Informing Website Navigation Design with Team-Based Card Sorting

Abstract

In 2016, Utah State University (USU) Libraries redesigned the library website's main menu and underlying information architecture (IA) in response to a number of known usability problems and limitations. Card sorting studies were conducted with a group of USU undergraduate students and a mixed group of faculty and graduate students to help develop a better understanding of users' mental models of library-related research and service tasks. Participants worked in teams to sort, rank and label cards pertaining to the content and feature of the library's website. Afterwards, participants discussed and performed usability tasks on each other's categories. Results were used to inform the design of a new IA and menu structure, while best practices from usability studies and trends in academic library website design were used to help with menu and link labeling. The final design was validated through follow-up discussions with staff, usability tests, and category/reverse category tests.

Free for All

“…Utah State University librarians' account tells of a conscientiously organized and executed card sort that involved librarians, faculty, and graduate students in multiple rounds of testing that incorporated both open and closed sorts as well as additional feedback at each round. Librarians not on the development team were also allowed to comment on the proposed site architecture that resulted from the insights derived through the card sorting (Sundt and Eastman, 2019). By involving the entire library staff, the redesign team collected feedback from a variety of perspectives, integrating, for example, the needs of systems librarians with those of instruction librarians.…”

User experience and information architecture of the National Digital Library and archives of Iran: a usability investigation and card sorting

“…In 2016, UT State University (USU) Libraries redesigned the library website’s main menu and underlying IA in response to a number of known usability problems and limitations. Then, Sundt and Eastman (2019) conducted card sorting studies with a group of USU undergraduate students and a mixed group of faculty and graduate students to help develop a better understanding of users’ mental models of library-related research and service tasks. Participants worked in teams to sort, rank and label cards pertaining to the content and features of the library’s website.…”

“…A few other studies focused on user experiences of library usability (Dalveren and Peker, 2022; Kous et al , 2020; Rogers, 2009). User involvement and extracting user mental models were highlighted in several studies (Guo and Yan, 2011; Schall, 2014; Sundt and Eastman, 2019; Wentzel et al , 2016). The current study aimed to consider the user’s step-by-step task-based experience to detect dark points in the DL of NLAI.…”

“…An important part of the design of a website is to make sure that its users can easily find information they need (Spencer, 2009). One way to achieve this end is to provide a user-friendly interface (Alvankar et al, 2020), as a mediator between library users and its computerized system that can facilitate user access to information and decrease their attempts at browsing and monitoring (Doroudi et al, 2019).…”

Service-oriented information technologies in library processes and scientific communication

“…Сосредоточение внимания на удобстве использования поможет повысить функциональность сайта, поэтому тестирование юзабилити и обучение этому персонала являются важными задачами. Для оценки веб-дизайна, информационной архитектуры и функций навигации библиотечных веб-сайтов авторы предлагают инструменты в виде контрольных списков [5][6][7][8][9]. Также в последние годы проводится много исследований, посвященных изучению поведения пользователей на сайтах, то есть веб-аналитике [10; 11].…”