All the Pretty Little Rows and Columns

I will resist doing it my way, I will resist doing it my way, I will resist doing it my way.

Week three of the Buffalo project (see my intro post), and things have gotten really interesting. I was telling Rebecca yesterday that I had originally wanted to develop the information architecture offline using mStoner’s standard process, just to see how similar it would be to the structures we’re developing using Indi Young’s mental models process. But I decided that the temptation (conscious or subconscious) would be too great to match the results of our work together to my super-secret preliminary efforts.

So we list and group and nest and cluster and play Tetris, just a little bit.

Let me explain.

Normally when I create information architecture, I start with my clients’ primary target audiences: usually, prospective students and their influencers, and prospective donors. For each of those audiences, I list key tasks and critical paths to accomplishing those tasks, and I flex the site structure to make finding that information and completing those tasks as quick and intuitive as possible. Harder than it sounds, but that’s a post for a different occasion.

With this process, we dial back even further, and we use a spreadsheet (or in my case, an Omnioutliner file) to:

1. Create a laundry list, row by row, of all the tasks (which include general information and services) that people would want to accomplish on the UB site. We then sort and group those tasks to eliminate redundancies.
2. List the different people who might perform these tasks in different columns.
3. Mark x’s in the cells for performers who might complete those tasks.
4. Visually move the columns and rows around until we start to see visual patterns and clusters (see, just like Tetris).
5. Name those clusters with descriptive labels.

And at the end of the exercise, we don’t have prospective students, current faculty, alumni, per se. Instead, we’ve found match seekers, solution seekers, prideful belongers, pulsetakers, and active supporters. Rebecca shopped these groupings around to some internal stakeholders, and eureka!, they make sense.

Next up, training next week with Indi and her colleague Eric, and then we begin a slew of one-on-one interviews to validate out hypotheses about their needs and expectations and to flesh out the task list. Stay tuned, same bat time, same bat channel.