NUX Leeds meet-ups are kindly sponsored by SimpleUsability and Orchard Recruitment.
The next NUX Leeds event takes place on Thursday 26th November and will be with our usual hosts Simple Usability at Marshall Mills, Marshall Street, Leeds.
Join us from 6:00pm for food, drinks, networking and our talk will start from 6:30pm.
Guerrilla IA: Drafting an Information Structure When You Can’t Do a Card Sort
with Elizabeth Buie and Adam Babajee-Pycroft
Update 25 November: Sadly Adam is unable to be with us so Elizabeth will be running the workshop.
This month’s NUX Leeds meet-up will be a workshop on building an IA hypothesis when all you’ve got is you and the data, with Elizabeth Buie, Northumbria University.
Your website project needs an information architecture but won’t allow a card sort. Perhaps you haven’t the budget for a user study or you can’t get access to users. Or maybe management just doesn’t believe in card sorting. So you have to take a guerrilla approach. After the content inventory, what can you do?
Inductive content analysis to the rescue!
This workshop will show how you can use this qualitative research technique to approximate an open sort and draft an initial information structure when all you have to work with is yourself and the content. We will describe and illustrate the technique, giving concrete examples from a real-world project and tips for applying it in practice. We will show how to use a spreadsheet to group themes and create categories. Finally, we will offer some strategies for improving the robustness of your results by involving a colleague.
Brief intro to your presenters
Elizabeth Buie is a researcher and user experience consultant based in the UK. She is in the final year of a PhD programme in Media and Communication Design at Northumbria University — a brief excursion into academia after three decades in practice — and has recently returned to industry part time while she finishes her PhD. Elizabeth has conducted user research, information architecture, and interaction design for clients in the US, the UK, and Italy. Her projects have ranged from public websites to social media web apps to touchscreen kiosks to spacecraft control centres; their user populations have ranged from the worldwide general public to the astronauts on board the International Space Station. Whilst using inductive content analysis on some PhD research data, she realised she was doing information architecture and adapted the technique for IA projects.
When she’s not working on her PhD, Elizabeth enjoys singing a cappella polyphony, exploring medieval British ruins, and mooching about Italy in search of culture with a Renaissance soundtrack.
Adam Babajee-Pycroft is the User Experience Director at Bristol based UX consultancy Natural Interaction. He has a decade of commercial experience gained agency and client side. He has used the inductive content analysis technique on real-world Lean UX projects and has developed a collection of tips for applying it successfully.
When he’s not making sites, apps and technology useful for non geeks, Adam enjoys cooking, eating out, dinner parties and travelling the world in search of adventure with a heavy metal soundtrack.
Running order
| 6:00 – 6:30 | Free beer, soft drinks & refreshments |
|---|---|
| 6:30 – 7:30 | Elizabeth will direct a workshop on Guerrilla IA |
| 7:30 – 8:00 | Open discussion and networking |
Slides
to follow
