Information Architecture Exercises

Found on Column Two
From Poor But Happy

Peter Van Dijck has posted a collection of ideas for information architecture exercises, to use during a workshop. To quote:

I am preparing some information architecture workshops, and I’m collecting various types of exercises. I've managed to identify some general rules for developing workshop exercises as well.

To add to these suggestions, in our IA Fundamentals workshops (running in Canberra and Sydney), we base the day around the design of a mock "snowfields website". Using this type of example, we can then construct examples around:

• brainstorming the types of visitors to this site (thereby introducing personas)
• types of tasks they might want to complete (task analysis)
• types of information required (content modeling)
• overall structure for the site (card sorting)
• confirming the final design (card-based classification evaluation)

It makes for a fun day, and the use of a single site throughout the day makes it both concrete and easy to explore IA concepts and techniques...

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