One of the fun and challenging parts of data analysis is knowing where/how to “group your data” – starting with groups can help, but sometimes it can box your thinking. I enjoy allowing the data to naturally show me the groups or insights to help present the results forward.

Also think its important to give yourself at least a day between analysis and reporting sessions to let the thinking settle.

Good stuff.

These points you’re making really resonate with my thinking:
- “Much of the rearranging we do is exploratory”
- “Manipulation encourages exploration”
- “Greatest challenge .. is a tendency to settle on the first arrangement”

Curiously enough, our digital tools should allow infinite iterations seem to get in the way of exploratory rearranging. Let’s say you’ve done your card sorting and plugged all that data into Visio to start working on a new website structure. How tedious is it to try different versions of it??

It seems that diagramming tools specifically invite you polish the look and style of your deliverable (neatly aligned boxes and labels, uniform line widths, pretty colours anyone?), and once you’ve invested in the visuals it’s hard to thrash the structure and start all over again.

Which brings me to my shameless plug. We at Volkside have created a navigation preview tool for rapid IA prototyping called Naview. It helps information architects design and visualise a new navigational structure.

It’s meant to be used more as a design tool rather than as an analysis tool but the whole concept is based on iterations and being able to rearrange & manipulate the structure quickly and efficiently. Obviously there’s heaps more to information architecture than just running card sorts and creating sitemaps but we’re hoping Naview will help IA’s ‘bridge’ these two common activities easier.

Cheers, Jussi

Keep up the good work.