Have you ever been confused as to where to find an item on a website? Does the primary navigation always make sense? Are things hidden in sub-levels that are confusing? Do you know where something should be located on a website?

I have recently been tasked with creating the navigation for a complex web enabled application. I started by creating a list of Activities that the user should be able to perform on the site. From that I created a knowledge map of all of the areas, and I derived the Information Architecture from the map that I created. Technically Information Architecture should be based on the data collected from performing a Card Sorting Exercise.

What is card sorting? According to Jed Wood and Larry wood’s article from the Journal of Usability Studies, “Card sorting was originally developed by psychologists as a method to the study of how people organize and categorize their knowledge. As the name implies, the method originally consisted of researchers writing labels representing concepts (either or concrete) on cards, and then asking participants to sort (categorize) the cards into piles that were simliar in some way.”

As you may be able to guess, this could be very useful for finding out where users think things should be located on a website, or in a web enabled application. So I wonder, should I be able to use the information architecture that I generated from my own experience, or should this order be dictated by the users. I will look at the results of my validation exercise, and if I am not happy with the results, then I may have to look into performing a card sorting exercise of my own.