Discovering the best organization of menus and physical controls
Menus and Control Layouts
When designing the ‘Product Experience’, one of the main goals is to match users' mental models how the product works with the conceptual model intended by the designers.
This is especially important when deciding how to group a large number of items (e.g., links or menu selections) into meaningful categories (e.g., menus) in order to facilitate user navigation and decision-making.
One powerful method that can be used to aid in such decisions is the card-sort.
Card-sorting is a research method where users sort cards representing relevant concepts into categories.
This method has a long tradition in the Human Factors field as well as other fields, such as marketing research.
Designing Menus for a Phone
Click on the video player "window" below for a
demonstration of a card-sort.
The Output from a Card-Sort
Cluster Tree
Generated by an statistical method called ‘Cluster Analysis’
Shows graphically an aggregated view of how many people think that items should be grouped into categories
Click on the thumbnail image below for a full-size view of a ."Cluster Tree"
Some Results of Card-Sorting
