Using the same card sort information in question, create a single vertical navigation bar with links corresponding to the individual items.

Question

a. What organizational scheme and organizational structure will you use? Justify your answer in terms of your card sorting interviews. Include a copy of your card sorting results with your answer.
b. For the organizational structure you chose in part A, choose a navigational system. Justify your answer.
c. Create a sketch of the navigation bar(s) you envision for the home page. Show the correspondence between the items in the navigation bars and the results of the card sorting sessions you conducted.
d. Create a sketch of the navigation system that you envision on the second level pages. Explain how it is consistent with the navigation bar(s) on the home page. Also explain how it accommodates the results of the card sorting sessions you conducted.

Answer 1

a. The results of the card sort should drive the choice of organizational scheme and structure, not the other way around. Examine the groupings from the card sort to see which of topical, task-oriented, audience-specific seems to be the best fit. It is unlikely that a metaphor-driven scheme will be appropriate. Except for small subsets of content items such as a directory of personnel or a calendar of events, exact organizational schemes such as alphabetic or chronological will not be appropriate. An example that would be a possible exception is a listing of all of the activities or programs offered in a particular location within a city parks system. (Again, this would probably be a subset of all of the content items being considered for the Web site.)
The vast majority of Web sites do best with a hierarchical structure (with
additional links for flexibility.)
The authors believe that a good portion of the credit awarded for part A should be based on the rationale provided by the students.
b. Since the navigation system is an implementation of organizational structure, the most likely answer is “a hierarchical navigation system,” since the most likely answer for the organizational structure is “hierarchical organizational structure.”
c. The link names in the top-level navigation bar should be extremely similar to the names of the groups determined from the card-sorting sessions. If you see a variance between the link names and the group names, also look for a carefully thought-out rationale for this. (We’re bending over backwards to be fair-minded here.)
d. It’s perfectly fine if they want to use the same navigation system on secondary-level pages; but many times the client will want the home page to be more graphics intensive. In this case, it’s worth considering using a text-based system on secondary pages. In any case, they should consider what type of global navigation needs to appear on all pages in the site.