[drupal-docs] Information Architecture research: User interview and grouping exercise

[Kieran Lal]

Hi, I have set up two online exercises to help us get some user 
feedback.  The first exercise is a user interview in the form of a web 
survey.  The survey focuses on getting three types of information.

What is the users situation when they are looking for documentation?
What are the users documentation needs?
What are the users decision criteria for using documentation?

You can see the draft of the user interview survey is here: 
http://www.zoomerang.com/reports/public_report.zgi?ID=L22BAXDMCNN6
I hope that we can spread this survey widely and have a permanent 
feedback mechanism built into every Drupal site on how we can improve 
our documentation.  Please post comments or questions about the survey 
to the list.

The second exercise is a grouping exercise.  The intent of the exercise 
is help us documentation writers find out how users actually think 
things should go together rather than just assuming we know how things 
should go together.  This exercise is a form of a card sort, a popular 
usability technique for grouping.  The intention is to take the results 
of the user interviews and ensure we have logical groups.  Then we will 
ask the users to sort the documentation items identified in Boris's 
Handbook version 2(http://dev.bryght.com/t/wiki/HandbookVersionTwo) and 
put them into the predefined groups.  If they do not understand the 
terms or don't know where it belongs they can put the term in a Don't 
know/Don't understand bucket.

http://websort.net/dev?s=drupaldocumentation

Please send suggested grouping and feedback to the list.

Thanks,
Kieran