Virginia Art Therapy Association (VATA) Card Sorting
How can content be organized so members can find what they need? How can they draw in new members?
Virginia Art Therapy Association (VATA) came to our graduate school and asked us to help them study the information architecture (IA) of their current site and determine how they can improve to better serve current members and attract new ones. To accomplish this, we did a content inventory, SWOT analysis of competitors, and finally a card sorting study with 30 participants to recommend a new IA complete with wireframes. The client loved it and selected our proposal for further exploration out of the three in the class.
Recommendation Process
Needs Meeting & Content Inventory
We met with the client to fully review their needs and get to know their audience. We did a full content inventory of the website with notes and suggestions in excel. See full results here.
SWOT & Accessibility Analyses
We used WebAim tools as well as our group's expertise in literacy accessibility to evaluate the website content. Full results here. We then did a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis of both their website and 5 others in their industry. This gave us a good idea of other norms and successes that they could learn from.
Card Sort Studies & Wireframes
We asked 30 users to sort 26 cards representing VATA website content into categories. Users were either medical/mental health professionals or past or present therapy patients.
First, half of users completed an open card sort and then, the other half did a hybrid. We used the card sorting results and other research to inform a new Information Architecture and wireframes, which can be viewed here. Please see full presentation below (section 6) to see further logic of the information architecture.