This looks very interesting tool & very useful in creating and maintaining your companies taxonomy.

“At PINGAR we have been building semantic search applications for business enterprises since 2007.

Consider the facts. The volume of data companies need to manage is growing 40 percent a year. Fifty percent of data searches are unsuccessful — employees may lose up to 25 percent of their productive time searching for information. And the cost to enterprises from failed searches is approximately USD $5.3 million per year, for every 1000 enterprise workers employed.

PINGAR’s research teams had three objectives:

•Deliver applications to assist enterprise workers to find more relevant data, faster
•Improve employees’ search experience
•Improve enterprise productivity and drive down costs.

These objectives were achieved with PINGAR’s Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and 2010, and Apache SOLR semantic search applications. Each can be purchased as an easy to install ‘plug-in’ server application, for distribution across enterprise networks.”

Find out more Pingar.com

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What is Card Sorting?

Card sorting is a simple technique that allows you to get feedback from your users about how information should be organized. Originally, researchers wrote labels on 3 x 5 cards or sticky notes, and asked participants to sort the cards into piles that were similar. Then the participants would label each pile. Using statistics and/or “eyeballing” the results across several participants, researchers were able to create better information structures.

With WebSort, card sorting is done online. People can complete your study from anywhere in the world, and you benefit from expert analysis tools that help you make sense of the data.

What Card Sorting can do for you
Documents, web pages, features; we are always presented with more. The challenge is organizing it. Managers, employees, and customers think about information in different ways.

Using WebSort, you can conduct card sorts that will allow you to:

* construct your website intuitively
* validate the structure of your organization
* get feedback on your company’s intranet
* learn where to add new content to an existing site
* reassign tasks and roles within a team
* create actionable workflows for project management
* organize products in your e-commerce store
* prioritize features for software

http://websort.net/

Card sorting is a technique that many information architects (and related professionals.) use as an input to the structure of a site or product. With so many of us using the technique, why would we need to write an article on it?

While card sorting is described in a few texts and a number of sites, most descriptions are brief. There is not a definitive article that describes the technique and its variants and explains the issues to watch out for. Given the number of questions posted to discussion groups, and discussions we have had at conferences, we thought it was time to get all of the issues in one place.

This article provides a detailed description of the basic technique, with some focus on using the technique for more complex sites. This article does not cover some issues such as the use of online tools, which will be covered in a future article.

Read more…….

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide

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