Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories

Donna Spencer is a freelance information architect, interaction designer, and writer. That means she is responsible for what you see on the computer screen—website navigation, applications, forms, categories, and words. She works mostly on large, messy projects like government websites and intranets, internal business applications, and web applications. But sometimes she gets to work on funky, small projects and likes them just as much. Some of her projects take months to do, and sometimes she works with agile programming teams to do small amounts of work in short bursts. One of the most important parts of her work is to get a good understanding of the needs of the users and make sure the system she's working on is as usable as possible. Given that she's quite fond of people, she loves doing user research and running usability tests to understand the people she's designing for. She also sketches screens, draws wireframes, and makes prototypes. But Donna likes something even more than designing usable systems. She loves teaching. She's a very experienced speaker and regularly teaches workshops at conferences and in-house. She also presents at local and international conferences on the topics of information architecture, interaction design, the Web, writing, and more.