Trip to Cogapp and Clearleft

Yesterday, we went on a trip to two companies in Brighton, which were Cogapp and Clearleft.

At Cogapp, we learnt about Information Achitecture, and how to organise information so the user can navigate through it easily. We learnt this through various methods, one of these being the "LATCH" method. LATCH stands for Location, Alphabetical, Time, Category, Hierarchy, which is how the information would be sorted. We did some exercises in sorting information, such as using the LATCH method to sort records in a music store. For example, sorting music by place in the Top 40 would go under Hierarchy.
Another information sorting exercise we did was how to sort food in a supermarket, which is quite different from sorting information on a website since items can't go under two categories like it can if it was data. Overall, I feel that the trip to Cogapp was informative and I learned some good information on how to sort data in a way that it is easy for users to understand.

The second place we went to was Clearleft, which specialises in usability testing. They showed us Silverback, which is user testing software which records the screen and the face of the tester whilst they are doing the usability testing. After learning about the software, we were put into groups to do our own usability test. One person would test a site, one would tell the tester what tasks to perform on the site, and the last person would take notes and observe the test. This was a fun and useful exercise, as we all took turns in the different roles, and learned about user testing in the process.