We’re excited to announce a new project we’ve been working on. It’s not publicly available yet, but we’re looking for some good UX/IA peeps to help us shape it into a polished app.
After Card Sorting
You did an open sort to understand how your users think about your content. You did a closed sort to hone in on your early insights. You’ve sliced and diced the results and added your own expertise and intuition. You’ve crafted a brilliant new navigation system to propose to your project manager. But now what— go live and check the site analytics in a month?
You know you should test the navigation in context, but haven’t had a good way to do that. Current solutions have people click through a flat tree structure, but that’s not how users experience navigating a site.
Location matters. That’s why we’ve been building PlainFrame.
It allows you to easily and quickly put your navigation structure into a clickable “white site.”1 And we not only record the interactions as data for analysis, we let you play them back so you can see how the user interacts with the site dynamically.
Beyond Tree Testing
Site structures have multiple starting points and subdivisions. Real menus have position and size and interaction. These design elements play a huge role in the ultimate usability and ease of navigation for your site. PlainFrame puts your site structure into the context of real, clickable menus.
See what happened
Site analytics and click paths are like punctuation; they show you the entrance and exit of each page, but not everything in between. PlainFrame records every mouse move so you can replay any test as it happened. Or you can watch it at 8x speed. Combining stats and data with viewable replays gives you the best of qualitative and quantitative worlds.
Sound interesting to you? We’d love it if you’ll join us in shaping the public version of PlainFrame. Check out the home page or jump straight to the sign-up form.
- Some ideas just take a long time to develop, even in the high-speed web 2.0 world. The idea for PlainFrame, and my introduction to term “white site,” came from a hallway conversation at UPA 2003 between me, Janice James, Carol Righi, and WebSort co-creator Larry Wood. [↩]
