To those of you looking for Top of the Pops who have come to this blog-post accidentally I say "fret not wandering searcher", for you have stumbled upon a treasure far more substantial than the much-mourned TOTP. You have stumbled upon Cogapp's TTOP: Tech Tuesday Outreach Program.

Firstly, let's get a bit of background out of the way. Tech Tuesday is a fortnightly occurrence here at Cogapp central. The Technical Department gather round Japanese food in our conference room and discuss all manner of tech related trivia, from iPhones to ICONS and anything else they're musing about. This has tended to be the realm of digital gurus, technological masterminds and computational wizards in the past, but this week Tristan decided to mix things up by opening the invitation to the entire office (and holding Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday, but that's less dramatic). Not only this, but having recently been to London's Over the Air event, he had been inspired by the presentation given by Tom Hume (MD of Future Platforms) and Joh Hunt (a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sussex) called "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain". So with material generously lent to us from Tom and Joh, and an invitation to the hallowed halls of Tech Tuesday extended to everyone, we descended upon the gathering. With almost all of the Cogapp team involved, Tristan had a much larger audience to demonstrate his digital delights to; the Tech Tuesday Outreach Program had begun.

Tristan started with background information and a brief about what we were going to be doing before swiftly moving onto the main event of the TTOP. "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain" is a group exercise designed to get people with different skills working together on one project at the same time. This interdisciplinary approach creates a hotbed of creativity and ingenuity as ideas are proposed and almost instantly analysed by experts in various fields. With specialists from design, tech, production, user experience, finance and business development all bouncing ideas off each other, the inventive juices really got flowing.

What is a prototype?
A prototype is a rough mock-up of your current approach to your project (be it for a website, an interactive, or something else).

It doesn’t have to be full of content. In fact, we often test with a mixture of guide content and lorem ipsum placeholder text, and it's not unheard of to have a totally black and white prototype with boxes instead of images.

Why make a prototype?
Prototyping has some big advantages. It helps us plan how the screens will work functionally, as well as graphically.

By testing a protoype with users, we can quickly identify where we're going right and where we're going wrong, whilst there is still time to make changes. Wherever possible we test version one with users, make changes and then test version two. Often this rapid approach will be done between a morning and afternoon session, allowing us to take great strides in a single day's work.

 As part of an information architecture (IA) project, we have been looking into different ways of usefully analysing the results of card sorts. What is card sorting? Card sorting is a quick and informative way of finding out how users group information. It is often the first step to developing a site IA. Open or closed? Open card sorting works by giving users an unsorted number of cards, each with a user goal written on, and asking the user to organise the cards into groups that make sense to them. They then name the groups themselves. Some users go through the cards in a very structured way; others start by throwing them across the table. Quantitative or qualitative? In a quantitative card sort, the facilitator (usually us) takes quite a back seat, allowing the testers (often in groups of four) to get on with it. Quantitative sorts are to get the number of results we need to analyse. In a qualitative card sort the facilitator is more involved, asking for a running commentary on why the tester is grouping cards together and the thinking behind it. This helps us when we analyse the data and work on the IA as we have an idea of user thinking. We usually use a combination of these two methods to get our results, often with a rough 50/50 split. The cards and goals The goals on cards should always be research-based. Card sorting is a research-based exercise, and it’s results are dependent on the quality of the goals used to sort. On a recent Cogapp project, we conducted the following before undertaking card sorting:

• A heuristic site evaluation
• Review of existing research
• Stakeholder interviews which provided organisational goals
• User depth interviews which provided a number of user goals
• Strategy workshop to prioritise user goals and organisational goals

In this example, we held a strategy workshop with our client where we analysed the goals that had come out of the user research and prioritised the organisational need against the user need, shown below.