Hi Silvia,

Thanks for the great questions. Happy to provide more info. Here are my responses:

- We had 2 team members working on the project: 1 lead researcher and 1 supporting researcher, and a couple of other team members jumped in when needed.

- We're a small agency (currently 6 FTE) and we typically staff projects with 2 or 3 researchers.

- Re: capabilities ... All of our team members are experienced user researchers. We have varying degrees of experience with IA research/design and varying degrees of content/writing skills. For this project we picked a lead researcher with a strong IA and content background. For any card sort project, we find it helpful to have at least one team member with strong writing/editing skills since card labeling is so important. Same is true for quantitative analysis skills. We are mostly a qual shop, but with IA research, we often need at least one team member with strong quant analysis chops. The client had SEO expertise that was incorporated into their content strategy for the site; SEO questions did come up a couple of times when we were selecting category names but it wasn't a big factor in this case.

- Not sure about cost; the project was a while ago and part of a long-term engagement; guessing $75k USD to cover the card sort, multiple rounds of tree testing, and IA design iterations, plus expenses. IA research can get expensive if you're using multiple methods, qual + quant, and an iterative approach -- but it's a lot less costly than overhauling your navigation after launch!

Hope this is helpful. Thanks again for responding to the story.

John