Joshua Thomas
CareerCase study

Khora

Foundational discovery for an open-source multimedia philosophy platform, serving audiences from tenured academics to digital artists.

Company
Palinode Productions
Role
Discovery lead
Period
2024
On this site
Khora

The challenge

Khora is an open-source multimedia philosophy platform. Its audience ranges from tenured academics to digital artists, people who learn in fundamentally different ways. I owned the foundational discovery work.

Khora Website Screenshot

Research

I ran user interviews and built four personas that captured those different ways of learning.

Marcus Rivera | The Experimental Creator Persona

Sarah Okonjo | The Community Builder

Eleanor Chen | The Traditional Academic Persona

Alex Brady | Digital Explorer Persona

Information architecture

I designed and facilitated a card-sorting study. I analyzed the results quantitatively (co-occurrence, participant agreement, outliers) and qualitatively (the reasoning behind the groupings), and turned both into a standardization grid.

Card Sorting Grid

A participant’s completed card sort, showing feature cards grouped into categories they named themselves.

Card sort standardization grid

I then validated the resulting structure through tree testing and refined it before any screens were built.

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