Organization – Labeling – Navigation – Search

1. Information Architecture Designing and Organising Digital Information SpacesPart II. IA Building Blocks

2. Organization – Labeling – Navigation – Search

3. Organization Structures • Hierarchy: taxonomies, top levels, mental model • Database:structured content, metadata, facets, relationships • Hypertext:cross-references, contextual hierarchy hypertext database

4. Organization Schemes • Exact • Everything has a place. • Easy to create and maintain. • Great for known-item searches. • e.g., white pages, geography, chronology • Ambiguous • Fuzzy and full of overlap. • Hard to create and maintain. • Great for subject searches, associative learning. • e.g., yellow pages, topic, audience

7. Movies Personals • “Consider for example the proceedings we call games. I mean board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?” • Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1945 • Philosophical Investigations Quake Soccer Games Chess Solitaire Investing Horoscopes

8. Rules

9. Family Resemblances

10. Most categorization is automatic and unconscious. solid boxes green squares olive blocks small spheres orange circles glass marbles big mountains When we define categories, we choose which attributes or properties to surface. blue triangles hollow shapes

11. “Categorization is not a matter to be taken lightly. There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech.” George Lakoff Professor, Cognitive Linguistics UC Berkeley

12. Prototype Theory • Prototype-based categories defined by fuzzy cognitive models rather than objective rules. • Family Resemblances • Members may be related without all members sharing any common property. • Centrality • Some members may be better examples • Membership Gradience • Some categories have degrees of membership and no clear boundaries • Basic Level Primacy • A psychologically basic (folk-generic) level in the hierarchy. Optimal for learning, recognition, memory, knowledge organization.

13. Robin Core Ostrich Peripheral Bat External

14. Kingdom Animalia Animal Phylum Chordata Subphylum Vertebrata Vertebrate Class Mammalia Mammal Grey Dolphin Black Dolphin Bottlenose Porpoise Cowfish Bottle-Nosed Dolphin Atlantic Bottlenose Pacific Bottlenose Order Cetacea Whales, Dolphins Suborder Odontoceti Toothed Whales Family Delphinidae Dolphins, Killer Whales Genus Tursiops Basic Level Species Truncatus Bottlenose Dolphin

15. Sony Clie PEG-NZ90 Handheld Electronics > Audio & Video Electronics > Brands > Sony Electronics > Camera & Photo Electronics > Computers Gifts > Over $100 Basic Level Kingdom Electronics Phylum Handhelds & PDAs Class Palm Operating Systems Family Sony Genus Clie Species PEG-NZ90

16. Labeling • Types • Purposes • Sources

18. Descriptive Name • A name which describes a product, service, or company. Descriptive names, such as Workgroup Server and Pacific Gas and Electric, have content, but often are not protectable and typically are not favored by trademark attorneys. • Proprietary NameA protectable name which one is able to own and trademark, as opposed to a descriptive name, which is not protectable or ownable. See Brand Name. • Suggestive NameA name built on or utilizing words or word parts which suggest or refer to the goods or services, but do not literally describe them. Oracle and Safeway are suggestive. Suggestive names are often protectable (unlike descriptive names), but may be weaker as trademarks than coined/fanciful or arbitrary names. • PsycholinguisticsThe study of how language is understood and interpreted and how and why the individual responds to discrete aspects of language.

19. Navigation • Support task flow • Provide context and flexibility • Avoid drowning content

20. Global Local Contextual

21. Global Breadcrumb Contextual Local

22. Path|Location|Attribute

23. Path|Location|Attribute

24. Path|Location|Attribute

25. Navigation Stress Test by Keith Instone >http://keith.instone.org/navstress/

26. Nike.com > North America > USA > NikeRunning.com > Gear > Footwear > Women’s > Trail > Air Trail Pegasus

27. Home  Camp/Hike  Water Treatment  Water Purifiers

30. Supplemental Navigation • Sitemaps • Table of contents • Top few levels of hierarchy • Scope / organization • Exploratory browsing • Indexes • A-Z index (back-of-book) • Finely grained • Relatively non-hierarchical • Known-item finding

32. The Right Number by Scott McCloud

33. Search • “…studies show that search is still the primary usability problem in web site design.” • Vividence Research: Common Usability Problems • Poorly organized search results • Poor information architecture • Source: Flexible Search and Navigation using Faceted Metadata (UC Berkeley SIMS)

34. “Most of the complaints we get are due to the way users search; they use the wrong keywords.” • Manufacturing Manager in Must Search Stink? by Forrester Research

37. “I really do see the future in terms of categories and clicking. The more I watch what's happening with the evolution of web sites, the more I believe that Search is essentially an experiment that has failed.” • Jared Spool • http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/0302/0297.html

38. Search Systems • http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/search.html

47. Where To Find Me • Peter Morville • morville@semanticstudios.com • Semantic Studios • http://semanticstudios.com/ • Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture • http://aifia.org/ • Findability • http://findability.org/