Transcript Information Architecture IBE312

Information Architecture
IBE312
Ch 3 – User Needs and Behaviors
&
Ch 4 The Anatomy of IA
2013
Information Architecture
Some notes from Morville
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1.
The combination of organization,
labeling, and navigation schemes within
an information system.
2.
The structural design of an information
space to facilitate
task completion
and intuitive access to content.
3.
The art and science of structuring and
classifying web sites and intranets to
help people find and manage
information.
4.
An emerging discipline and community
of practice focused on bringing principles
of design and architecture to the digital
landscape.
Things that Information Architects do…
• Understand user and system requirements
• Design (and build) organization, navigation,
and metadata systems
• Evaluate the user experience
Figure out if it works
Build it
Figure out what’s needed
Design it
(compare with physical architects)
Why is IA Important?
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Cost of finding (time, frustration)
Cost of not finding (bad decisions, alternate channels)
Cost of construction (staff, technology, planning, bugs)
Cost of maintenance (content management, redesigns)
Cost of training (employees, turnover)
Value of education (related products, projects, people)
Value of brand (identity, reputation, trust)
Why is IA Important? (examples)
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Employees spend 35% of productive time searching for information
online. Working Council for Chief Information Officers
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The Fortune 1000 stands to waste at least $2.5 billion / year due to an
inability to locate and retrieve information. IDC
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Poorly architected retailing sites are underselling by as much as 50%.
Forrester Research
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50% of web sales are lost because customers can’t find content fast
enough. Gartner Group
Content on a typical public corporate website grows at an 80% rate
annually. The CMS Report
Most Common
Usability Problems
Poorly organized search results
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53%
Poor information architecture
32%
Slow performance
32%
Cluttered home pages
27%
Confusing labels
25%
Invasive registration
15%
Inconsistent navigation
13%
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Vividence Research
The Tangled Web
Vividence found poorly
organized search results and
poor information architecture
design to be the two most
common and serious usability
problems
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Ch3 User Needs & Behaviors
• How information needs vary
• How information seeking behaviors vary
• How and why to learn more about info
seeking behaviors
Misconception: finding information can be addressed
with a simple algorithmic approach
• So we think we can measure the experience of
finding by how long it takes, or how many
mouse clickts it takes, or how many viewed
pages it takes to find the ”right” answer when
there is no right answer. (p.32)
• Search Analytics – should have both
quantitative and qualitative approaches. Web
stats + user provided (task analysis, surveys,
focus groups)
Information needs – fishing metaphor
• The perfect catch – looking for a specific fact
• Lobster trapping – looking for more than just a
single answer. Hope whatever ambles in will
be useful.
• Indiscriminate driftnetting – leave no stone
unturned on a topic. Exhaustive search.
• I’ve seen you before, Moby Dick…- tag it so
you can find it again. Bookmarking (del.icio.us)
Type of needs – fishing metaphor
• The perfect catch – know item seeking – know
what you are looking for
• Lobster trapping – exploratory seeking – learn
something from the process – a few useful items
– open ended – springboard for new searches
• Indiscriminate driftnetting – exhaustive searchwant everything
• I’ve seen you before, Moby Dick…- need it again –
refinding a piece of useful information - tagging
Four common information needs
Precision vs. Recall
Everything
= Recall-oriented Searching
Orthogonal concepts:
A few good things
Exploratory seeking
Known-item seeking
Users’ Needs
Organization
Systems
Navigation
Systems
Page Layout
and Design
The right thing
= Precision-oriented Searching
Information seeking behaviors
• Integration – do searching, browsing and asking
in the same finding session
• Iterations – do it in several cycles to refine
findings
Berry-picking: search and browse and search…
• After search – you can browse a sub-category
• After browsing – you can search
Ch 4 Anatomy of IA
• Visualizing IA & categorizing components
– Organization systems
– Navigation systems
– Search systems
– Labeling systems
• Well designed IA is invisible to the users
IA components
• Organization systems – content categories –
categorize information (subjects, chronologically)
• Navigation systems – help users move through
the content –browse or look through information
• Search systems – allow users to search the
content (query, index)
• Labeling systems – describe categories, options
and links to language that is meaningful to users
(controlled vocabularies, thesauri)
Aids
• Browsing aids – organization systems, site-wide
and local navigation sitemaps/TOC, site indexes,
guides, and wizards, contextual links.
• Search aids – search interface, query language,
retrieval algorithm, search zones and results
• Content and task – headings, embedded links and
metadata, chunks, lists, sequential aids,
identifiers,
• ”Invisible” components – controlled vocabularies,
thesauri, rule sets.
1. Where am I
2. How do I search for it
3. How do i get around this
site
4. What’s important
5. What’s available
6. What’s happening here
7. Do they want my opinion
8. How can i contact a
human
9. What’s their address
A different type of page – bulk of the page points to
content elsewhere
1. Where we are
2. Helps us move
to others
related pages
3. Helps move
through site
hierarchy
4. Helps
manipulate
content for
better browsing
5. Getting help
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Bottom-up IA – content structure (e.g. recipe format), sequencing,
tagging – help answer where am I, what’s here, where to og from here..
Find what I need from middle without learning the top-down
organization.
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Findability
“Findability will eventually be recognized as a central and
defining challenge in the development of web sites, intranets,
knowledge management systems and online communities.”
Peter Morville, The Age of Findability
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“A case of librarians trying to muscle into the
usability field with their own spin…findability is
just a subset of user-centered design.”
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/002595.php
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surrounding, encircling, enveloping
Ambient Findability
the ability to find anyone or anything
from anywhere at anytime
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David Rose
ambientdevices.com
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