Andrea Richeson

Continued notes from Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville & Lou Rosenfeld.

Primary goal of information architecture: understanding and satisfying users’ needs.

Info Seeking Definitions:

• Known-item seeking: search a phone directory to find a person’s number
• Exploratory seeking: iterative, results prompt more searching, learn about retirement plans on company HR site
• Exhaustive research: looking for everything on a topic. Medical condition search
• Refinding: Found it. Save it for later.

Searching, browsing, asking are building blocks of info seeking behaviors.

Two other major aspects to seeking behaviors:

• integration
• iteration

Berry-picking model of info seeking (Dr. Marcia Bates/USC). Query/thought/query/thought…  The request is modified as user learns about what they need and what the system provides.  If berry picking is a common technique of your users, then look into ways of making the search then browse function easier. Yahoo example: allows search in browsable categories.

Pearl-growing: Get a perfect result and search for ‘more like this’. Example: Google provides ’similar pages’ command. Flickr & del.icio.us provide similar searches. Another example: using metadata from the perfect match to find more docs.

Learn about info seeking behaviors through:

•  Search analytics: review common searches to find patterns, areas that need improvement
• Contextual inquiry: user observation and questioning

Continued notes from Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville & Lou Rosenfeld.

Definitions:

• Taxonomy:  a classification scheme
• Information Ecology: composed of users, content and context – used to address complex dependencies

Conferences:

• IA Summit

Organizations:

• Information Architecture Institute
• The American Society for Information Science and Technology

People:

• Andrew Dillon (hello, Dean Dillon)
• Peter Merholz

IA is like Go: Takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master.

What fields provide a good source of IA’s?

• Graphic & Information Designers: create relationships between visual elements & integrate to facilitate communication
• Librarians: organize & provide access to information
• Journalists: timely organization & dissemination of information
• Usability Engineers: quantif/evaluate usability of systems
• Marketing: targeting the message to the audience
• Computer Science: modeling data and system structures
• Technical Writers:sensitive to users’needs
• Architects: sensitivity to spacial relationships, inf-seeking behavior
• ProductManagement; Strategists, Team mangers

Development teams benefit from a variety of perspectives: inside & outside the organization and people from a variety of disciplines.

What provides the basis for practicing effective IA design? A balanced consideration of:

• Users: audience, task, needs, info-seeking behavior, experience
• Content: doc& data types, content objects, volume, existing structure
• Context: business goals, funcing, politics, culture, technology, resources, constraints

When dealing with questions of content, consider: ownership, format, structure, metadata, volume, dynamism

I recently re-entered grad school for some continuing education in the fields of usability and information architecture.

The classic book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville & Lou Rosenfeld.  has been assigned for class reading in Don Turnbull’s Intro to Information Architecture at the University of Texas iSchool.

Back in 1994, Lou Rosenfeld was my teacher in an entry-level School of Information class at the University of Michigan. How curious to be reading a classic text in the field of IA which was written a couple years after I received my Master’s degree from Michigan.

So, Chapter 1 Notes:

Architecture on the web?

• The architecture analogy is a helpful tool. People can relate to what must be done to design a good building — and those hooks of understanding can be used to describe what it takes to make a good website.
• Architects of both ilk do not generally live in the spaces they create. They may know their users well
  (or not) but they are often not the end-users of their products.
• Both architects must balance stability, flexibility, scalability of their creations are to remain usable into the future.
• Architects transform the chaos of complex requirements, competing goals and high levels of ambiguity into an ordered whole.

What is IA?

• The structural design of shared info spaces.
• Includes orgaization, labeling, search, nav systems. It’s an art and a science that supports usability & findability. The focus is on bringing design & architecture principles to digital products.

Andrea’s Observation:

There’s a lot of discussion these days, trying to define subject matter competencies and boundaries for  a competency for web professionals. It’s the ‘Who We Are’ problem for a relatively new field of study. What’s usability? Where does accessibility fit in? Is design part of usability – or usability part of design? What are the boundaries of user-centered design?  How do you distinguish interaction design from other kinds of design for the web? What’s the difference between librarians and online learning professionals and usability experts?  Web Designer? Webmaster? Experience Designer? Usability Engineer? Mostly, I don’t care to worry too much about the answers. That said,  it would be handy to be able to carry a professional label that meant the same thing to most people. Like the field of traditional librarianship, web professionals might benefit from an agreed-upon set of core competencies & certification path.  At this point, though, there are no perfect definitions or certification paths.  At the moment, I like to define myself as an  librarian working as a Web designer.

Basic Concepts

• Information is more than facts and figures. Includes a variety of environmental factors, objects, metadata…
• Structuring, organizing labeling
• Finding, managing goals/needs of users and content owners
• Art and Science: Intuition + data on user needs & seeking behavior

IA Concepts

• Components (main page, search…)
• Dimensions (multidimensional space, hypertext nav)
• Boundaries (fuzzy boundaries)
• Purpose (content access, sales, collaboration…)
• Heterogeneity (hugely diverse collection)
• Centralization (decentralized operations)

The Elevator Pitch

•  an internet librarian, online merchandiser, managing your information overload

Why IA Matters

• The cost of finding information (in time and lost sales, collaboration opportunities)
• The value of educating empl0yees, clients
• The cost of re-building or maintaining a poorly-designed site
• Training costs resulting from poor design
• Brand value (PR resulting from great or poor site)

The work of IA might be initially invisible to clients, peers and managers

• How to describe the search benefits of a well-designed controlled vocabulary
• A good search experience involves a good search engine, good graphic design and a carefuyly integrated system