Austin Govella

Christina Wodtke

Provides information on the concepts of information architecture to design effective and easy-to-undertand interfaces.

Blueprints for the Web

Information Architecture

Jaydee (she/her)

So why are so many of these sites so difficult to use? When you build a building, you make a blueprint. When you build a toaster, you create a diagram of its workings. Yet Web sites, whose complexity far exceeds a toaster's, are often thrown up hastily with barely a thought about how they will be used. A company wanting a Web site hires an engineer, a marketing guy, and a graphic designer, and says, "Go to it." It's the equivalent of hiring an electrician, a plumber, and an interior decorator, and then saying, "Build me a shopping mall." That shopping mall desperately needs an architect, and today's Web site needs an information architect.

Wayfinding lets people know four things: 1. Where they are. 2. Where the things are that they're looking for. 3. How they can get to those things they seek. 4. Where they have already looked.

People visit a Web site for three main reasons: 

• They're looking for something. • They're trying to accomplish a task. • They have five minutes before their next meeting and want to kill some time.

 Too many site creators think their audience is made up of visitors who want to kill time. They also tend to think those visitors have two hours instead of five minutes. Too many site creators think the visitor is dying to be entertained (even if they are coming to a tax- preparation site), so they festoon the place with animated GIFS and zooming navigation.

When someone visits a Web page, they ask themselves these four questions : 

Do they have anything better (if this isn't what I want)? 

If you're in charge of the information architecture, it's your job to answer these four questions on every page of your site. Design-wise, this means you have to do four things: 

Assure visitors they're in the right place. 

Make it easy for visitors to find what they're looking for. 

Make sure that visitors know what their options are. 

Let them save it, buy it, find something neW... 

It doesn't matter what visitors are trying to do on your site. You have to answer these questions, all the time, no matter what.

If you are building an online grocery store, don't divide it into sandwich making and salad making (even though it might be kind of nifty'). People shopping for groceries are used to bakery, dairy, and produce in an organization scheme.

Nathan Shedroff² collected a list of common organization systems most people are familiar with. He says you can organize things by alphabet (an employee directory), location (a map), time (a calendar), continuum (top-rated), numbers (zip codes), categories (newspapers organize articles by local, world, business, and so on), or randomness (iTunes shuffle).

Repeat after me, "A label is not a place to promote your brand. It's a signpost to help people find stuff." If you have a greeting card site, Naughty Humor may not be as in tune with your brand image as Snickers and Snorts, but as a label it will keep the grandmas out and draw the college kids in.

Do the labels match? Is there more than one piece of content in each category? Is one category too big, needing to be divided into subcategories? When you are done refining, you have what you need-a taxonomy. 

A taxonomy is a hierarchal organization scheme, and on the Web it's very useful for browsing (Figure 3.16). If you do your work right, no one will ever notice your taxonomy. They'll just glide along effortlessly to their dream scarf or to a recipe for chicken à la king.

"But some of my stuff could go into more than one category!" "But half my users wanted organization by course, and the other half wanted organization by ingredients!" 

In the real world, you can't be in more than one place at one time. There is a crazy concept called "shelf space," and it appears to be limited. The grocery store can't have a bakery aisle and a sandwich aisle, and have bread in both. There isn't enough space-or bread. However, on the Web, it's another story.

  FIGURE 3.17 Epicurious has more than 80,000 recipes. Good organization is not optional if the site is to be useful.

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