morvillesemanticstudios com Information Architecture Designing and Organising Digital

morville@semanticstudios. com Information Architecture Designing and Organising Digital Information Spaces Part II. IA Building Blocks

morville@semanticstudios. com Organization – Labeling – Navigation – Search

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

morville@semanticstudios. com 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

morville@semanticstudios. com

morville@semanticstudios. com

morville@semanticstudios. com Movies Personals Quake Soccer Games Chess Solitaire Investing Horoscopes “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

morville@semanticstudios. com Rules 8

morville@semanticstudios. com Family Resemblances 9

morville@semanticstudios. com 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

morville@semanticstudios. com “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 11

morville@semanticstudios. com 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 (folkgeneric) level in the hierarchy. Optimal for learning, recognition, memory, knowledge organization. 12

morville@semanticstudios. com Robin Core Ostrich Peripheral Bat External

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

morville@semanticstudios. com Sony Clie PEG-NZ 90 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-NZ 90

morville@semanticstudios. com Labeling Types Purposes Sources

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morville@semanticstudios. com 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 Name A 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 Name A 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. Psycholinguistics The study of how language is understood and interpreted and how and why the individual responds to discrete aspects of language.

morville@semanticstudios. com Navigation Support task flow Provide context and flexibility Avoid drowning content

Global morville@semanticstudios. com Local Contextual

morville@semanticstudios. com Global Breadcrumb Contextual Local

morville@semanticstudios. com Path | Location | Attribute 22

morville@semanticstudios. com Path | Location | Attribute 23

morville@semanticstudios. com Path | Location | Attribute 24

Navigation Question Mark Up on the Paper What is this page about? Draw a rectangle around the title of the page or write it on the paper yourself What site is this? Circle the site name, or write it on the paper yourself What are the major sections of this site? Label with X What major section is this page in? Draw a triangle around the X What is "up" 1 level from here? Label with U How do I get to the home page of this site? Label with H How do I get to the top of this section of the site? Label with T What does each group of links represent? Circle the major groups of links and label. D: More details, sub-pages of this one N: Nearby pages, within same section as this page S: Pages on same site, but not as near O: Off-site pages How might you get to this page from the site home page? Write the set of selections as: Choice 1 > Choice 2 >. . Connect the visual elements on the page that tell you this. morville@semanticstudios. com Navigation Stress Test by Keith Instone > http: //keith. instone. org/navstress/

morville@semanticstudios. com Nike. com > North America > USA > Nike. Running. com > Gear > Footwear > Women’s > Trail > Air Trail Pegasus

morville@semanticstudios. com Home Camp/Hike Water Treatment Water Purifiers

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morville@semanticstudios. com 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

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morville@semanticstudios. com The Right Number by Scott Mc. Cloud 32

morville@semanticstudios. com Search “…studies show that search is still the primary usability problem in web site design. ” Vividence Research: Common Usability Problems 1. Poorly organized search results 2. Poor information architecture 3. Source: Flexible Search and Navigation using Faceted Metadata (UC Berkeley SIMS)

morville@semanticstudios. com “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

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morville@semanticstudios. com “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

morville@semanticstudios. com Search Systems http: //semanticstudios. com/publications/semantics/search. html

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morville@semanticstudios. com 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/