IANatalia Shatokhina CS 575

Information Architecture

Outline

• What is IA• IA for WWW• Pervasive IA Example

Architecture of a cup

Weight and size conductive to being held in hand

Relationship between walls and bottom that allows containment

Open top, for consumption of liquid

Create architecture==Describe the essense

Definition of IA (from “Polar Bear book”)

1. The structural design of shared information environments

2.The combination of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within web sites and intranets.

3.The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability and findability

4. An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape

Information organization

• Librarians put the collection of books within framework of information architecture that facilitates access to those materials

• Information architects perform a similar role but within the context of websites and digital content.

Effective IA design model

IA

Content

Context

Users

Audience, tasks, needs,info-seeking behavior, experience

Business goals, funding, politics, culture, technology, resources

Document/data types, content objects, volume, existing structure

IA starts with User• Study user needs and behavior to pick up a correct user

behavior model

• Types of behaviors• known item seeking• exploratory search• exhaustive search

How to learn about user behavior?• search analytics method• context inquiry method

IA Components

• Organization systems (how we categorize information)

• Navigation systems (how we browse or move through information)

• Searching systems (how we search information, e.g executing a search query against an index)

• Labeling systems (how we represent the information, e.g.Terminology )

Visualizing IA

Organization

systems

search

Navigation

systems

Organization system

• The grouping of like content together• Provides a way to browse the structure

of the site

• Schemes:• chronological• geographical• alphabetical

Navigation and Search systems

• Global• Local • Contextual• Supplemental

Global Navigation

Contextual

Loca

l

Where I am?

What is related to what’s here?W

hat

’s

nea

rby?

Labeling system

• The interface to the organization scheme - the names of the different categories

• Appears in the words in the navigation systems

• One of the most important aspects and one of the most difficult to do.

• Needs to reflect the content and the user - must be written in user’s language

Designing labeling system

The proprietor of this website ditched conventional wisdom, utilizing terminology they knew their users would better understand. In fact, the whole store is premised on this innovative nomenclature scheme, and it's been frightfully successful…

labels

Classification schemasTwo classification models:• Faceted (Item is tagged with set of attributes

and values and organization of these objects emerges from this classification and from how user decides to access them).

• Hierarchical (only one place for an item according to classification scheme)

Category

Subcategory 1 Subcategory 2

Item

Faceted classification example

facets

Item = particular wine

Facet Value

Type of wine

Red, White

Wine Regions

California, France

…… ……..

Process of IA

Research -> Strategy -> Design -> Implementation -> Administration

Research phase - review background, understand goals,business context, existing IA, content and intended audience

Strategy phase - define the highest two or three levels of the site’s organization and navigation structure. Suggest candidate document types and metadata schema.

Design phase- creating detailed blueprints, wireframes and metadata schema that will be used by graphic designers, programmers, content authors.

Research

Background search

Presentations and meetings

Stakeholders interviews

Technology assesment

Context

Heuristic evaluation

Metadata and content analysis

Content mapping Benchmarking

Content

Server log & clickstream

analysis

Use cases and personas

Contextual inquiry

User interviews and testing

Users

IA iceberg

Interface

Wireframes, Blueprints

Metadata, Classification scheme, Thesauri

Information architecture strategies, Project plans

UsersNeeds, behaviors

ContentStructure, meaning

ContextCulture, technology

Some trends…

• Organizing search (collaborative tagging - tag clouds, “I’m feeling lucky” button)

• RIA• Information Visualization (newsmap)• Person-based organization : google

personalized search• Social navigation (amazon collaborative

filtering)

Definition of IA (revisited)

1. The structural design of shared information environments

2.The combination of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within web sites and intranets.

3.The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability and findability

4. An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape

From wikipedia “Pervasive computing”:

……At their core, all models of ubiquitous computing (also called pervasive computing) share a vision of small, inexpensive, robust networked processing devices, distributed at all scales throughout everyday life and generally turned to distinctly common-place ends.

Pervasive IA?

Future directions: developing pervasive IA

Pervasive design example (by Maya Design company)

• Carnegie library in Pittsburgh• Paper “Designing for a pervasive information environment”: the importance of

information architecture”

• Goal: to design public library environment

• “Pervasiveness” of the situation:• After observing customers and talking with librarians we had much

more complete picture of the kinds of information available and how people accessed that information. We discovered for example that information a customer is seeking might reside in multiple media (books, bulletin boards, magazines, microfiche, newspapers, videotapes, posters, electronic articles and other people) in different locations (building , floors, shelves, computers) with different access and organization methods..The variety and complexity of these choices demonstrate the pervasiveness of information in a library

References

• Information Architecture for world Wide Web, Peter Morville and Louis RosenFeld, O’Reilly, 2007

• H.L.McQuaid, A.Goel, M.McManus. Designing for a pervasive information environment: the importance of information architecture, 2003

• www.maya.com• Wikipedia• http://www.peterme.com/archives/00000063.html• Faceted Search (Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts,

Retrieval, and Services), Daniel Tunkelang.• http://www.slideshare.net/cfox74/making-ia-real-planning-an-

information-architecture-strategy-presentation