Category: Information Architecture

Zeldman beats up on drop down menus. You go brother. But why insult birdbath installers? That sounds like a nice job, working in gardens all day.

Andrew Dillon, in his report on the fifth annual IA Summit, gives me props but is critical of the idea of navigation….

…I really enjoyed, again, a session on navigation by Victor Lombardi, which probably appealed to my academic sensibilities more than some of the other sessions. I have been a strong critic of the whole idea of navigation as a driving force for design, but there is no doubting the allure of the concept for IAs – it was standing room only at this session as Victor gave a detailed overview of the various strands of research that have emerged in this area and how best IAs might use the findings.

I’m not sure if he means navigation as in navigation bars (which Dillon has specifically questioned IA’s obsession with) or the larger practice of navigating through digital information, or something else. I’ll be sure to follow up.

Rashmi riffs on my presentation of information shape recognition, relating it to implicit and explicit memory. Her analysis is only speculation but seems spot-on based on what I’ve read. Implicit and explicit memory might play similar roles as local and global schemata, respectively, that Andew Dillon describes in his work on information shape.

Peterme points to Kevin Crowston‘s Reproduced and emergent genres of communication on the World-Wide Web which is — and I’m not exaggerating here — design gold. It really is. It relates to work by researchers such as Dillon and Toms on information shape and genre that I summarized in my navigation research paper (.pdf). The argument, put simply, is that if we format information using familiar genres, the familiar information structure of those genres can become more intuitable navigation (intuitive, of course, equals familiar).

What Crowston has done is survey and document all those genres. So the step I describe of “formatting information in familiar genres when possible” becomes easier when we have a list of common genres. Then you just need to figure out which genres your audience recognizes.

I’ve plowed through the research on information scent, and while they seem to be learning something about how people think about links and navigation, it’s not clear if there’s anything actionable for designers to take away from it. So I continue to think about how to create scent, or really, how to make links meaningful to people. I think some of Spool’s research on link length is helpful.

Recently I’ve been playing with what I call the Litmus Test for Scent. It helps to quickly judge whether link text is effective in an appeal-to-common-sense way. Here’s the format:

“OH! I really want to see what’s in [link name]!“

So, for example, when I go to Amazon and see that little tab with my name on it, I say, “OH! I really want to see what’s on Victor’s page!“

but not

“OH! I really want to see what’s in Click here” or “OH! I really want to see what’s in [insider lingo]” etc.

Peterme nicely illustrates shifting goals in the information seeking process — complete with screen shots — revealing the complexity of navigation design: ‘My original “goal” was to learn about Ann Willoughby. On reading that page about Ann, my goal shifted…. Shifting and evolving goals are not only common — they are the norm.‘

Someone at work recently pointed out that the retail theory people, like the folks at Vanderbilt’s eLab, tried pinning navigation to the measurement of flow. It’s another example of a highly dynamic environment (psychology + HCI + lots of information) that makes simplistic approaches to navigation design look, well, simplistic.

I took the first step to addressing this with my navigation design research and method. It needs a lot of work, but I think it approaches something robust enough to acknowledge the complexity of navigation design yet accessible enough to use without interfering with the design work itself.

Mark Hurst warns of a content-centric view in The Page Paradigm, making the point that ‘Web developers often waste time worrying about “where content should live”‘ which is so true. Designers often become hyper-focused on the content and navigation and forget about the user’s goals and the flow they go through to get there (can you say personas and scenarios?). That said, his three-step process of ‘Identify users’ goals on each page… remove any page elements that don’t help to accomplish the goal, and emphasize… elements that… take users closer to their goal… and you’re done‘ is just a wee bit easier said than done. I’m all like, Which tasks will help them accomplish their goals? In what order(s) do the tasks happen? What’s the best interface to accomplish each task? How do you present disparate interfaces in a coherent way? How do the tasks and interfaces differ according to the volume and type of content accessed? And so on. Navigation design can get fairly complicated when taken seriously. Whaddya trying to do, Mark, get my salary cut in half?!

Incidentally, in the long view, I think the page paradigm will go away. It’s an artifact of the earliest HTML spec, and once we have a platform where Flash-like capabilities are widespread we’ll all be doing interaction design (interactions designers will need to learn information architecture and vice versa). We might still think in terms of a current state, as with the currently displayed page, but the increased volatility and potential for richer interaction will be a whole new beast.