Information. Knowledge Management. Getting IA Done, Part II. The web professional's online magazine of choice. In: Columns > Information Architecture for the People By Joshua Kaufman Published on August 22, 2005 Back in June, I presented my best advice in Getting IA Done, Part I. Tip #1: Keep Your Eyes on the Content When you start a site map, even as a paper sketch, take that opportunity to immediately start putting ID numbers on pages. As information architects (IAs), we sometimes get carried away with the visual design of sites and forget about one of the most important components of our work—content. Concentrate on the content, and don’t get carried away with the presentation.
Tip #2: Think, Design, Draw Sometimes we can’t wait to start designing and our excitement gets the best of us. If I find myself sitting, staring at the computer screen wondering what I’m meant to do next, it is usually because I am trying to draw or create something without having done the prerequisite work. Tip #3: We Heart Site Maps Tip #4: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel. User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing. The web professional's online magazine of choice. In: Articles By Mike Padilla Published on April 29, 2008 Just as it is important to choose the proper knife when slicing-n-dicing vegetables, it is critical to prescribe a suitable user interface to support faceted filtering. Faceted filtering allows you to narrow down a large list of objects to a manageable size by applying flexible combinations of attribute filters in any order.
Rather than forcing you down fixed paths within a website’s information architecture, faceted filtering allows you to multi-dimensionally slice-n-dice the information in a manner that best accommodates your specific needs. You Know What You Want More recently, with the advent of enhanced asynchronous interactions of Ajax and Flash, you can apply filter criteria individually and see how the resulting list updates. Traditional static information architecture (IA) makes up most of the fundamental structure of the web.
Along came faceted filtering to the rescue. Faceted Metadata Search - Search Tools Report. Metadata is information about information: more precisely, it's structured information about resources. This can be a single set of hierarchical subject labels, such as a Yahoo or Open Directory Project category. More often, the metadata has several facets: attributes in various orthogonal sets of categories. This is often stored in database record fields and tables, especially for product catalogs. Examples of faceted metadata include: Music catalog: songs have attributes such as artist, title, length, genre, date... Recipes: cuisine, main ingredients, cooking style, holiday... Travel site: articles have authors, dates, places, prices... Traditional Approaches to Structured Data Access Parametric Search Traditional field-based or parametric search engines for structured data have used a command line or provided a form to fill out: AU:rosenfeld TI:web PB:oreilly or These require a lot of knowledge on the searcher's side: they have to know the values or choose from a popup menu.
Improve your site maps with page archetypes | Viget Advance. Here's a pretty typical site map: boxes and arrows, a decision point, and a conditional section. If you're the person who diagrammed it, you already have a good sense about how the system will work. You know the major interaction paths and what type of content will be present. You know the purpose for each of those pages. Yet those generic little boxes betray that knowledge. To those who weren't part of the creation process, it takes a leap of faith (and a lot of questions usually) to really understand what is occurring. These boxes don't communicate the context of the interaction. Page archetypes help you better express what's going on in your site maps and user flows.
Arche-what? A page archetype is a picture. Meet the Archetypes Across all projects, I find that I can generalize to a few common points of interaction. My "kit", shown above, contains just 12 different archetypes–a manageable number. Form: input/output interaction with a system. 5 reasons why I use them They help me plan. Information Archetecture Tutorial - Lesson 1. Why’s Information Architecture So Important? Information architecture (also known as IA) is the foundation for great Web design. It is the blueprint of the site upon which all other aspects are built – form, function, metaphor, navigation and interface, interaction, and visual design.
Initiating the IA process is the first thing you should do when designing a site. This series of articles describes specific methods and processes for developing a site’s information architecture. Clients sometimes view the development of an IA to be impractical, both in terms of the time it takes and the skill needed to do it effectively. But this mentality is slowly changing. A good IA is incredibly effective, and knowing the basics of the IA process can save both time and money in the long run.
This series will demonstrate how easy and powerful the IA process can be. Each article presents a portion of a design document. Also, just about everyone these days is a proponent of ease-of-use. Ask Questions. Information Architecture Tutorial. Information architecture is the science of figuring out what you want your site to do and then constructing a blueprint before you dive in and put the thing together. It’s more important than you might think, and John Shiple, aka Squishy, tells you why.
Squishy first looks at how to define your site’s goals, shedding light on the all-important art of collecting clients’ or co-workers’ opinions and assembling them in a coherent, weighted order of importance. He also shares his scheme for documenting everything so that all parties can keep up. The next step is figuring out who the heck your audiences are going to be. Once that’s out of the way, you can start organizing your future site into pages of content and functions that the site will need to have. Next, Squishy gets into creativityland, where you start to build the beast:form a skeleton, pick your metaphors, map out your navigation.
Jesse James Garrett: Visual Vocabulary for Information Architecture. Looking for more? My book The Elements of User Experience puts information architecture and interaction design in context for beginners and experts alike. You can now order the book from Amazon.com. version 1.1b (6 March 2002) Jesse James Garrett (contact) Translations of this document are available: Chinese (thanks to Arky Tan) Japanese (thanks to Atsushi Hasegawa) Spanish (thanks to Javier Velasco) Italian (thanks to Laura Caprio and Beatrice Ghiglione) French (thanks to Francois Lamotte) German (thanks to Marcus Brinckhoff) Portuguese (thanks to Livia Labate and Laura Cretton Lessa) Table of Contents Summary Diagrams are an essential tool for communicating information architecture and interaction design in Web development teams. Version history 1.1b (6 Mar 2002) Information on built-in support in OmnGraffle 2.0 New shape library for iGrafx Flowcharter 1.1a (17 Sep 2001) New shape libraries for Macromedia FreeHand Posted cheat sheet and PDF shape template 1.1 (31 Jan 2001) 1.0 (17 Oct 2000)
Presenting Information Architecture. Site planning with a team is often easier if you base your major structural planning and decisions on a shared master site diagram that all members of the group can work with. The site diagram should evolve as the plan evolves and act as the core planning document as changes are proposed and made in the diagram. Site diagrams are excellent for planning both the broad scope of the site and the details of where each piece of content, navigation, or interactive functionality will appear. For major planning meetings consider printing at least one large diagram of the site organization, so that everyone can see the big picture as it develops from meeting to meeting. The site diagram should dominate the conference table, becoming a tactile, malleable representation of the plan. Everyone should be free to make notes and suggest improvements on the printed plan, and the revised diagram becomes the official result of the meeting.
Site diagrams Major elements of a mature site diagram include: Trovabile | Architettura dell'informazione e trovabilità. Vocabolario Visuale: Strumenti - InformationArchitecture.it. Il Vocabolario Visuale di Jesse James Garrett è il primo sistema di notazione progettato per descrivere l'Information Architecture e l'Interaction Design di un sito, ed è stato adottato dalla comunità internazionale degli Information Architects come standard per la rappresentazione del Flowchart. Indice Sommario I diagrammi sono uno strumento essenziale per comunicare l'Information Architecture e l'Interaction Design (progettazione dell'interazione) nei team di sviluppo di progetti web.
Questo documento presenta i risultati dello sviluppo di questi diagrammi, delinea una simbologia base per rappresentare i concetti dell'architettura delle informazioni e dell'interaction design, e fornisce le linee guida per l'utilizzo di questi elementi. Storico delle versioni 1.1b (6 Marzo 2002) Informazioni sul supporto incorporato in OmniGraffle 2.0 Nuova libreria di forme per iGrafx Flowcharter 1.1a (17 Settembre 2001) Nuova libreria di forme per Macromedia FreeHand 1.1 (31 Gennaio 2001) 1.0 (17 Ottobre 2000)