1. Information Architecture
Donna Maurer
Usability Specialist

2. About me Consultant for Step Two Designs
Previously government departments
Designing intranets & websites, business applications
Usability testing, user research, information architecture
Studying Master of Human Factors (UQ)

3. Lecture overview What is information architecture
Information can be arranged and accessed in many ways
Design process for information architectures
Information architecture for interactive systems
Information architecture for ubiquitous systems

4. What information architecture is about
AIfIA definition
The structural design of shared information environments.
The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability.
An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.
AIfIA is the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture – the IA industry body/practitioner group. This is a working definition and is recognised as still taking shape.
Information architecture primarily relates to the design of information spaces such as sites (websites, intranets, extranets, search systems)
Information architecture is also relevant when designing interactive spaces (business applications, browser-based transactional systems) where information is used to support the system, where people have to navigate through the system, and in labelling parts of the system..
It is often discussed as the overlap between user needs, business needs and content

5. Information is arranged in many ways
Date
Alphabetical
Geography
Topic
Hierarchy
Faceted
Organic
Combination
Good IA allows access to information in many ways

6. By date

7. Alphabetical
It is rare to find a site that is arranged primarily by alphabet, but a lot of sites contain an alphabetical index as an additional way to get to information

8. By geography
Geography is a common organising scheme, particularly for travel, maps and other sites where the content relates to spatiality.

9. By geography http://www.casio.com/
Geography is usually a poor scheme for content that is inherently not about spatiality. For example, many corporate sites arrange information by the country that the visitor is in, and ask visitors to choose a country before they proceed. In the end, not everything goes under a country site, and you end up back in the global site.
In this case I wanted to look at casio products generally & it didn’t really matter to me where I was located

10. By audience
Some sites arrange content by audience – the Australian Taxation Office splits into individuals, businesses, not-for profit organisations, tax professionals

11. By audience
University of Canberra (and many other university sites) arrange the content by audience. Within each audience there will be some cross over.

12. By task
Some sites arrange their information by task – Paypal arranges most of the information around the two main tasks of sending money or requesting money

13. By topic
Most sites are arranged by topic, subject or category of some type.
Wikipedia is an amazing open-content encyclopedia. Anyone can contribute. Yes, anyone!
One way wikipedia is organised is by topic. Wikipedia here shows some of the other way that information is organised – dewey, library of congress (LOC), acad discipline, category, title, etc

14. By category
Amazon’s product are arranged by product category. These categories all have a lot of subcategories.

15. By category Ebay too arranges products by category

16. Organic organisation system
Wikis are examples of sites that really have no organisation scheme. Pages are added just by writing words in a combination of upper and lower case – if the page exists, the word will link to it. If the page doesn’t exist, clicking on it will create a new page. Usually, overview or entry point pages are added so people can find their way around.

17. About hierarchies
Many, many sites are arranged as simple hierarchies – in a tree.
Some sites have information in only one place of the tree, but most hierarchical sites allow information to be repeated in many places in the tree so that people can find information more easily.
This is an example showing the first two levels of the University of Canberra site. In practice, the files stored on the University of Canberra site do not match these groupings – the first few pages on the site overlay the file structure and attempt to group information better than the file structure

18. Getting around - navigation
OK, so we’ve looked at ways that information can be grouped and organised. Many sites contain combinations for different groups of information, or different methods for the same group of information (as we saw with the wikipedia).
Another very important aspect of information architecture is navigation – helping people get around the information.
(this is a pirate map that my daughter drew for this lecture – see the x marks the spot in the top left)

19. Navigation Every page of a site should let you know:
Where am I
What’s here
Where can I go now
Where have I been
People don’t always work from the home page – they get to a page from a link or from a search
Moving around in the physical world is different to the online world – no real spatial clues. Navigation allows you to move around in a site, and provides a lot of the contextual clues.
Steve Krug, author of “Don’t make me think” has a thing he calls the trunk test. Someone’s thrown you in the trunk of a car blindfolded, driven you around the city for a while, dragged you out of the trunk, removed the blindfold and shown you this page:

20. Where are you? There are no clues apart from the URL (and believe it or not, many, many people don’t notice URLs)
Even further down this page, there is no indication where you are. There are a few links within the content, but nothing else (not even a footer)
Reference – apologies, I can’t find this page again

21. However, if you landed on this page from the trunk test, you have a much better chance of knowing these things.
The site clearly shows that it is the Australian War Memorial (logo) and that you are in the ‘travelling exhibitions’ page. There is somewhere to go – to details of current tours, and you can easily get to other parts of the site as well.

22. Types of navigation Global navigation Local navigation
Persistent across a site
Allows access to major parts of the site
Local navigation
Lets you move around the current ‘section’
Contextual navigation
Inline links, to anywhere
Supplemental navigation
Helpers – site map, A-Z index
See also
Related links
Not all sites show all of these navigation types, and in some cases the navigation that a site uses may not fall neatly into these categories. But they are neat groupings of the main types of navigation you will come across.
Going back to the war memorial site, this site displays some types:
The global navigation is across the top and down the left. It allows access to major parts of the site and is persistent
The local navigation is in the left and changes depending where you are in the site, and allows movement around that section. In this example, we are in the ‘events & exhibitions’ section & the local nav shows that
The links in the content area of the page are also local navigation (despite the fact that they are in the body) as they all link to content in the current section of the site
There is no real contextual or ‘see also’ navigation
The supplemental includes an ‘encyclopedia’ – an A-Z list of pages on the site

23. Navigation
Another example of a site with great navigation – this is one of my favourite information architectures. This shows global and local nav, so gives good context as to where you are. What I like best about this is how well the related navigation is done (on the left). From a recipe, you can easily skip to more recipes from this chef, more information about him, about his TV program and his site, amongst other things.
Part of the challenge of designing good information architectures and navigation is putting things together – thinking not just that readers have made it to a page, but what might they want to do when they get there.

24. Social navigation
Amazon is perhaps the site most well known for social navigation. A significant proportion of the site is driven by the purchasing characteristics of other people. For example, books are recommended based on what other people bought who bought this book.
I don’t know about you, but I have never been to Amazon and not followed a link to another book on the page…

25. Labeling
Good labels
Are understandable by the reader
Are consistent within the site
Clearly describe where you are going next
Labeling is not easy – it is as complex as structure and navigation
Where to get labeling ideas:
User research
Search terms
Referrer terms
Call centre/people in contact with users
Another key aspect of information architecture is labelling, and making sure that they way the information is labelled matches the way that people think about it.
Information on labels can come from direct user research (which I will talk about shortly), by looking at what people type into your search box, looking at what people type into other sites search boxes (this will be in the website logs) and talking with people who talk to users
The war memorial’s ‘encyclopedia’ should probably have been called ‘A-Z’ index – after all, that’s what it is. I was expecting to see some type of online encyclopedia ;) but other labels on that page were pretty good.

26. Search What to search Query structure - how to search it
Relevance - which results are the most important
How to display the results
Information architecture isn’t just about designing structures and navigation, but with the broader issue of helping readers to find information. Search is another big part of information architecture.
There are a lot of challenges to effective search that I won’t go into in detail. The main ones involve:
figuring out what to search – the entire website, the key sections, the titles only or the full text, should big documents be included
How to structure the query sent to the search database. If someone types in ‘information architecture’ do they want you to search on the phrase or both words or on either word
How do you tell which are the most relevant results. Are they the ones that have been changed or written most recently, the ones where the query string appears most often, the ones that have the query string in the title or the ones that match on metadata. You might have heard about Google’s relevance ranking – one of the things that they use to gauge relevance is the number of inward links to a site (this is how the practice of Google-bombing came about – loading search results by creating lots of inward links eg ‘miserable failure’ pointed to the whitehouse bio for George Bush)
Displaying the results is also complex – helping readers understand which result is useful to them

27. Metadata ‘Data about data’
Title
Description
Authored date
Keywords
Historically used to improve searching – search can use the metadata fields
Also can be used to relate information together
This is a silly sounding definition, but is what metadata is. It is the information that describes the content. A good metaphor is a can of soup – the contents are the soup, the metadata is the ingredients list, the nutrition information, the manufacturer, country of origin, weight etc
Metadata will usually contain basic fields that describe the content. These have value and can be used to return better search results (but not on the web – search engines no longer look at metadata as spammers used it years ago). Internal sites can use the metadata for this
I prefer to use metadata to pull things together in interesting ways, particularly if the site is being run with a content management system. Like the BBC example, the metadata for that recipe could include information about the chef, what book the recipe came from, or what TV show etc, and this information could automatically generate the related links

28. In an IA project Research
Business needs
User requirements
Content
Gives me an understanding of the domain
Understand technical opportunities or limitations
Design site structure (site map)
Design navigation and page layouts (wireframes)
Design metadata, search and relationships
Usability test throughout the process
Creates a blueprint for the site – technical work after blueprint created and tested
A normal IA project might contain steps like this. Every site is different, but the main aspect is that the design process is done and as much usability testing is done as possible before the technical work is hit hard (some of it will need to be done to create a prototype to usability test).
These steps look pretty simple in a list like this, but each of them can be large and involved, depending on the site in question
The research phase is similar to what you have done for your assignment – gathered information about business needs and user needs, and the context as well. For an information architecture project, content is also important. Ethnographic methods can be used to gather the user research.
The site map shows the site structure and how pages or sections relate to one another.
Wireframes are page layouts without graphical treatment that show the relationship between page elements.

29. IA for interactive sites
Sites that are primarily about ‘doing things’ use IA differently
Fewer pages than a large informational site, so site map may show workflow not structure
Navigation and labeling still important
More emphasis on scenarios
Wireframes show a lot more detail and show all screens
Design process is very similar
Most of what I have been talking about relates to informational sites – sites where you go primarily to find things, not necessarily to do things. Information architecture for interactive sites, or parts of sites is different but uses a lot of the same principles.
The structure and relationships of content is less important, but the workflow is much more important. The site map may show workflows and not so much about structure.
Scenarios are almost impossible to write for a large content-based site, as the number of scenarios is incredibly large. However for an interactive site, scenarios (for example, adding an item to a shopping cart and completing the payment process) are much easier.
The wireframes for an informational site may only contain a few pages that represent the whole site – for example, the home page, navigation pages and content pages. For an interactive site, the wireframes will show all pages, as all are needed, and the level of detail will be much greater.

30. The elements of user experience
From “The Elements of user experience” by Jesse James Garrett, this diagram illustrates some of the differences between the web as software interface (my example of places to ‘do things’) and the web as hypertext system (my examples of content-based sites)
He shows that where information architecture and navigation as I’ve described it is important for content-based sites, interactions and interface are more important for interactive sites

31. IA for ubiquitous computing
Depends on the ubicomp device
For this assignment, interaction is more important
Navigation – getting around the interface
Labeling always important
Design process is similar
As information becomes embedded into our environment, accessing that information will become important…
How much this is relevant for the design of ubiquitous computing devices will depend on the type of device you are designing. For this assignment, the design of a device to assist groups on tours to remain grouped and to locate members who are lost, the interactive aspects are more important. Many of you will be designing something that requires some navigation around the interface. And labeling is always important, so these aspects are directly relevant.
The design process is similar – user research/ethnography, understanding the business requirements, designing structures, interfaces and interactions and prototyping are relevant to all systems.
However, this is just one ubiquitous computing device. In the near future as we start to see a move away from the PC-based internet method of information access, as more information is embedded into our environment, the issues that I have discussed around designing and finding information will become much more relevant.

32. IA Resources Books Online Some blatant self-promotion
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web – Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville
Elements of user experience – Jesse James Garrett
Information Architecture – Blueprints for the Web – Christina Wodtke
Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
Online
Boxes and Arrows –
IAslash -
IAwiki –
Some blatant self-promotion
My weblog –
My organisation –