1. Information Architecture Robert Munro 2005

2. Information Architecture  Information architecture is how your content is structured within the product:  your arrangement of assets across different parts of the production, and the relationships between them

3. Information Architecture  The most common architecture of websites and many multimedia productions is a hierarchy:  homepage (A)  sub-pages of A  sub-pages of B

4. Information Architecture  What did the previous diagram tell us about the relative themes/content of the pages?  These two diagrams are identical in terms of the links between pages, but we would expect the relative content to be different:

5. Information Architecture  If your production is driven by the data you already have, what is the appropriate architecture?  The ‘boxes’ can represent a page, or something more abstract:  play a sound,  initiate a dialogue  any event (not always mutually exclusive)

6. Data Management  The data management used in planning, capturing and storing the data will determine its structure  For a multimedia production, the relationships between assets can also be ‘content’

7. Structured data  What are the relationships between the types of information?  which of these are machine-readable  Most multimedia productions will have a large degree of structural repetition:  an online dictionary with a page for every word (or a single panel/frame within a page)  the ability to play many different sound recordings

8. Structured data  Productions can take advantage of all the machine readable relationships in your data  machine readable relationships allow scalability  For a online dictionary, you could:  create a single template for a page for a word  populate the entire dictionary in an instant

9. Example: Hearing Voices  Contents  recording (audio)  photo  recording name  language name  transcription  speaker name

10. Example: Hearing Voices  Where the data came from  recording (audio)  photo  recording name  language name  transcription  speaker name

11. Example: Hearing Voices  This allowed a single script to import about 50 recordings / transcriptions etc, for 8 different speakers:

12. Example: Hearing Voices  …but it could have imported 50,000 recordings with no extra effort:

13. Example: Hearing Voices  Example 2: interview timings:

14. Example: Hearing Voices  Example 2: interview timings:

15. Designing your production  Your production might be data driven, but your design should be driven by user needs  Storyboarding is a good technique for negotiating the structure of your production (see tomorrow’s lecture on navigation design)

16. References Garrett, J. J. 2002. A visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design. http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/