IA Natalia 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 Local Where I am? What is related to what’s here? What’s nearby?

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 schemas Two 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 1Subcategory 2 Item

Faceted classification example facets Item = particular wine FacetValue Type of wine Red, White Wine Regions California, France …………..

Process of IA Design of complex web-sites requires an interdisciplinary team that involves graphic designers, software developers, content managers, usability engineers and other experts 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 Benchmarki ng 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 Users Needs, behaviors Content Structure, meaning Context Culture, 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 1.Understand of how information is used, how it flows, and how it fits within the user’s world (its context) 2.Create a systematic description of the information content of a given product, service, or environment. (categories…etc.)

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, Wikipedia Faceted Search (Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services), Daniel Tunkelang. information-architecture-strategy-presentation