Eight Principles of Information Architecture

Editor's Notes

• #2: Slot To be clear: Stephen and I are each doing a separate but coincidentally related talk. How many of you have been practicing IA or something like it for more than 3 years? How many of you have been practicing IA or something like it for 3 years or less? This is for everyone raising their hand right now. I’m Dan. I work at EightShapes. On a project a couple years ago, a client asked me, “What did you base these design decisions on?” I provided a rationale that referenced user research, objectives, and the requirements analysis process we had just been through. “But how do you know these decisions are right?” I understood that she was asking for some underlying theory, some cohesive set of guidelines. So I rattled a few off the top of my head. “I need you to put that in your document.” Which I did, and it’s stuck with me ever since. Beyond design themes that we extract at the project level, are there more universal notions of IA. These are those principles and a couple more.
• #4: Let’s set up our principles by providing a bit of context. WHAT we design can help us figure out what guidelines would be useful. You're at a conference full of IAs, so it would be interesting to ask this question of other people.
• #5: 2IAs create structures. •Structures are the set of relationships between concepts. 3Our role is to make those structures meaningful, useful, explicit. •We need to make decisions about which concepts are most important and which relationships users would be most interested in. •We need to decide how to express those relationships. •We need to decide how those relationships grow and flex to accommodate new variations of the concepts. •These guiding principles provide a sense of what makes structures work. No particular order, but this first one is pretty abstract.
• #6: Content... •May be classified in terms of its function, purpose or structure •Exhibits behaviors related to aging, popularity, prominence •Is subject to rules •Whenever people talk about a content type, they have expectations on: •kinds of information it will include •the way it relates to other content of the same or different types •the ways in which it can be classified CLICK •Describe it in terms of properties that it has in common with other content.
• #7: Implication: Objects are structured in and of themselves. Those structures face inward and outward. We must design the structures of content objects as well as the structures in which they thrive. From Epicurious Elements that structure the recipe Elements that allow me to make connections to other recipes
• #8: With more options, it can be harder for people to make a choice. Based on the book CLICK
• #9: •To be clear: big menus of options will be challenging for users to find what they want. •Exception: known item searches by experts •Implication: structures should provide digestible groups without losing coherence or meaning
• #10: Gradually revealing information, as requested by the user Providing a means for accessing additional information
• #11: Netflix was the original, the canonical example for AJAX technology, too Hulu provides a reasonable facsimile Roll over an episode and get more details of the episode
• #12: Corollary: A piece of content should come in multiple configurations to allow different ways of providing access Hulu episodes can be represented in a single line of a table, an entry in a gallery, or in a hover balloon. Implication: structures should compartmentalize content types, giving a single piece of content multiple "guises" or views, such that it has flexibility to be displayed in a variety of contexts
• #13: Category names don't necessarily speak for themselves Providing an example of what appears in the category can help users triangulate its content
• #14: Was having a hard time finding a good example on the web, but then I found this in the App store for iPad. Point to GAMES Implication: Structures should include a rule for selecting and highlighting exemplars in the absence of other human-supplied direction. Structures should permit pieces of content to be escalated to provide good examples. They might be chosen by a human or by rule.
• #15: Went to iTunes since they tend to be light on explicit categorization. Wanted to see what they came up with and I see exemplars going horribly wrong.
• #16: When good exemplars go bad. Do these exemplars help me distinguish the categories? Do I have confidence that I’m going to see successfully segmented categories?
• #17: Perhaps the best example online. Look at these categories! Categories we know you like. Here are some examples. Also implied: hierarchy of video-watching decision-making in the Brown house.
• #18: In recent years, this principle is becoming more self-evident. Could I say: Powerful search has rendered home pages useless. Perhaps that’s taking it too far. In short: users don’t always start their experience on your home page. From a UI perspective, the challenge here is to make the inside pages navigationally useful without obscuring the content Structures must be flexible enough such that they don’t depend on a single starting point. When designing interior pages, the use of exemplars is crucial: pick examples of categories to expose them, but choose them in such a way to make them plausibly relevant to the content. Implication: Structures should de-emphasize a particular starting point (though marketing might say otherwise) and should provide mechanisms for exposing a range of content using the current context as a starting point
• #19: Suppose you arrived at this Nat Geo news story through some syndicated source. The question we need to ask ourselves as designers is what parts of the structure do I need to expose? How can I use the current content here as a bridge to get from this to other parts of the site? So, can they use this news story as a mechanism for reasonably exposing other areas of the site? Should they?
• #20: Structures must accommodate new content and new concepts Navigation mechanisms that allow for an expanding middle: interface elements
• #21: Personalized content categories. Structure of Netflix expands to accommodate new ways of classifying videos. BUT does the navigation? Not really. Netflix elegantly includes new (seemingly customized) categories. Because of this content area, they can recede the other navigation mechanisms of the site.
• #22: Politico 44, a subsection of Politico.com doesn’t have any discernible sub-categories, another way of dealing with scale. CLICK Instead, they offer some catchy box headers that help users understand content by scanning.
• #23: This is something I did for a large content site designed a couple years ago. Ripped off from an old version of CNN.com CLICK Here, Builder Magazine’s navigation includes a mechanism for escalating key sub-topics.
• #24: This is something I did for a large content site designed a couple years ago. Ripped off from an old version of CNN.com CLICK Here, Builder Magazine’s navigation includes a mechanism for escalating key sub-topics.
• #25: Content doesn’t live in one taxonomy of categories. Any site must have more than one way to categorize content.
• #26: EA exposes their polyhierarchy through this faceted navigation scheme: I can add “filters” by clicking on the terms that help find the game I want. In this context, however, I suspect people may use one or two facets to narrow the list to answer simple questions like “What’s coming out for XBox?”
• #27: Perhaps my most controversial principle. Navigation mechanisms should be defined by what they do, not where they are. Say good-bye to the following terms: left nav, global nav, header nav, footer nav Purposes: exploring related topics, digging deeper into the current topic, escaping from the current topic, filtering a collection
• #28: This was the documentation for the project we saw earlier... CLICK
• #29: Implication: Give your navigation a purpose, treat it like a toolbar Navigation tools with a purpose have a unifying theme and provide a structure for moderating growth and scaling appropriately
• #31: 1IAs create structures 2Is there a single unified theory to drive that process? I have no idea. 3There are, however, at least eight principles we can consider in designing our structures Break? Ignore? Sure. But they provide a useful starting point. Besides these universal principles, I often rely on project-specific principles. Guidelines that drive the design efforts that are derived during the project itself. Stephen’s going to talk about that next. Before we go there, though, let me leave you a thought about what makes a good principle. And maybe something a little more.
• #32: What makes the principles meaningful? Agreement: We all agree with the principle’s underlying concept. CLICK Interpretation: We understand that the principle leaves room for interpretation, but that our design decisions should be traceable to it. CLICK Internalization: Principles are most useful when we’ve internalized them, when our design work is driven by the principle ALMOST on an unconscious level. We can internalize something when it makes sense to us inherently. As a field, we are creating a language to talk about novel problems and old problems in a new way. Every person in this room contributes to that language. Don’t let grumpy old men tell you that your contributions aren’t worthwhile. Or are only worthwhile if they happen at a certain level. If you have a tool that works for the job at hand, use it. If it doesn’t work, design a better one.
• #33: What makes the principles meaningful? Agreement: We all agree with the principle’s underlying concept. CLICK Interpretation: We understand that the principle leaves room for interpretation, but that our design decisions should be traceable to it. CLICK Internalization: Principles are most useful when we’ve internalized them, when our design work is driven by the principle ALMOST on an unconscious level. We can internalize something when it makes sense to us inherently. As a field, we are creating a language to talk about novel problems and old problems in a new way. Every person in this room contributes to that language. Don’t let grumpy old men tell you that your contributions aren’t worthwhile. Or are only worthwhile if they happen at a certain level. If you have a tool that works for the job at hand, use it. If it doesn’t work, design a better one.
• #34: What makes the principles meaningful? Agreement: We all agree with the principle’s underlying concept. CLICK Interpretation: We understand that the principle leaves room for interpretation, but that our design decisions should be traceable to it. CLICK Internalization: Principles are most useful when we’ve internalized them, when our design work is driven by the principle ALMOST on an unconscious level. We can internalize something when it makes sense to us inherently. As a field, we are creating a language to talk about novel problems and old problems in a new way. Every person in this room contributes to that language. Don’t let grumpy old men tell you that your contributions aren’t worthwhile. Or are only worthwhile if they happen at a certain level. If you have a tool that works for the job at hand, use it. If it doesn’t work, design a better one.