Eight Principles of Information Architecture
by Daniel Brown on Apr 10, 2010
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Does information architecture have a set of universal principles we can draw from to facilitate the design process? Beats me, but these are eight that I use. ...
Does information architecture have a set of universal principles we can draw from to facilitate the design process? Beats me, but these are eight that I use.
For more information, see my article in the ASIS&T August 2010 Bulletin: http://asis.org/Bulletin/Aug-10/AugSep10_Brown.pdf
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Lisa Oreshkina
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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.
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.
•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.
•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.
From Epicurious
Elements that structure the recipe
Elements that allow me to make connections to other recipes
Based on the book CLICK
•Exception: known item searches by experts
•Implication: structures should provide digestible groups without losing coherence or meaning
Providing a means for accessing additional information
Hulu provides a reasonable facsimile
Roll over an episode and get more details of the episode
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
Providing an example of what appears in the category can help users triangulate its content
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.
Do these exemplars help me distinguish the categories?
Do I have confidence that I’m going to see successfully segmented categories?
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.
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
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?
Navigation mechanisms that allow for an expanding middle: interface elements
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.
CLICK
Instead, they offer some catchy box headers that help users understand content by scanning.
CLICK
Here, Builder Magazine’s navigation includes a mechanism for escalating key sub-topics.
CLICK
Here, Builder Magazine’s navigation includes a mechanism for escalating key sub-topics.
Any site must have more than one way to categorize content.
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?”
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
Navigation tools with a purpose have a unifying theme and provide a structure for moderating growth and scaling appropriately
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.
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.
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.
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.