Monthly Archives: August 2008

A Primer on Information Architecture: Navigation

Navigation and IA

Navigation is without a doubt one of the most essential elements of any interface, and as a result adequate time and thought is necessary to ensure your interface’s navigation is usable and comprehensive. From the all important global navigation that stays the same throughout the site, to local navigation which changes based on the content of the page, to contextual navigation which exists within the content itself. They all work together to form a powerful navigation experience.

Information Architecture as an Extension of Web Design — features some good points on navigation and IA.
Information Architecture Deliverables: Site/Navigation Structure — a good article on conveying your IA suggestions for navigation through deliverables.
Essential Navigation Checklists for Web Design
Where Am I? — a fantastic article on improving your navigation by highlighting context within your site’s IA.

Types of Navigation

There are typically a few types of navigation: global, local, contextual/supplemental. Sometimes you may only need one, but other times you may need all three depending on the amount of content and the complexity of the interface. Understanding how and when to use these different types

Global navigation is a navigation structure that stays consistent through your application to provide familiarity and a good overview of your site’s content.
- Global navigation design pattern
Local navigation is a navigation structure contingent on the current content.
Contextual navigation refers to navigation that is embedded within a site’s content to facilitate further browsing. The best of example of this is Wikipedia which links content together inside the articles.

Breadcrumbs

Hansel and Gretel weren’t the only two who wanted to get back to where they started. Breadcrumbs, when well thought out and implemented in moderation, can add a dynamic and usable element into your interface.

Location, Path & Attribute Breadcrumbs — an excellent overview of approaches to breadcrumb navigation.
Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful — Jakob Nielsen’s analysis of the effectiveness of breadcrumbs.
Design Cop-out: Breadcrumbs — a very insightful article on the thought necessary to implement breadcrumbs and not using them to “cop-out” of other aspects of IA.

Pagination

Pagination is often an over-looked aspect of effective navigation architectures. When combined with a thoughtful search architecture it will increase findability drastically.

Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices — an incredibly rich article outlining common mistakes and best practices.

Navigation Design Patterns

Design patterns are a great way to see how others are starting to standardize the way they approach certain aspects of design and their resulting interactions. Most often, navigation mistakes are made, because the designer doesn’t take into account existing patterns that users may be familiar with.

Patterns in Interaction Design — here is a great listing of patterns related to navigation styles including accordions, fly-outs, and much more.
Elements of Design — an interesting gallery of creatively styled navigation.
Information Architecture models: Guide to web site navigation patterns — an overview of different approaches to modeling the content in a navigation scheme.

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Being A Good Designer Isn’t Just About Being A Good Designer

We live in a time that is far removed from the late 90’s battle with 640x480 resolutions with IE 4 (oh how I shudder at those days). Today, the web is an elaborate medium for artistic expression, and we have no shortage of talented designers strutting their stuff and receiving their due recognition. But I must admit that I, and most of the web designers out there, aren’t a “good designer” in the traditional sense of being completely original. In fact, I venture to estimate that the truly revolutionary ideas come out in web design is coming from a group smaller than 5% (similar to this is how much of a country’s wealth comes from the upper 1%). So, what about the rest of us?

The Argument

For a long time I was discouraged that I would never be a Cameron Moll, Eric Meyer, or work for Happy Cog. I thought since I couldn’t compete at that level it was better that I hang up the designing shoes. Well, I have since learned that being a good designer isn’t just about being a good designer, and I want to elaborate on what that means and its implications for the majority of “designers” out there.

I have learned that just because I’m not completely original designer with my layouts, methodology, etc that doesn’t mean I can’t be a “good designer.” While I might not be the most original I can work on how I discern good from bad and functional against un-functional in doing design work. In short, the average designer can be a good designer by honing their ability to be discerning on design choices and therefore be able to give educated opinions to clients and co-workers about best practices in the design world.

The Proof

To prove this we need to look no farther than this site! It is chocked full of resources, best practices, and galleries of exceptional designers/programmers doing exceptional things in order that we may learn from them. The fact that there are no shortages of design galleries on the Internet speaks to the market of inspiring other designers. That doesn’t mean we can blatantly copy them, but we can see how someone else approached a similar design problem and then mix and match to solve our individual design requirements.

The Conclusion

Just because most of us (including myself) might not be in the upper echelon of designers doesn’t mean that we can’t be talented in how we approach our design work. It’s true that being truly original is great, but for the rest of us we can stand on the shoulders of giants while paving our own way!

A Primer on Information Architecture: Introduction

Information Architecture (IA) is one of the most important and exciting concepts in designing applications, but it also one of the least understood by a majority of designers, programmers, business analysts, etc. Hopefully through the following overview of the major concepts and benefits you can immediately improve both the utility and finabitliy of information in your application. After all, content (information) is the most important thing to any application so doesn’t it deserve some foresight?

Defining Information Architecture (IA)

The Findability Flower

The Information Architecture Institute has the following definition to begin our study. They define IA as:

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.

Information architects, from this working definition, play an important role in not only ensuring the usability and utility of information but it also goes to the level of discovering the optimal way to do physical layouts inside applications. From beginning to end, IA has an important role our design work.

Relation to Other Disciplines

Findability truly is the center of all applications we design. If information is not findable, then the value-added proposition from our applications doesn’t amount to much. Information Architecture is an important component to achieving maximum findability in our applications, but it has a very symbiotic relationship to other disciples in designing interfaces.

Interaction designers/user experience gurus are very interested in how our applications are actually used by the end user and therefore take a keen interest in how we label, describe, and layout our information.
Usability experts love IA for ensuring that our applications actually have information structured in such a way that makes it both usable and provides utility for the user.\
Graphic designers need IA before ever applying CSS, DHTML, or any other element to add to the aesthetic and function of the interface.
Business Analysts/Executives are concerned with ensuring that the product they sell and/or information they provide is understood by the target market. They see a tight relationship between IA and an application’s return on investment (ROI).

The list can continue, but it’s very apparent that many different stakeholders have a keen interest in IA. Because of this, information architects straddle an important line between the business objectives, customer needs, and application designers. They truly serve as the “glue” that makes projects stand or fall.

Understanding Information-Seeking Behavior

Before we continue with the various aspects of IA we first need to clarify how users actually seek information. If we can’t understand this vital aspect than all our IA will amount to a waste in time and money.

Too many designers design interfaces on the premise that search takes a linear form. In other words, the user comes to our application, searches/browses in a simple manner, finds their information, and leaves. Truth is, seeking information is an involved process. Think of how we search for information on sites: Sometimes we attempt to navigate the site, other times we go straight to search, but usually it’s a combination of both. We need to keep this in perspective when designing our information architectures.

A Diagram of Typical Information Seeking Behavior

Here are some important articles outlining information seeking behavior.

The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface — this article was created in 1989, but it remains a phenomenal introduction to information seeking behavior to which the author likens it to “berrypicking.”
Designing for Information Foragers: A Behavioral Model for Information Seeking on the World Wide Web — a great introduction to the concepts inside understanding information seeking behavior.
Information Seeking on the Web — a great overview of information seeking behavior as specific to web interfaces with its unique needs and concerns.
Information Seeking Behavior in New Searching Environments — search is an important aspect in understanding this topic, and this is a great primer on its complexities.

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