Information Architecture

Ultimately, users visit your website for its content. Everything else is just the backdrop.

Jakob Nielsen, Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity - 2000

What Usable Content Is

1. Usable content is clear and easy to understand.
2. Usable content can bridge gaps–things like language barriers, disability and cultural differences.
3. Usable content is meaningful.
4. Usable content makes the reader feel smart.
5. Usable content is goal and audience appropriate.
6. It’s thought–out, planned and constantly maintained.
7. It’s fresh, light and lively.
8. It’s content that is organized in a way that people understand and can get their mind around.
9. It’s designed to be accessible.
10. It’s reusable and shareable, readily available and easy to locate.
11. It’s straightforward, open and honest and to the point.
12. It encourages feedback and is engineered for conversation.
13. It’s hard work, but worthy of the job.

What Usable Content Is Not

1. Usable content is not clever, obtuse or misleading.
2. It’s not marketing drivel, or bland branding messages.
3. It’s not longwinded.
4. It’s not written at the highest possible reading level.
5. It’s doesn’t use "big words" unless they are needed.
6. It’s not legalese.
7. It’s not double talk.
8. It’s not an afterthought.
9. It’s not a mission statement.
10. It’s not an org chart.
11. It’s not self–centered.

D. Keith Robinson, Usable Content Manifesto - July 13, 2005

One of the more annoying things with many online versions of newspapers is that they constantly "retire" old content. Different news organizations have different policies, but the sites go away after a certain period of time. That's annoying for sites like ours where we link to those news sources. When we go looking for more information later, our links go to nowhere. So why is this a particularly pointless business practice for newspapers? Newspapers that keep their content online are finding that as much as a third of their traffic is to old stories. That's one-third of your online revenue from ads, and you're just throwing it away. Storage is cheap, so the cost of keeping the content online can't be that high, but the cost of not keeping it online (and at the same link!) seems to be huge.

Mike at TechDirt, Note To Online Newspapers: Stop Removing Old Content - November 10, 2005

Much like our real world namesakes, we design spaces for human beings to live work and play in. The big difference is the materials we work with: cement is replaced with thesauri, timber with hierarchies and steel with interaction flows.

Christina Wodke, Information Architecture Defined - December 12th 2000

Information Architecture (IA) is the science of designing the labeling, navigation, organization and search systems to help people find and manage information more successfully.

DefiningTheDamnThing, Information Architecture Defined

A vital component in the development of Web sites, used to round the budget up to the next hundred thousand dollars.

information architecture, noun

Three factors are creating new challenges for information architects that have emerged with Web 2.0:

1. users expecting more control over information management
2. large and dynamic information spaces
3. unstructured metadata

"Information architects ... must think about the structures and patterns that govern these dynamic information spaces."

What all three factors have in common is that they force information architects to think about underlying structures. Rather than developing concrete navigation categories or prioritizing certain content over other content, an information architect must think more abstractly. The domain of today's information architect includes not only organizing information into categories, but principles of organization as well. Gone are the days when information architects could do a card sort alone to establish an information structure for a Web site.

The complexity of modern Web services demands the same level of rigor in their information architectures while, at the same time, requiring that we design information spaces on a more abstract level. With users continually contributing both content and metadata, information architects have much less raw data to work with up front. Instead, they must think about the structures and patterns that govern these dynamic information spaces without losing sight of their primary responsibility: ensuring people can find the information they need.

Dan Brown Information Architecture 2.0 - October 29, 2005

1. User Research
2. Site Strategy
3. Technology Strategy
4. Content Strategy
5. Abstract Design
6. Technology Implementation
7. Content Production
8. Concrete Design
9. Project Management

Does this mean that every Web team has to have at least nine people on it? Not necessarily. It's very common to have team members with multiple competencies.

This is especially true for the strategic competencies, which are often paired with complementary tactical competencies. For example, someone with a strong grounding in technology implementation frequently takes on technology strategy as well, and many concrete designers also have an aptitude for abstract design. On the other hand, many organizations find they need several team members to fill out a single competency (especially in the case of the more tactical pillars).

How you end up structuring your team and your process will depend largely on the specific circumstances of your organization. But by building your practices on the Nine Pillars, you can be assured that you aren't missing any competencies that are essential to your site's success.

Jesse James Garrett, The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams - July 9, 2003

"In its simplest form, usability is absence of frustration," explains Jared Spool, founding principal of User Interface Engineering. "When people claim something is not usable, what they're finding is that they're frustrated because something is harder than it should be."

EContent Magazine, Tony Byrne, Applying Usability Principles to Your CMS - March 17, 2005

1. Motivate
2. User task flow
3. Architecture – it's 80% of usability
4. Affordance means obvious
5. Replicate
6. Usability test along the way
7. Know the technology limitations
8. Know user tolerances
9. Multimedia – be discriminating
10. Use a stats package

Human Factors, 10 Usability Principles to guide you through the Web Design Maze

We take for granted that good user experience design will help a business succeed. However, if there is a dissonance between business goals and project selection - as there often is - the Web team has little control over a project's failure.

Developing Applicable Metrics

If the designers had been at the table, they might have helped to brainstorm some lower-level metrics that contribute to total sales, but are more specific to the actual business strategies that designers control.

Here are just a few examples of user experience metrics that contribute to total sales:

1. Sales conversion from the search function
2. Cross-sell conversion that occurs online
3. Increase in qualified business leads to the sales department
4. Increase in percentage of applications or transactions completed
5. Decrease in abandoned shopping carts

Scott Hirsch, User Experience Accountability: Assessing Your Impact on Business Results - November 13, 2003

Eighty percent of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience, but only 8 percent of their customers agree, says Bain & Company.

1. They design the right offers and experiences for the right customers.
2. They deliver these propositions by focusing the entire company on them with an emphasis on cross-functional collaboration.
3. They develop their capabilities to please customers again and again—by such means as revamping the planning process, training people in how to create new customer propositions, and establishing direct accountability for the customer experience.

James Allen, Frederick F. Reichheld, and Barney Hamilton, The Three "Ds" of Customer Experience - November 7, 2005

To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.

Jakob Nielsen, First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users - August 5, 2001

If market research tells us what consumers want....usability helps us learn how to deliver on that promise and when we have succeeded.

Whitney Interactive Design, The Research Triangle

1. Effective: How completely and accurately the work or experience is completed or goals reached
2. Efficient: How quickly this work can be completed
3. Engaging: How well the interface draws the user into the interaction and how pleasant and satisfying it is to use
4. Error Tolerant: How well the product prevents errors and can help the user recover from mistakes that do occur
5. Easy to Learn: How well the product supports both the initial orientation and continued learning throughout the complete lifetime of use

Whitney Interactive Design, Using the 5Es to Understand Users

The usability consultancy UIE conducted an eye-tracking study to find out how people scan a typical three column web page layout.

Some major findings:

1. The users usually scanned in the centre area first, then the left area and then the right column
2. The users would only investigate the left and right column when looking for additional information
3. The users quickly learned to look where they would expect to find relevant content and avoid areas which was unimportant to their current task, such as banner ads
4. The users would only re-evaluate their scan strategies when they detected changes in the layout of pages
5. The users where able to determine if surrounding content was relevant before looking directly at it, suggesting that peripheral vision plays a central role in the interaction with the web pages
6. Ads attracted users only when they related to the current task - even if the content interested users

Henrik Olsen, How people scan web pages - October 21, 2003

The web isn't like newspapers or magazines either. At IBM and at Sun, we studied how people read on the Web. What we discovered is - they don't! They scan. Only 16% of Web users actually read word by word.

Jakob Nielsen via Fast Company, Usability Makes the Web Click - October, 1998

Functional specifications documents lead to an illusion of agreement. A bunch of people agreeing on paragraphs of text is not real agreement. Everyone is reading the same thing, but they're often thinking something different. This inevitably comes out in the future when it's too late. "Wait, that's not what I had in mind..." "Huh? That's not how we described it." "Yes it was and we all agreed on it - you even signed off on it." You know the drill.

Functional specs are often appeasement documents. They're about making people feel involved. But, there's very little reality attached to anything you do when the builders aren't building, the designers aren't designing, and the people aren't using. We think reality builds better products than appeasement.

Jason Fried, Signal vs. Noise Getting Real, Step 1: No Functional Spec February 9, 2005

All web navigation must answer:

1. Where am I?
2. Where have I been?
3. Where can I go next
4. Where's the Home Page
5. Where's the Home Home Page

Navigation must be simple and consistent.

Common mistakes include different types of navigation on the same site, a link to the current page on the current page (home page link on home page), poorly worded links so the visitor doesn't know where he'll go if he clicks, no links back to the home page, confusing links to the home page (Seth Godin is a good example), etc.

There are probably 10 million ways to screw up navigation.

Mystery Meat Navigation occurs when, in order to find specific pages in a site, the user must mouse over unmarked navigational "buttons" -- graphics that are usually blank or don't describe their function. JavaScript code then reveals what the real purpose of the button is and where it leads.

The problem with MMN is it influences designers and companies who aren't smart enough to realize they're not in the music, art, movie, or fashion business. When a manufacturing company starts using MMN, you know the apocalypse can't be too far behind.

Vincent Flanders, The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004

Now, me, I hate drop-down menus. I hate them as a user. Too many choices. It's like those big laminated menus you get at a New York diner. Spaghetti, diet plate, French Toast, broiled filet of sole, pizza, ice cream sundae, Atkins menu, veggie burger.... The eyes blur. You slam the menu shut and order coffee.

As a designer, wherever possible, I avoid drop-down menus. For they almost always create an inferior user experience versus drilling down through clearly labeled, intelligently organized categories.

When I see a drop-down menu, I know that a committee sat around a table, unwilling to think through the organization of the site's material into a user-focused structure — or unwilling to accept the recommendation of an information architect who spent days making sense of the site's offerings.

A drop-down menu tells me there were too many decision makers, none of whom understood that the user's needs were more important than their ego-driven desire to win front-page placement for their little piece of the content puzzle.

Jeffrey Zeldman, Architectural Digest vs. This Old House (A List Apart No. 184) - June 29, 2004

From Szuc & Gaffney:

Q: How many usability people does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. They're too busy complaining about the door knob.

Szuc & Gaffney, Usability Joke January 31, 2006