Hot answers tagged information-architecture
24
If you're looking for the most SEO friendly URLs that are also human readable, then I would recommend using all lowercase, hyphenated URLs, as that is what Google recommends in their Webmaster tools documentation. However, if SEO doesn't matter for your web app (if, for instance, it all lives behind a login requirement), then you can use whatever ...
23
Having a blank field that means that all Organizations/Locations can access the item is really confusing. There should be a default that says "All Organizations" and "All Locations". It can be shown if the value is Null, if that is appropriate for the underlying code, but it needs to show the user what is going on. Changing the code to not confuse the ...
19
To quote one of Jakob Nielson's studies on scrolling behavior:
Today, users will scroll. However, you
shouldn't ignore the fold and create
endless pages for two reasons:
Long pages continue to be problematic because of users'
limited attention span. People
prefer sites that get to the point
and let them get things done
...
19
It heavily depends on the site content and architecture.
I believe it is very dangerous to try and make conclusions using statistics "on average" (moreover, I'm not sure such statistics even exist).
In my experience no matter how well your site is indexed and how many good entry points there are, it is always better to have a home page than not to have one. ...
14
When you have categories, there are often items that don't fit into any category well, and so you are left with a choice between having a category with a single item in it, or a catchall category like 'other'.
If the item isn't needed in the first place, then regardless of whether it fits into a category or not, you should not include it. That said, I will ...
13
Sounds like your colleagues got a little lost in assumptions without thinking about what the purpose of a wireframe is. Let's start with a loose definition provided by Wikipedia:
A website wireframe (also "web wire
frame", "web wireframe", "web
wireframing") is a basic visual guide
used in interface design to suggest
the structure of a website ...
13
One possible solution is to progressively show more details as users select items and sub-items. The benefit is that the initial ui is still clean, while getting rid of extra panels and buttons.
You can still keep your initial page with the "configure" button, even though i would try to eliminate it, if possible.
Initial View
User Selects an Item
...
12
Regardless of the solution criteria, why not populating the field with a default value in grey? Telling your users what the field actually does without their input. If they're happy with it they'll move on, otherwise they'll replace it.
As per the default criteria, I would choose the less painful i.e. "As a user the less input I have to provide the better I ...
12
Although it makes sense for the banner image and the title to link to the event page, their affordance for clicking isn't as strong as that of a button or text link. That you can click on the image and the title might surface with a hover effect, but a button or text link is naturally clickable. However, the image offers a nice large target, so for someone ...
11
I think the question you should be asking is what should be my content strategy and how should I define that to drive my site navigation..
That said, there are multiple steps in defining your content strategy :
Plan your content:
This is the initial phase of any site and should involve the questions such as the objective of the site, the user group which ...
10
My favorite answer to most UX questions is: "It depends".
How will the redesign be done? Full redesign with a rewrite of navigation and content? Or keep the existing content as is, and just redesign navigation?
My next question is: What are you trying to organize? 600+ words sounds like a lot of words to organization, and I don't believe that you ...
10
It's not published anywhere, but when I was at university I had to do a small usability study. For the sites tested, I did observe significant attempts to return to the home page corresponding with user frustration, particularly in users with mental handicaps such as dyslexia -- often they would fail to notice that something was clickable where neurotypical ...
10
I've solved this task using card sorting in a low tech, hands on session with my client and/or users.
Write down all menu items onto index cards and let the participants sort the cards in a way they think it is correct.
You will find a lot more information on the internet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sorting
9
You want to put a new (task focused) IA in place and install a new CMS with improved templates and publishing workflow, but any changes to content are out of scope. There will be no content migration and the intranet site must be fully functional throughout.
This is one of life's paradoxes. A new IA will typically mean a good amount of new content is ...
9
I would call it an Inline Help Box which can take many forms and shapes. Take a look at UI Patterns: Inline Help Box, where they explain the following:
Use to gently introduce functionality to the new and untrained user.
...which is exactly what "How to format" in your screenshot is meant to do.
8
There is no rule/recommendations/guideline which says we can't use more than one <h1>. A Google engineer says we can have multiple <h1> on a page if there is reason to do so.
But for better accessibility I always use one <h1>
JAWS will announce how many headings
and links are found such as “Page has
5 headings and 30 links”.
...
7
Agreed.
Typically, color brings emotional/cultural overtones to a discussion that is "supposed" to be about basic structure, layout and IA (information architecture). While that can be debated, we can agree that use of Color will, at the least, convey MORE information to the rendering.
The whole point of the wireframe is to communicate ONLY what is ...
7
Basically the validation for large IA is similar as in other situations. Do a closed card sort.
Other comments on your problem:
Check the the article Scaling the card sort method to over 500 items: restructuring the Google AdWords help center by Nakhimovsky et al for ideas on how to conduct card sorts with a lot of items. In essence you have to get the ...
7
Even if your navigation is the most perfect one, you do need a homepage, because the homepage is the one that serves these cases:
Users type the URL/domain name directly. Your loyal readers/clients may remember your domain and type it in directly, or find it in your business card and type it in.
As a corollary: When a user types a simple word in the ...
7
Do A/B testing.
By getting direct knowledge of what works or what doesn't from the analytical data collected by the tests from your user's behaviours, data will speak by itself instead of each other's personal assumptions (both the UX designer's and the stakeholders').
It is important to stress that A/B testing must be done right in order to harvest ...
7
It may seem that separating products available for immediate purchase online from the products available only in brick-and-mortar stores makes sense. You may even consider listing all products together and then make the store area separate. The problem with either of these approaches is that you repeat product descriptions and increase the path to the ...
6
While - as others have pointed out - there are certainly theoretical differences in how people perceive the two job titles.
However, in practice, you'll find that many of the people with an IA title are in fact doing a great deal of more general UX work.
So the real answer is "it depends" :-)
6
Jesse James Garret, author of "The Elements of User Experience", made an infamous visualization on User Experience elements before writing his book. It has two different scales: Abstract to Concrete- scale and Conception to Completion-scale. It's divided into five layers which should be read from the bottom and upward (from Conception to Completion and from ...
6
I believe that the Information Architecture Institute uses those same definitions for IA, and they are probably the most widely accepted. It's difficult to create a universal definition for IA because the need to organize information is cross-domain, and the methodology will vary between each domain. For example, you wouldn't organize a website the same way ...
6
While hundreds is likely a bit much, the answer tends to be 'as much as you need and not more'.
There's the old myth of 5-7, though that's not applicable at all to menus:
http://uxmyths.com/post/931925744/myth-23-choices-should-always-be-limited-to-seven
The best I've read on the subject is this report "the scent of information"
...
6
Firstly I don't have experience in this area of doing content analysis on such a large website, but I have some ideas which may help or at least give some inspiration as to how you can make them relevant for your particular situation.
Consider if qualitative analysis can also help
You mention specifically quantitave methods, but since you are also looking ...
6
Jesse James Garrett's Visual Vocabulary for IA has the concept of a "conditional area", represented by a dotted line grouping the elements.
http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/#conarea
The example he gives is the following:
In your example, you'd have the condition based on their role and throw some sort of error when the user tries to access a page outside ...
6
You should consider a unified video player that would allow you to select different videos and load them on the same page (something like http://www.heydayfootwear.com/videos/ or the screenshot below) or jumps to a certain part of a single video (as @alexeypegov mentioned).
An advantage to note of the above player, is that videos can still be browsed ...
6
Understanding the content
To be able to understand the content currently available on the site you can't only rely on the navigation menu, tagging systems or search which is where you start. Get your view of where content lives before you ask the users and editors of content today. You need to interview and observe content editors and content consumers ...
6
Menus are a navigation element and so what make the most sense is whatever makes navigation easier for your users.
Your first example is a good menu, as although you have only one item under 'Otters', it wouldn't make sense renaming 'Otters' to 'Sarah' as it would then look like 'Sarah' were a type of animal. Additionally, if you get a second otter to keep ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
