Information Architecture

Principles of categorization

Informit produced a nice article about "Principles of Good Commerce design'" and reviewed the categorization of your information.
Especially they posted:

There are several useful schemes for categorization:

* Alphabetical: The most logical organization scheme for a dictionary or phone book. It is typically used to provide order within other schemes. For example, Blockbuster organizes by movie genre then alphabetically by title.
* Chronological: Organizing by date is useful for subjects like automobiles, antiques, and wines.
* Geographical: Organizing information based on place is useful for gardening, real estate, and travel. It's also valuable when location is relevant to buying, i.e., shipping costs or physical store locations.
* Task oriented: Requires that content be organized as an outline of a process. For example: Select a home, find an agent, choose a mortgage. The organization reinforces the steps a customer needs to take.
* Topical: More challenging than the first four options, designing topical schemes requires defining limits to the breadth of content. Do you want to cover every topic like the Encyclopedia Britannica or a focused few like the Discovery Channel?
* Visitor specific: You might wish to design your information to fit into neat categories for different types of visitors, based on psychographic or demographic traits. For example, an apparel site might have site content arranged differently for women than men....

Have a look at there site

International Information Architecture

Connecting people from diverse disciplines, countries and cultures is a strategic imperative, not only for
AIfIA but for the information architecture community as a whole. Our competitive advantage derives from our very ability to build bridges and span networks.

Have a look at Semantics Studios to view the whole content of P. Morville latest article.

What about IA?

Due to a translation project from ALFLA,where I'm participating for the translation to Dutch, I was reading an 'old' article from Peter Morville An Information Architecture Manifesto as a candiate for the next translation project.

Interesting lecture BTW, to see opinions from people who have maded the start of the IA community!
One paragraph especialy took my attention:

Information architecture does not equal USABILITY. Usability engineers and user experience designers are wonderful and important, and we like them too, but they can't do everything. Neither can the user. You can't user test your way from a bicycle to an airplane.

Both things (Information Architecture and Usability Design) seems to be two different disciplines!

I should remember it , when discussing to my boss, that both disciplines consolidated in one person are not evident! And that infact we need two instead of one specialist for making our websites. Nice interpretation.

Definition of usability

Today I red an article from a book description, which has been published March 2003, concerning "Website Usability". I haven't yet red it, but I will in the next days. One remarkable item is the definition they are using for "Usability". See there article snippet out of this book and authored by Oskar van Rijswijk LOgos and Peter Kassenaar, both writers which are wurthfull to be mentioned.

As such I can agree whith there definition certainly when you're take about the items:

1. Efficiency
2. Effectivity
and
3. User satisfaction

which in fact are valid for EACH product are service you deliver.

No, the only thing I'm wundering is that they disagree with the splash (intro) screens and/or Flash-intro screens! Well, I've seen a lot of sites with this kind of intro's. Hell, (;)) they are even discussed in leading magazins as ComputerArts (UK). I now that I search on regular basis for websites which have this kind of intro's. The arguments of efficiency and bandwidth waste isn't valid anymore. More and more people having already cable or (A)DSL connection which are fast enough to deal with this kind of information transfer.

When you arguing about the efficiency, lot of those sites are adding information even before you have even had to make one single button click! So the definition as such is OK, but the example they are using is a little outdated, IMHO at least! But hey, who am I.

Information Architecture with use of TypePad

Well, d@mm@d it. The first try was already wrong, due to my mistake. Nevertheless, I will try to give you an impression for what this weblog will have it's use.

This blog will try to act as an information chanel regarding IA esp. in the Dutch speaking communities here in Belgium and The Netherlands.

Today we have in fact only one initiative which is dealing with this item: AIFIA Translations, for which I'm now occupied to translate the document of Peter Morville from English into Dutch.

You can find an example of this document at the AIFIA website and concers the following paper The Definition of Information Architecture - Peter Morville .

Hope you will have as much fun with this little try-out as I have with finding out this new technology called Information Architecture and Usabilty Design.