Information Architecture

Beyond Hierarchies

People often think that information architecture means organizing information into a logical hierarchy, such as a web site navigation scheme. But developing an intuitive taxonomy, or classification system, sometimes goes beyond the simple hierarchy.

Information is often multi-dimensional, and all too often companies organize their sites according to where information comes from. This means that visitors must determine how your company is organized before they can use your site. For example, a visitor looking for help may have trouble determining whether the answer to their question is in the training, support, sales, or documentation sections.

Have you organized your product line by your own departments or divisions? A visitor looking for a particular solution may not know which group provides the products or services that would satisfy their requirements, or even what the right names, topics, or labels are. Sometimes the best organizational structure has nothing to do with your company's org chart but everything to do with your market demographic: geography, age, income level, or interests.

Text search systems will never replace good information architecture. Will all users know what you call things? Will they become frustrated with too many or too few "hits"? And even if they eventually find the product, service, or information they want, text search circumvents browsing and learning. So our search systems include category classifications along multiple dimensions that expose related items. This is essential in any knowledge discovery application, such as a commerce site where the process of discovery introduces customers to the other products and services that you offer, increasing the likelihood of related sales and impulse buying.

Along with information architecture consulting and web user interface design services, Specific Impulse provides a toolkit specially designed for web developers, designers, and information architects. The StageOne system enables information architects to model a company's information, content, documents, business taxonomies, navigation, and workflow processes in a web-based eBusiness control panel. The transparent collaboration features enable staff, contractors, subcontractors, and consultants to work together as a team.

The control panel is made up of modules that store information, and the information can be tagged according to any data classifications. Modules can be related using shared classification trees, and end-user access and publishing permission is controlled at the module or data level.

StageOne makes it easy to model a company's information architecture, and it enables end-users to begin managing and storing their information almost immediately. The control panel serves as a powerful vehicle for driving web templates, and data-driven template design is simplified through the use of a simple tag library using the popular Macromedia® ColdFusion® markup language.

Read more about StageOne.

Read more about Rich Julius, Chief Information Architect.

 
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