Information Architecture

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Information Architecture

• The Elements of User Experience

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Information Ecologies
Context
Content
Users
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Information Ecologies
Business goals, funding, politics, culture,
technology, resources, constraints
Context
Document/data types, content objects, volume,
existing structure
Content
Users
Audience, tasks, needs, information seeking
behavior, experience
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Relevant Dimensions of Content

• Ownershipwho creates and owns content (affects
  your control over other dimensions)
• Formattypes of documents or files, see example
  about national parks reservation system
• Structurelength, data format, degree of XML or
  SGML markup (allowing you to deal with pieces of
  files, not just files)
• Metadatahow much metadata already exists?
  Quality consistency? What could be automated?
• Volumehow much content is there
• Rate of changehow much new content is expected,
  expected frequency of updates

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Information needs models

• Perfect catch
• (known item seeking)
• Lobster trapping
• (explanatory seeking)
• Indiscriminate Drift netting
• (exhaustive research)

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Information seeking behaviors

• Searching
• Browsing
• Asking
• Integrated and iterative (search browse)
• Models berry picking, pearl growing

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Information scent

• Information scentthe visual and linguistic cues
  (proximal cues perceivable in local environment)
  that enable a searcher to determine whether a
  source, particularly a Web site, has the
  information they seek, as well as to navigate to
  the desired data
• Information foraging theoryunderstanding user
  strategies for information seeking, gathering,
  and consumption

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How much information is enough?

• Satisficing versus optimal foraginguser
  testing shows that users have different
  aspiration levels (Krug, 2000, p.24)
• Pirolli--satisficing can often be characterized
  as localized optimization (e.g., hill climbing)
  with resource bounds and imperfect information as
  included constraints.

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Staying on the path

• Informavores will keep clicking as long as they
  feel like they're "getting warmer" -- the scent
  must keep getting stronger and stronger, or
  people give up.
• Progress must seem rapid enough to be worth the
  predicted effort required to reach the
  destination.

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Cost-benefit analysis for navigation

• What gain can I expect from a specific
  information nugget (such as a Web page)?
• What is the likely cost to discover and consume
  that information? (typically time and effort, or
  even money in micropayment system.)
• Users make estimates to answer these questions,
  based on their experience or on design cues

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Abandoning the path

• Reasons to change sites
• Too many links
• Confusing page layouts
• Users "decide to quit not because the information
  isn't there, but because the amount of cognition
  it would take is so high," Chi said.

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Patch foraging theory

• Information foraging predicts that the easier it
  is to find good patches, the quicker users will
  leave a patch.
• Googleemphasizes quality in sorting search
  results. Its easy for users to find other good
  sites. Thus, the less time users will spend on
  any one site.
• Broadband means internet connection is always
  onfacilitates information snacking rather than
  extended foraging

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How things change

• Moving between sites has always been easy. But,
  from an information foraging perspective, it used
  to be best if users stayed put because the
  probability that the next site would be any good
  was extremely low.
• Jakobs advice to early website designers
• Convince users that the site is worthy of their
  attention. (good information, easy to find)
• Make it easy for users to find even more good
  stuff so that they stay rather than go elsewhere.
  (sticky sites)

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Jakobs advice now

• Google and always-on connections have changed the
  most fruitful design strategy to one with three
  components
• Support short visits be a snack
• Encourage users to return use mechanisms such as
  newsletters as a reminder
• Emphasize search engine visibility and other ways
  of increasing frequent visits by addressing
  users' immediate needs

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Sites with good information scent

• Good content
• Easy to find
• links and category descriptions explicitly
  describe what users will find at the destination
  (Top level labels/categories provide scent for
  everything under them

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Understanding Information Scent

• Each label on a website has a semantic
  relationship with the links to which it leads
• Think of the top-level label as carrying a
  residue of the lower-level labels. This residue
  is the scent we follow.
• Careers carries a strong, distinct residue for
  the Open Positions and Employee Benefits
  subnavigation links.

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Scent and Information Processing

• Choosing among information scents seems to
  involve preconscious processing
• Scent draws on our existing semantic networks,
  vast numbers of nodes (with one node per concept)
  interconnected in various relationships

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Semantic Networks
Tie
Fire
Pants
Shirt
Red
Blue
Clouds
Plants
Sky
Green
Airplane
Grass
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Spreading Activation

• Activation of one node spreads down the paths to
  related nodes, in a ripple effect
• As the activation spreads further from the
  source, it decreases in strength
• Distance of nodes from one another, as well as
  the weight (strength) of the connection, is based
  on how closely related they are in your experience

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Spreading Activation and Scent

• The labels chosen for links activate these nodes
  and cause the spreading activation
• We choose the link label with the strongest
  relationship to what we are seeking, based on
  what we have encoded in our semantic networks

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Three Indicators of Poor Scent

• Indecision (Which path to take? More than one
  looks like a possibility.)
• Frustration (None of these look good)
• Confusion (What does this word mean?)

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IA Components

• Organization system
• Labeling system
• Navigation system
• Search system

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Possible user questions

• Where am I?
• Whats available on the site? Where do I find out
  about something?
• I know what Im looking for how do I search for
  it?
• How do I contact/communicate with UB?
• Whats happening at UB?
• Whats happening right now?
• Do these UB people do any cool stuff in my field?
• How do I get back to the main page to start over
  again?
• How do I browse around for what I am looking for
  (say a computer science program)?
• Where can I get help with this site?
• Can I jump directly to what I want-I know what it
  is?

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