Exact Organization schemes: "known-item" searching requires user to know what they're searching for. Requires little to no thought in order to create the system.
- Alphabetical: phone book
- Chronological: newspaper archive
- Geographical: interactive map
- Topical: organized by subject or topic, ie yellow pages
- Task-oriented: organized into a collection of processes, functions or tasks. ie Word menus (edit, insert, format)
- Audience-specific: used when there are multiple audiences for one website. ie wsu.edu (future students, current students, parents, alumni)
- Metaphor-driven: creating an online space that mimics the real world. ie online library with librarian
- Hierarchy: Top-down approach--mutually exclusive branching tree. Consider breadth (number of options per tab) and depth (how many clicks to get to the right page)
- Hypertext: non-linear structure is flexible but can be confusing to users. Creative and useful relations between information
- Relational database model: Bottom-up approach--a collection of records that lends itself to being customized through searches. This is good for audience-specific information, information is not mutually exclusive and can be miscellaneously reorganized in any number of ways. Creates greater efficiency and accuracy.
"Information Architecture" organization structures:
Themes to organize information:
- Category: related items
- Time: sequential order
- Location: orientation/direction
- Alphabetic:
- Continuum: quantity over a given range
- Straight linear sequence - no choices, similar to a book.
- linear sequences with supporting digressions- option to view tangential information
- Simple hub-and-spoke structure - one central page with one subpage on each spoke
- Complex hierarchy - multiple subpages with subpages of their own
1 notes:
nice job differentiating between structures and schemes. You also did a nice job describing all of them. I am missing, however, the piece on what strategy is best for the final project.
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