Archive for the ‘IA’ Category

Wayfinding

Finding the way out, knowing where to go, is just a matter of having the right point of view.

et3.pnget4.png

Wayfinding system developer by Axel Peemoeller who has put more pictures online about this project in Melbourne

Sort data, order information

This post is more for me to allow me to really understand the issue of sorting and organizing, because several times I have to face business people wanting to “alphabetically sort” navigation elements on a website.
I always doubt that that is a good idea, because when I personally look at a website I tend to go for the things which are visible at first sight. The sorting aspect of a list comes only after visiting the website a few times when you get to know the subject and the navigation of the website. So here we go:

Sorting is ordering data: alphabetically, numerical, by day, week (by number again) and/or month.
All these sorting orders are based on random lists. By random I do not imply a mathemacical random list, but just the fact that we assigned an order to words, and because everyone knows the order, the list becomes a functional tool.
Most people do not have to think about whether a 4 comes before a 7, or that the month of January is the first of the year. The fact that we all have a complete image of these things in our mind, makes them so practical.

But does it make sense for the navigation of a website?

In a website the navigations is about information (that is not everything, I will get to that), which is something different then data.
I had a look at the dictionary entries:

Information: the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence

Data: factual information (as measurements or statistics) used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation

The 2 definitions tell me that data is used to generate information. Information emanates from data, it is the basis on which we can form a decision or some reasoning.

Well, if we apply this idea to the navigation of a website, we should be putting organised information on the website and that information should be coming from the data we collected as a basis to create the website.
Sounds good, but what about the visitor? People could still argue that sorting can be applied to information to ease scanning of the list, to guide the visitor of the website.

Guidance

The argument to ease scanning is actually a valid one, though not good enough, I think. People scan pages, they tend to skip most of the things available on a website. And now it comes down to what you want as a webmaster, do you want people to see the items that start with an A first, or do you want a visitor to see things that are important first?

I guess the answer should be clear, the important things should go on top and the order should be the order of importance. Importance, of course, can be defined in different ways ( from a user perspective or from a business pespective) but it certainly is not following the order of a very famous random list. If you want to guide the visitor, you should give them the most important bits of information first.

Translations

The reason why I came up with this subject is that I had an argument with a colleague after I noticed they had sorted the list of services by alphabet. A first, B second, etc… you know :-)
Now, the thing is that the most important service started with an A, and that the manager in charge is responsible for that product. In this rare case, the alphabetical sorting order matched the order of importance (from the business point of view).

This is an exception and will not happen very often, but lets look at this example and see what might happen in the future. The service is an international service in Europe and it has to cather for the south of europe. In my experience with international websites that try to reach the public in the south of europe, you need a translation in the local language.

Ok, you already know what is going to happen to your nicely alphabetical order, right?

Once you start creating multi language websites, you have no way of ordering a list alphabetically and keeping the order of the items in the list.
I wrote about this before, as I was faced with a sorting problem of a list in Chinese

When everything else fails

When your website navigation fails, and your visitor cannot find what he/she is looking for, an alphabetical list of keywords, a sitemap where the subelements are ordered alphabetically, and/or a monthly list of posts on a blog, are valid examples of pages where you can alphabetically sort information. But that is when everything else fails …

I am sure there are other reasons why it is bad to sort you information as you do with data on a website, but for now this is what I experienced.
Please leave a message if you had similar experience with this kind of problems.

Bad error messages

Writing error messages is very hard if you check the list of error screenshots collected on the iarchitect page from Isys IA Inc.

My personal favorites is generated by Lotus notes: Mail engine: no error.

Some useful guidelines for printing error messages can be found on the Cranky Users article: could you repeat that in English, or the guidelines for error messages from Norman Nielsens’ alertbox.

The web that wasn’t

The Web that wasn’t, a presentation about the concept and the history of the internet as we know it, is really one to watch. The Google Tech Talks go beyond the subject of the internet, but some of them are really interesting.


The web that wasn’t

Alex Wright goes through several names that wrote about concepts like a keyboard, networks, terminals even before a computer was even thinkable.
If you need more stuff, here is a list of some names and their corresponding Wikipage:

Ask the SME’s to write content for the web

I found an old draft for a post that I was going to publish a loooong time ago, but it still makes sense:

  • Make sure you have a web governance models which supports a distributed web authoring model
  • Emphasize the benefits of distributed web authoring to SMEs
  • Make sure you have appropriate training and tools for new web authors
  • Try out the new publishing paradigm on a few “ringer” SMEs who you know will do a good job and use them as success stories to recruit others
  • Make a business case for formally distributing web authoring in your organization and present it to management
  • And, if all else fails, turn off their lights.

Ask Tony — CMS Watch

A webmasters’ time and resources are limited

Webmasters’, IA’s and other computer power users are continuously facing the reality of scarce resources and little time to manage them.
It is as if people who work with computers are the culprit of “the active users’ paradox”.
If you don’t know what this paradox is, have a look at Bokardo’s post on the subject but it basically comes down to the following:

The “paradox of the active user” is a paradox because users would save time in the long term by taking some initial time to optimize the system and learn more about it.

Paradox of the Active User (Alertbox Sidebar)

If I have a job to do, let’s say create a content inventory, I could go through the website, create the sitemap and content inventory by hand or …
I could learn a bit more about vbscript, excel and visio and create both in one go.

If I automate, I save time. In this case, I can make a better decision on which pages I really have to read. I don’t have to go through each and every page.

There are probably a thousand example like this:

  • corporate system admins writing scripts to install PC’s,
  • batch files to connect to shared drives,
  • managers trying to cramp everything in an excel file and run vbscript reports on the figures,
  • me trying to create a script that generates an Umbraco website package from my excel content inventory, which I can import (Anybody? please mail me :-)

Either you do it manually, or you study and automate.

I tend to go for the latter, but that is because I prefer to do new things instead of struggling through the routine of doing something over and over again.
If I calculate the time spent, I end up with the same amount or even more time spent.

Just make sure that this job is not the first or last time you have to do this and in the end you will be spending less time doing routine jobs.

CSS, Personas and IA blogs

Old posts are supposed to be a good way to keep the interest level up for your blog. And I did find some articles which I completely forgot about, so this is a good time to bring them back to your attention.

I managed to go back to November 2003 and reviewed an article I wrote back then about CSS as a debugging tool for templates. This is a little theoretical, but three years later I wrote an article on how to implement this technique:


Personas is another topic which I touched several times and you can still download a tool to help you create personas:


And to finish, you should have a look at all the articles my European colleagues managed to write during my absence. Only one of the blogs mentioned in the article is no longer available, which IMHO, is quite an achievement on their part.

More Persona examples

Maybe you are interested in my Persona tool, a form for sales and marketing people to create personas
Last updated on 13th November 2007.

At the moment it seems more and more people are interested in using personas in the development process of writing software or creating websites. Here are 3 more examples and some really good introductions to personas

Examples

Articles

Categories

About

My name is Len Dierickx and this is my personal blog. I studied Musicology at the UG, long time ago but got more and more into webdevelopment. I started this blog because the EuroIA summit in Brussels (Belgium, Oct 2005), was such an inspiration. And I was thinking about a blog on IA a while now, so that was the extra kick I needed to get it actually done.

Powered by WordPress