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The LIS Foundations of IA A Presentation Made at the University of Arizona SIRLS Amy J. Warner, Ph.D.
,Who I Am Amy J. Warner, Ph.D. (warneramyj@yahoo.com) Independent consultant in taxonomy & metadata design and information architecture
Formerly Thesaurus Design Specialist with Argus Associates, Inc. Faculty member in library and information science at University of Wisconsin-Madison (1985-1988) and University of Michigan (1989-2000) Co-author of Information Retrieval Today Fortune 500 consulting ,Outline What is IA?
IA defined
Why IA is important Basic concepts and building blocks of IA IA in context IA and users
IA and business context ,Definition of IA The art and science of structuring and organizing information systems to help people achieve their goals. The application of principles and methods of library and information science (LIS) to the design of corporate intranets and websites.
,Why Is IA Important Costs
To the user
Finding information (time, # of clicks, frustration, precision)
Not finding information (recall, frustration) To the organization (lost revenue, competition) Value of learning (related products, services, projects, people) ,Why Is IA Important Web Site Statistics Wasted expense: most sites will waste between .5M and .1M on redesign next year
Forfeited revenue: poorly architected retail sites are underselling by as much as 50% Lost customers: the sites we tested are driving away up to 40% of repeat traffic Eroded brand: people who have a bad experience typically tell 10 others Forrester Research Why Most Web Sites Fail (Sept. ‘96)
,Why Is IA Important Intranet Statistics Employees spend 35% of productive time searching for information online (Working Council for Chief Information Officers)
Managers spend 17% of their time (6 weeks a year) searching for information (Information Ecology, Thomas Davenport & Lawrence Prusack) Sun’s usability experts calculated that 21,000 employees were wasting an average of six minutes per day due to inconsistent intranet navigation structures. When lost time was multiplied by staff salaries, the estimated productivity loss exceeded M per year (Web Design and Development, Jakob Nielsen [Sept. 1997) ,Why IA Fails ‘Internet time’
Cultural issues–developers, librarians, managers Project management Underestimating the problem Thinking it’s easy
Good IA is ‘invisible’ ,Why IA Is Hard Expectations
Underestimating time/cost
Underestimating difficulty of task Diversity: goals, users, authors Heterogeneous content / objects Relevance is subjective and situational Organization & language are ambiguous ,Making IA a Manageable Problem Identify and address the major needs of major audiences
Remove old, outdated content (ROT) Enable precision Design for the 80/20 rule ,Basic Concepts/Components of IA Organization systems
Navigation systems Labeling systems Searching systems ,Organization Systems Organization scheme
defines the shared characteristics of content items and influences the logical grouping of those items
identify through content inventory types exact–divide information into well-defined and mutually exclusive groups (alphabetical, chronological, geographical)
ambiguous–divide information into categories that are not exactly defined or necessarily mutually exclusive (topical, task-oriented, audience specific, metaphor driven ,Organization Scheme, cont. Organization structure
defines the principle ways in which users can navigate
often can be determined through user research models hierarchy–top down
polyhierarchies
depth vs. breadth hypertext–nonlinear chunking and linking
databases–relational ,Navigation Systems Hierarchical navigation systems–the information hierarchy is the primary navigation system
Global navigation systems–often enables greater vertical and lateral navigation within a site Local navigation systems–often used for sub-sites Ad hoc navigation–relationships between in