Designing Web Navigation

QUESTIONS

1. The organization of information can get messy, even with simple schemes that we are all familiar with. This exercise begins with a simple task. On a separate piece of paper, arrange the following list in alphabetical order. Then answer the questions below:

   El Paso, Texas	Saint Nicholas, Belgium
   The Lord of the Rings	Newark, New Jersey
   XVIIme siècle	.38 Special
   St. Louis, Missouri	New York, New York
   1001 Arabian Nights	The 1-2-3 of Magic
   Albany, New York	#!%&: Creating Comic Books
   The Hague, Netherlands	$35 a Day Through Europe
   H20: The Beauty of Water	Plzen, Czech Republic

   1. Did you put The Hague under T or H? Did you put El Paso under E or P?

   2. Which came first in your list, Newark or New York?

   3. Does St. Louis come before or after Saint Nicholas?

   4. How did you handle numbers, punctuation, and special characters?

   5. Now, assuming the italicized terms are book titles, what might be a more useful way to organize this list?

   6. If the cities represent places you've visited and the book titles are ones you've read, how could chronology be used to order the list in a more meaningful way?

2. This quick exercise has two parts. First, organize all the things on your desk or in your desk drawer into piles or groups any way that seems natural to you.

   1. What schemes did you use?

   2. Why?

   Now organize those same things in the following ways:

   1. By size

   2. By material type

   What are the differences to the first way you organized them? Which way was better or worse?

3. Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, the famous Indian librarian, ...