Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

Creating Cohesive Organization Systems

Experience designer Nathan Shedroff suggests that the first step in transforming data into information is exploring its organization.^[17] As you’ve seen in this chapter, organization systems are fairly complex. You need to consider a variety of exact and ambiguous organization schemes. Should you organize by topic, by task, or by audience? How about a chronological or geographical scheme? What about using multiple organization schemes?

You also need to think about the organization structures that influence how users can navigate through these schemes. Should you use a hierarchy, or would a more structured database model work best? Perhaps a loose hypertextual web would allow the most flexibility? Taken together in the context of a large web site development project, these questions can be overwhelming. That’s why it’s important to break down the site into its components, so you can tackle one question at a time. Also, keep in mind that all information retrieval systems work best when applied to narrow domains of homogeneous content. By decomposing the content collection into these narrow domains, you can identify opportunities for highly effective organization systems.

However, it’s also important not to lose sight of the big picture. As with cooking, you need to mix the right ingredients in the right way to get the desired results. Just because you like mushrooms and pancakes doesn’t mean they will go well together. The recipe for cohesive ...