070 Five Hat Racks
A metaphor representing the five ways information can be organized.
The term hat racks is built on an analogy—hats as information and racks as the ways to organize information. The organization of information is one of the most powerful factors influencing the way people think about and interact with a design.1
The five hat racks principle asserts that there are five organizational strategies, regardless of the specific application:
- Category—Organization by similarity or relatedness. Examples include areas of study in a college catalog and types of retail merchandise on a website. Organize information by category when clusters of similarity exist within the information or when people will naturally seek out information by ...
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