For this week, I read the fifth and sixth chapters of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by authors Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld. Chapter five deals with organization systems and related topics and issues such as why organizing information is often troublesome, organization schemes, database structures, and types of classification. In discussing organization, the authors make it clear just how important organization is. Not just in the business or academic world, but in everyday life. We see it in both social and political interactions. It helps us to comprehend, clarify, and manage the information we receive. Without it, we could very well fall into chaos. Morville and Rosenfeld (2007) have stated that, “As information architects, we organize information so that people can find the right answers to their questions. We strive to support casual browsing and directed searching. Our aim is to design organization and labeling systems that make sense to users” (p. 53).
While it does keep our lives in some state of order, organization is not without its difficulties. Some of the problems that can be encountered are ambiguity in terms and labels, heterogeneity, differences in user perspectives as not every user searches for or processes information the same way, and internal politics. All these factors must be taken into account when information is being sorted out. There are some straightforward ways that Information Architects can organize information. The authors call attention to three relatively simple methods of arranging information. They are alphabetical, chronological, and geographical. Most people have used at least one of these methods at some point. They are called Exact Organization Schemes due to the fact that they allow information to be placed into clusters that are simpler to understand. Of course there are also methods that are less clear that are called Ambiguous Organization Schemes, which according to Morville and Rosenfeld (2007), are, “organization schemes that divide information in categories that defy exact definition. They are mired in the ambiguity of language and organization, not to mention human subjectivity. They are difficult to design and maintain” (p. 61). The prominent illustrations of this style of scheme are organizing by topic, task (such as e-commerce websites), audience type, metaphors and hybrids.
Organization structures were also mentioned and included hierarchies and taxonomies, database models and social classification. When discussing the structures, the authors stress the importance of making sure that the size is well balanced. You don’t want it to be too deep or too shallow. Nor do you want it to be too wide or too narrow. This is why organization structures require so much planning.
In chapter six, the authors discussed labeling systems and how these systems can be employed to build up an excellent and thriving search system. Labeling serves as a form of description and in the field of IA, can be used on websites to call attention to bigger amounts of data. Authors Morville and Rosenfeld (2007), stated that, “labels are often the most obvious way to clearly show the user your organization and navigation systems” (p. 83). There are several varieties of labels that mainly exist to two formats: textual and iconic. Textual tends to see the most use and can consist of contextual links that are hyperlinks to data located on other pages, headings which are labels that explain the content that comes after them, navigation system choices which are labels that signify the choices in navigation systems and index terms which are keywords, subject headings and tags that correspond to what the user is searching for. The labels I was most familiar with were headings and index terms as I heard them described in other classes and have used them when doing research for projects. They really are an excellent help when you are conducting Internet searches.
Creating successful and easy to understand labels is very complicated as one can never be sure that the labels will be accurately understood by the users. According to the authors (2007), “we must remember that content, users and context affect all aspects of an information architecture and this is particularly true with labels” (p. 98). The authors do provide some guidelines in designing labels which include having as narrow a scope as possible and making sure that one creates consistent labeling systems.
All in all, both of these chapters, while being very technical, were quite interesting. Having already been a little familiar with organization and labeling, it was nice to go a bit more in depth into the concepts and get some clarification on a few things.
References
Morville, Peter & Rosenfeld, Louis. (2007). Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Sebastopol, CA. O’Reilly Media, Inc.