Week 3 An Introduction to Information Architecture

The article I introduced is about information architecture. The link of this article is:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/information-architecture/

In fact, information architecture helps us take a look at the big picture -- the primary goal of your Website -- and achieve that goal by effectively organizing your site. So, how to organize the site? For organizing the information, the author points out that it will depend on variables such as your business goals, the size of your Website, its future growth and expansion plans, the audience(s) you target, and more. I totally agreed with the author's point. Depend on business goal, you know what the users search first, and decide the information at the top levels is related to what and the sub levels. So we should organize the content for different business goals. For the size of the website, if the site is big enough, you may have more categories to organize the website's content. The future growth and expansion plans also affect the organizing of the information, because we must plan for the change such as adding information under the information at the related top level, so those top levels may be provided. Also, the users that we target affect too. We should think from user's point of view, what they will search for in our website.

For the information provided in the website, the author points out that if the website's target user is end user, we should avoid using engineering or marketing jargon. It's possible that the target user don't understand the information after reading parts of it and so they can't find out what they need in the website.

And how to help the users find their way easily in our website? The answer is consistent and persistent navigation, along with helpful hints like creating homepage links through the logo. Keeping the navigation consistent and persistent let the users make use of it and don't feel confused easily. And the hints really help user in visual way.

Moreover, search system should be planned well in information architecture, because a vocabulary of kewords for the site is served as the dictionary for the search. So the keywords searched by user will be checked against in the keywords in the dictionary and the result will display. From my point of view, if users type a similar word(not correct in spelling), the search should let them get away with all kinds of similar spelling. So the users can get the exact match in search result. That mean it helps the users find out what they need.

To conclude, I learned how to organize a site. It indicates the reason that we need those ways, and then give some ways and examples to us for reference. After reading the article, I think information architecture is the science because it needs us to follow some ways and steps to organize the site. On the other hand, I think information architecture is the art because the organized work can come from some creative ideas, for example, we may produce some information architecture deliverables like storyboards and paper prototype. Hence, information architecture is such a big topic that interest me most.