7. Places Made of Information
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
8. Places Full of Complexity and Contradiction
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
9. “information architecture is the only field I‟m
aware of that is concerned with the structural
integrity of meaning across contexts.
Anyone who questions the relevance of IA by
diminishing it to “just” website navigation in 2013 is
talking about their understanding of the state of the
profession 15 years ago”
-- Jorge Arango
past President of The Information Architecture Institute
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
10. A Model for Understanding Information Architecture
Arrangement of the parts.
Ontology
Particular meaning.
Rules for interaction among the parts.
Choreography
Taxonomy
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
11. Image pilfered from @inkblurt’s tweetstream
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
24. Taxonomy = Arranging Meaning Across Contexts
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
25. Taxonomy = Arranging Meaning Across Contexts
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
26. A Model for Understanding Information Architecture
Arrangement of the parts.
Ontology
Particular meaning.
Rules for interaction among the parts.
Choreography
Taxonomy
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
27. Choreography = Rules For How The Parts May Interact
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
32. UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
Ontology
Arrangement of the parts
Particular meaning
Rules for
interaction
among the
parts.
Choreography
33. A Model for Understanding Information Architecture
Arrangement of the parts.
Ontology
Particular meaning.
Rules for interaction among the parts.
Choreography
Taxonomy
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
38. The facet I focus on:
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
find•a•bil•i•ty [fahynd-duh-bil-i-tee] −noun
a. The quality of being locatable or navigable.
b. The degree to which a particular object is easy to
discover or locate.
c. The degree to which a system or environment
supports navigation and retrieval (search).
39. UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
Query (search) AskBrowse
Adapted from diagram in Morville and Callender’s Search Patterns.
40. Search engine optimization is…
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
…optimizing an interface for search engines.
42. Search engine optimization is…
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
People (Searchers) Search Engines
SEARCH-ENGINE
FRIENDLY
…optimizing an interface for people who use search engines.
technology-
centered
design
user-
centered
design
43. “I overheard a senior vice president say, „…and
then we‟ll get the SEO fairies to sprinkle magic
pixie dust and everything will be swell!‟ It was
a joke, but there‟s truth in every joke.
What did he mean by magic pixie dust? There
is no such thing in SEO.”
-- http://searchengineland.com/why-seo-needs-its-own-
reputation-management-64637
SEO is not…
44. Search engine optimization is…
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
• …optimizing a website for people who use search engines.
• SEO professionals are concerned with:
– Labeling website content so that it is easy to find
– Organizing website content so that it is easy to find
– Ensuring search engines have access to desired content
– Ensuring search engines don’t have access to undesirable content
• Applies to both:
– Web search engines
– Site search engines
46. Fundamental building blocks of SEO:
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
Architecture
and Design
Keywords
and Labels
Link
Development
and Social
Searcher
Goals
49. On-the-page criteria:
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
On-the-page
criteria
Architecture
and Design
Keywords
and Labels
Link
Development
and Social
Searcher
Goals
50. Off-the-page criteria:
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
Off-the-page
criteria
Keywords
and Labels
Architecture
and Design
Link
Development
and Social
Searcher
Goals
51. What searchers and search engines determine:
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
Architecture
and Design
Keywords
and Labels
Link
Development
and Social
Searcher
Goals
Infrastructure
& Scent
Aboutness
Validation
& Credibility
Searcher
Goals
=
52. Web searcher goals:
UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
Navigational
(Where can I go?)
Transactional
(What can I do?)
Informational
(What can I learn/know?)
64. UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
• We all have search responsibilities:
– Keywords (labels) are important.
– Treat most pages as a point of entry.
– Don’t limit access to desired content.
– Accommodate searching as well as browsing behaviors.
– Be aware that some of your findability solutions can cause search engine
problems (both web and site search engines).
IA and usability decisions have a
direct impact on findability.
66. UXPA Conference – Washington D.C. 2013
Thank you!
sthurow@search-usability.com
@sharithurow
Search Engine Visibility
From New Riders
Companion site at:
SearchEnginesBook.com
When Search Meets
Web Usability
Companion site at:
SearchMeetsUsability.com
Editor's Notes
My name is Dan Klyn and I’m a co-founder and information architect at The Understanding Group in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids, Michigan
Shari Thurow is founder and chief awesome officer at Omni Marketing Interactive in Chicago
We’re currently both serving on the board of Directors for the IA Institute, and are glad for the opportunity to talk about information architecture with usability and UX folks like yourselves, and if you become interested in what we present today and would like to learn more about IA the IAI is a great place to learn more.
Another great way to learn more about IA is at the IAI’s free global event for information architecture each year called World IA Day. Next year’s WIAD takes place on February 15 in 16 locations worldwide. And it’s 16 locations because of this:
This book – IA for the WWW – was published in February of 1998 and WIAD was created in part to commemorate and recognize this book and its importance in socializing the concept of information architecture as a critical part of the design of large-scale websites.The last – and as far as I know final edition of the polar bear book was published in 2007. And many of us who’re teaching IA in colleges and universities have found the book to be increasingly less comprehensive as the years go by and as the ways that people interact with information become pervasive, and multiply in complexity.
In 1998, if you were talking about the architecture of “places made of information” you’d have been told that that’s a nice metaphor. And if you’d have asked a political scientist to name the places in the world where the most important social and political events were happening, you’d have heard about Eastern Europe or The Middle East or North or North and South Korea. Today, ask that same question… if you were to ask “where did the Arab Spring happen”…. you might hear Tunisia or Egypt but more likely you’d hear Facebook and Twitter. This is not a metaphor. These are real places, made of information. Places we inhabit. And many of these places, like some of the buildings we live and dwell in, require specific architectures to support the activities people want or need to engage in in these places.
At the advent of the WWW, you might look to an information architect to devise an organization scheme for your website, and to develop a sitemap to explain the hierarchy of the information to be navigated on the site. Today, many of the products and services we work on can’t be represented in a sitemap, or be effectively structured on the basis of hierarchies (especially fixed hierarchies). The complexity and contradiction of what people and businesses want to see happen among users and across channels and devices in digital space is breathtaking.
So how does IA earn its keep if we’re no longer able to make a sitemap or “do the navigation”? For some of us, including my friend Jorge Arango, IA has never been primarily about sitemaps or wireframes or doing the navigation. And while some of the tactical stuff in the Polar Bear Book might be mostly played out in 2013, underneath it and connecting it back to the IA work done in the 1960s and 1970s is the idea that IA is and has always been about meaning. And about making structures to support, enhance and extend that meaning.
I realize that this definition of IA may be different than the one you came to the session with today. And that’s OK. What I’d like to do is propose a model for understanding information architecture that obtains in any context. In any decade. For any matter of communication: print or digital or hybrid. A way to identify the elements of products and services that’re information architectural in nature and to ensure what Louis Kahn called “a society” among those elements.The model is ontology, taxonomy and choreography.I used to work as a bicycle mechanic in High School, and one thing I learned doing that job was about how gears work, and the perhaps counter-intuitive way that the littlest gear does most of the work in the system of a bicycle. The littlest and most important gear in this system is ontology. Our particular meaning. What we mean when we say what we say.
