Posts Tagged "information architecture"

Where Topic-Based Authoring Fails: End-to-End Scenarios

After my Summit presentation about breaking out of topic-based hierarchies, a lady named Ursula came up to me and said she was tired of topic-based authoring. I asked her what the alternative was. She said she’s often more interested in seeing an end-to-end process rather than a specific task. This reminded me of a tutorial (Read more...)

Every Page Is Page One

The following is a guest post by Mark Baker. The a-ha moment came for me reading David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, a book Tom and I both admire. Weinberger’s central thesis is that miscellany has become more powerful than order. No one ordering of information is ideal for every reader. The web allows readers to (Read more...)

Examples of Help Systems that Provide Users with Multiple Entry Points?

In my Organizing Content series, I’ve been exploring the idea of adding metadata to help topics so you can sort them into different arrangements for different audiences. For example, you could add metadata tags such as “popular” or a specific role or a business goal and then provide entry points that arrange topics based on (Read more...)

A Paradox of Navigation Metaphors for the Web

In Ambient Findability, Peter Morville has an interesting observation about visual maps. He notes that we use a lot of physical wayfinding metaphors for the web — we go to a page, we follow a path, we search for objects, we become lost, we use breadcrumbs to orient ourselves, we surf around, we use sitemaps, (Read more...)

The Importance of Chunking for Sorting

If you want to be able to sort information by various classification schemes, such as by most popular, or by role, or by problem, your content has to be chunked in a granular enough way to facilitate the various means of sorting. Consider a work that is one large book, with no chunks at all. (Read more...)

Book Review: Everything is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger

In Everything is Miscellaneous, Dave Weinberger argues that classifications that we have imposed on most everything from the alphabet to the encyclopedia, planets, books, and knowledge ultimately represent our own beliefs and priorities. As time changes, we see how our own thinking at that time inclined us to organize the information that way. In reality, (Read more...)