Site Structure: Pitchfork

When a user visits a new site they make mental models to navigate content they have not encountered before. Thus balancing content in a consistent and logical way will help the ease of creating mental models for users. The goal is to build a structure of content that feels natural and does not mislead users.

The site map above was drafted during the last class. I was intrigued by hierarchical structures due to their pervasiveness in our world. It is commonly used in a lot of websites I use as well. Even Pitchfork.com utilizes hierarchy as it lists a main menu on its homepage and multiple sub-sites as you click them. However, with further investigation there was crossover in content. Best New Music is a main menu topic but also a sub-site of Reviews. Thus I decided my drafted site structure was lacking cross over.

Users don’t navigate sites in a purely hierarchical path. Instead it users often cross the hierarchy horizontally. For example, you want to order a new dress for spring. You visit your favorite e-commerce site and find the perfect dress and you see listings on the sidebar for sandals and a sun hat that perfectly matches. This site is realized that horizontally crossing the hierarchy to different topics from the main menu (shoes and accessories) will benefit usability and customer experience and the company, as it will hopefully generate to more sales.

Thus cross listing pages will help usability and casual browsing. So I decided to create a new site structure that would increase horizontal crossing but also keep the overall hierarchy. I also decided to be more specific with content.

The organization scheme of this site structure is topical.  Since this site is about various topics in information architecture it makes the most sense to group them in a topical (yet subjective) scheme. However, since the posts are developed and written over time, a hybrid scheme will be implemented after as the content will be arranged chronologically.

Organization Structure: Database Model

In a previous post, I discussed organizational schemes which I applied to a video store. It was a concept that we could easily wrap our heads around because we encounter it in our lives everyday and in so many contexts. As a quick review organization schemes are how content is logically grouped together by its characteristics such as dictionaries’ alphabetical organization scheme. It seems like organization schemes are the only thing needed to decide on how to group content however, organizational structure is just as important as it defines the type of relationship between content items and groups.

I had to read through the text and refer to my notes to really grasp this concept. Organization Structures include hierarchy, database model, hypertext, and social classification. Although each type of organizational structure is important, I will be examining the database model since this week’s work included finding and choosing a dataset which required me to look at a database.

Before diving deeper into the database model I will quickly review the other organization structures.

• The Hierarchy: The Top-Down Approach is ubiquitous in our lives as it greatly informs our understanding of the world. From family trees, royal linage, and political systems, the structure is pervasive lending to its ease of usbility and understandability.
• Hyper text is a highly nonlinear structure as it includes items and chunks of information and the links between them. It can form hypermedia systems that connect text, data, image, video, and audio chunks but is it complex and can cause much confusion. It is easy to get lost as it requires several “clicks” that will throw a user into a dark hole of links and pages. However, this structure would help with creative and interesting relationships that I could see in experimental media perhaps.
• Social Classification is primarily drive by user-generated content tagging or free tagging. It is highly collaborative with no set focus so very interesting opportunities arise. For example. the free tagging of Twitter draws attention to “trending” tags.

Now back to the database model, it is a collection of data arranged for ease and speed of search and retrieval. There are several models but the one I encountered while exploring datasets was a relational model which consists of a set of relations or tables with rows and columns. The separate table lend to ease of finding and retrieving data but it did not automatically put it in relation to the other tables.

Luckily, the metadata was accurate so that the tables could be combined and offer a dynamic link of the data. Once linked, I took my data into a spreadsheet, a tool I am much more familiar with, to auto generate alphabetical and numerical indexes. Advanced filtering and sorting of search results are also very useful and great tools that the database model offers.

Organization schemes are somewhat easier for me to understand and I see how hybrid versions can be utilized but I am interested in seeing how dynamic and hybrid organization structures on a site can be.

Categories and Tags: Young and (Content) Free

Creating a new sites comes with many challenges. Part of our assignment for this week was to create three posts on our new WordPress. This is not too challenging — until you get to the next part which is creating categories and tags. Without much content, there is nothing to form these crucial information architecture elements that help with navigation and finding related content.

I pondered on how to create categories. I thought I was set on categories based on the type of content that the post discusses such as Reading, Lecture, Concepts, etc. However, as I started drafting my first post, I found myself mixing all of these in one post! According to this assigned reading, having a post fall under multiple categories means they might be too broad. If too much content is cross-listed, than the categories lose a lot of their meaning and usefulness as they will not be effect filters. I then settled on categories based on main topics in Information Architecture. These categories also might be ambiguous, however there are not as broad as my previous categories. Also this blog will be solely on topics within Information Architecture so it seems logical that it will be divided by its subcategories.

Main topics in Information Architecture can be debated and change over time which is a problem. In chapter 6 of the textbook, it is suggested that several categories should be made in a site’s hierarchy so that categories stay consistent since it is confusing to users and expensive to change them as they are prominent navigation. Thus it is recommended that a broad-and-shallow hierarchy is created rather than a narrow-and-deep one. This will allow content to be easily added without completely restructuring the site and its categories.

Once I made my decision on categories, I found tags to be much easier to wrap my head around. Several social media websites such as Twitter and Tumblr utilize tags in a very public and user generated way, or free-form tag which Thomas Vander Wal cleverly coined as “folksonomies.” So it felt like second nature filling out the tags for my first posts. I tried to find keywords in my posts as well as any overarching themes. These tags will appear at the end of my posts so that readers can click them to kind related content with the same tag.

 

Organization Schemes: The Video Store

Last class we participated in a group exercise in which we had to propose several ways of organizing video store in terms of criteria such as geographical, time, alphabetical, etc. Each group presented very similar decisions in each category, however when their was differentiation it was due to the ambitious nature of the criteria.  For example, the geographical criteria resulted in organizing the videos based on the location the movie was set in and the location of it’s studio. These ways of organizing the videos also seem ridiculous. How would any one every find a video? If someone wants to find The Princess Diaries, do you search in the San Francisco section of the United States section or the fictional country, Genovia? Also how would one ever know, off the top of their head, where the studio is located that produced the movie?

This exercise made me realize that not only there are several ways to organize a video store but that some are way more useful, inviting, and good for discovery. After reading the assigned chapter for this week, a lot of my thoughts about this exercise were not only confirmed but clearer. The ways of organizing the video store that each group came up with are organizational schemes, which is grouping content items by shared characteristics. Organizational schemes have an important impact in how information is found and understood and influences logical grouping.

Thus the way one organizes a video store has a great impact on how customers find and end up taking home certain videos. If customers have a great experience they might walk out of the store with more videos than anticipated but if one cannot find what they were looking for they might leave empty handed and frustrated.

There are two main types of organizational schemes, exact and ambiguous as well as subtypes under these. I will quickly review the schemes as well as apply them to the video store.

• Exact Organizational Schemes are well-defined, mutually exclusive, are easy to use, and are great for known-item searching, however, this requires that one knows the exact name of the content they are searching for.
  • Alphabetical is pretty self-explanatory. It organizes content in alphabetical order from A to Z. This is a very common organization scheme and often serves as an umbrella for other schemes. If a video store were utilizing this scheme, a customer would easily find the exact movie they were looking for if they knew the exact title. Unfortunately, this does not help the customers who are unsure about the title of the movie or just want to browse.
  • Chronological is based on the release date. This is highly useful in several cases such as news articles or history books. However, in a video store this would require customers know the exact release date of the movie they are searching for. This would provide an interesting opportunity for discovery of movies released in close (or even far) proximity.
  • Geographical is based on location. This scheme is useful in local searches and directory services. For example, if one searches Target on Google maps, a list will populate and be ordered by its distance from the location of the searcher. Unfortunately, this is pretty confusing when applied to a video store as it is ambiguous how this would be determined as mentioned earlier in the post.
• Ambiguous Organization Schemes are subjective and difficult to design and maintain yet are often very useful and important when one does not know exactly what they are looking for. It groups content in intellectually meaningful ways that supports the serendipitous mode of information seeking and associative learning processes to make new connections and reach better conclusions. Now this sounds more like a video store…
  • Topical is based on the subject or topic. This is a very useful scheme but it is challenging as it takes the most work and maintenance. One has to determine the content’s topic but also this is a cultural construct that can vary over time. In terms of the video store, I think topical would be equated with genre. This sounds more how a video store as it is often organized by genres such as horror, romantic, comedy, drama, documentary, etc.
  • Task-oriented scheme is the organization of content and applications into collections of processes, functions, or tasks. This is great when users want to perform certain tasks so these are common in desktop and mobile applications. Not sure how this would relate to the video store but perhaps a customer might want to cry so movies are be organized how many tears they induce.
  • Audience specific schemes are when the organization is based on two or more audiences. This works well when there is great value in offering customized content that is clutter-free as it presents only the options of interest to that particular audience. However, this gets complicated when audiences overlap in desires. The video store could be organized  this way by it’s parental rating which clearly divides the audience by age category. However, a 13 year old might not venture in the PG as they are lingering in the PG-13 section…
  • Metaphor-driven schemes are used to help users understand the new by relating it to the familiar. This helps users understand content and function intuitively and can generate exciting ideas but it can be limiting and unsuccessful. For example, the videos can be grouped under emojis. This could be a very interesting organization scheme but it will not be very successfully in locating certain titles and would be highly ambiguous on how each movie is categorized.
  • Hybrid schemes include elements from multiple schemes. This might not be the easiest to use in terms of making a mental map and not great in large volumes of content. However, in the video store, it would be great! The videos could be organized by topical (genre) and then ordered in alphabetical order. Also sections of the store could be organized by release date, with “oldies” and a “new releases” sections.