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.
Information Architecture 