#28091
Intranet Information Architecture (IA)
In analyzing 56 intranets, we found many common top-level categories, labels, and navigation designs, but ultimately, the diversity was too great to recommend a single IA.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Intranets
#21415
Solving Mobile Challenges with Psychology-Driven Information Architecture
As the field of information architecture matures, we are beginning to understand the new challenges it raises for wireless media. This article suggests that some of these challenges can be best addressed through an approach called 'psychology-driven information architecture,' which bases design decisions and solutions on the psychological profile of the end user.
Napchi, Oded. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Design>Information Design>Wireless Web>Web Design
#30861
This study tests the effects of personalized and 'stealth' political discourse on weblogs (or blogs) and the repercussions on levels of political trust, information efficacy and political uses/gratifications. By surveying readers of three different blogs (N=1838), this study identified significant effects as a result of exposure to political statements on blogs. Indeed, there were differences in the levels of political cynicism depending on how political statements were communicated. Readers of non-political blogs were more confident in their level of political information and their ability to participate in politics. Finally, political uses/approaches and avoidances were examined, as were differences based on gender and age.
Sweetser, Kaye D. and Lynda Lee Kaid. New Media and Society (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Blogs
#22406
Storing Hierarchical Data in a Database
Whether you want to build your own forum, publish the messages from a mailing list on your Website, or write your own CMS: there will be a moment that you'll want to store hierarchical data in a database. And, unless you're using a XML-like database, tables aren't hierarchical; they're just a flat list. You'll have to find a way to translate the hierarchy in a flat file.
Van Tulder, Gijs. SitePoint (2004). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Databases
#26542
Storyboarding Rich Internet Applications with Visio
The recent rise in more powerful technologies that provide richer user experiences online has presented us with a challenge. As designers, we are moving from from designing for "PIAs" to designing for "RIAs." Does our documentation style change with the technology? Will our standard ways do the job?
Scott, Bill. Boxes and Arrows (2005). Design>Web Design>Information Design
#14199
Strategies for Categorizing Categories
How does a site containing thousands of pages of content get users to the content they seek quickly? There are many different strategies for organizing content on sites and we recently took a hard look at five of them. We've been examining several e-commerce sites to see how they handled the problem of categorizing large numbers of products. We were interested in seeing if the different designers came up with different methods and which methods were most effective.
User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Information Design>Web Design
#29676
Strategies for Improving Enterprise Search
Acquiring and installing a search engine is just the beginning of creating an effective enterprise search system. John Ferrara walks us through strategies for addressing critical aspects of the user experience often overlooked or ignored.
Ferrara, John. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization
#19910
Structure Paves the Way Online
What I've called structure in this series actually has various other names, the most familiar of which are probably 'hierarchy' or 'information architecture.' Whichever word you use, structure encapsulates the relationships between the components of a site that visitors will use to navigate to the information they seek. Structure is simple enough to define, but can be devilishly tricky to create. A successful site structure must create what psychologists refer to as a schema: A mental model that visitors can use to understand where you've hidden the content.
Hart, Geoffrey J.S. TECHWR-L (2001). Design>Web Design>Information Design
#24224
Studies in Hypertext: the Conversion of Traditional Texts into Web Sites 
The production of a web page has become a common assignment in a number of university classrooms, but there has yet to be established a pedagogy for the generation of large group-generated web sites that replicate the methods found in industry. In Studies in Hypertext, a course offered to technical communication students at the University of Central Florida, such a pedagogy is being shaped. In this course, students with little or no experience in web site generation work their way through a series of written and small web site construction tasks to eventually produce one complex and competently-integrated web site.
Applen, J.D. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Hypertext
#21329
A typical maintenance project goes something like this: someone has a new piece of functionality or content they want to put up on the website. The IA’s job: find the best place for it.
Saffer, Dan. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design
#23210
Provides a methodology for auditing web site content to produce an inventory -- a tabular document that may be used in information re-architecture projects.
Fraser, Janice. New Architect (2001). Design>Web Design>Information Design
#31512
Admit it. Your intranet is a mess. What started out as a great idea for sharing information inside the company has turned into the corporate junk drawer—a jumbled collection of useful, not-so-useful, relevant, irrelevant, redundant, inconsistent and unmanaged stuff. While parts of it make you proud (perhaps the employee directory or news portal), taken as a whole, it just hasn’t lived up to all the grand ideas you had when you posted those first few pages.
Stevenson, Jerry. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Information Design
#18946
Taxonomic Distress: The Challenge of Developing Effective Taxonomies for Web-facing Businesses
Any time you've got a big pile of stuff that you want to put out into the world — a list of your company's products, a document archive for your intranet, or almost any set of content that goes into or comes out of a CMS — a sensible taxonomy will be crucial to your success, assuming you define success as 'when people can actually find what they're looking for.' A good taxonomy is a win for both a company and its customers. It’s easy to see why taxonomy development is good for your users: The whole reason for creating a taxonomy for your site is to make information retrieval quick and easy by putting the information into a sensible structure that’s consistently applied. Well-designed taxonomies map out the base structure for your content, providing a navigation scheme that makes sense to your users.
Becker, Lane. Adaptive Path (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design
#23059
An introductory article discussing when and how to use controlled vocabularies in the development of information architectures.
Warner, Amy J. Lexonomy. Design>Web Design>Information Design
#21324
Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution
Better prioritization, fewer interruptions, and concentrated information that's easy to find and manage helps people become more productive and stop wasting their colleagues' time.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Design>Information Design>Web Design
#26155
Every directory on the site must have an index page. The index.htm or index.html page is a standard requirement for every directory on every site.
McAlpine, Rachel. Quality Web Content (2004). Design>Web Design>Information Design
#23835
Three Lessons From Tufte: Special Deliverable #6
Held up as a trio of 'must have' books for the Information Architect, Tufte’'s books are the quintessential resource for information design. But many IAs may wonder how Tufte'’s principles can be applied to their daily work. Dan Brown offers three lessons from Tufte.
Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Information Design>Web Design
#14840
Toward the Optimal Link Structure of the Cyber Shopping Mall
This study aims at identifying the optimal link structure, which is an essential requirement for convenient and pleasant cyber-shopping. To achieve the goal, this paper presents a research framework in which different types of links are hypothesized to cause different patterns of customer navigation, which in turn is expected to influence cognitive convenience and emotional pleasure of cyber shopping. Based on two dimensions of links, link direction and link target, various links are classified into five types; NBR(Neighborhood), PAR(Parent), TOP, NEP(Nephew), and IND (Index). Two consecutive experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the cognitive and emotional usability of various combinations of the five link types. Experimental results clearly indicated that different combinations of link types influenced customers’ navigation patterns, which in turn effected the convenience and pleasure of shopping. It was found that the combination of NBR, TOP and IND generated the optimal link structure, whereas PAR and NEP rather decreased the degree of shopping pleasure and convenience. This paper concludes with its limitations and implications on the construction of effective cyber shopping malls.
Kim, Jinwoo and Byunggon Yoo. Yonsei University (2000). Design>Information Design>Web Design>E Commerce
#23218
Toward Usable Browse Hierarchies for the Web 
The goal of the following study was to determine the potential usefulness of tracking traversal patterns through a browse hierarchy as a way to monitor confusion and determine its source. The major conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that this method is a useful and insightful way to monitor user experience.
Risden, Kirsten. Microsoft (1999). Articles>Information Design>Web Design
#19256
Towards a Core Ontology for Information Integration 
In this paper, we argue that a core ontology is one of the key building blocks necessary to enable the scalable assimilation of information from diverse sources. A complete and extensible ontology that expresses the basic concepts that are common across a variety of domains and can provide the basis for specialization into domain-specific concepts and vocabularies, is essential for well-defined mappings between domain-specific knowledge representations (i.e. metadata vocabularies) and the subsequent building of a variety of services such as cross-domain searching, browsing, data mining and knowledge extraction. This paper describes the results of a series of three workshops held in 2001 and 2002 which brought together representatives from the cultural heritage and digital library communities with the goal of harmonizing their knowledge perspectives and producing a core ontology. The knowledge perspectives of these two communities were represented by the CIDOC/CRM, an ontology for information exchange in the cultural heritage and museum community, and the ABC ontology, a model for the exchange and integration of digital library information. This paper describes the mediation process between these two different knowledge biases and the results of this mediation - the harmonization of the ABC and CIDOC/CRM ontologies, which we believe may provide a useful basis for information integration in the wider scope of the involved communities.
Doerr, Martin, Jane Hunter and Carl Lagoze. Journal of Digital information (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata
#19119
TreeDec: an Annotation Tool to Support Website Navigation
Websites are often organized into logical hierarchies, or tree structures, in order to help users navigate. Ideally, users could view the entire tree, or jump to nearby pages. TreeDec (= Tree Decorator) is a system to support website authors and maintainers by providing automatic annotation of webpages under the control of a central file that represents the tree structure.
Cugini, John. NIST (2000). Design>User Interface>Information Design>Web Design
#26136
I have long wondered why government web sites all over the world tend to use metadata of several different types jumbled together and overlapping. For example, pages with two description metatags or two or three title tags are common. I suspect that most of the replication and confusion has developed for historical reasons.
McAlpine, Rachel. Quality Web Content (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata
#21624
Even before there was XML, there was the Document Object Model, or DOM. It allows a developer to refer to, retrieve, and change items within an XML structure, and is essential to working with XML. In this tutorial, you will learn about the structure of a DOM document. You will also learn how to use Java technology to create a Document from an XML file, make changes to it, and retrieve the output.
Chase, Nicholas. IBM (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design>XML
#21286
Unraveling the Mysteries of Metadata and Taxonomies
Recently Boxes and Arrows caught up with Samantha Bailey, formerly at Argus and current lead IA for Wachovia Corporation's Wachovia.com website. She talks about the transition from being a consultant to an 'innie' IA, unravels the mysteries of metadata and taxonomies and shares her vision of the future of IA.
Wodtke, Christina. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata
#18708
Yahoo is truly one of the Best of the Net, as it has filled an enormous void in the areas of browsing and searching Internet-based information. So I hope you'll believe that I am truly sad as I predict the death of Yahoo. It seems inevitable, as Yahoo's organization, its information architecture, will collapse under the weight of the high volume of entries. And, unfortunately, searching won't solve the problem of volume.
Rosenfeld, Louis. CMC Magazine (1995). Articles>Information Design>Web Design
