This is really clever: a global navigation header that doubles as a progress indicator for the current article. Neat!
Check it out live at CNAS.org.
Dewey’s biased decimal system
Check out this week’s Every Little Thing podcast. It’s nominally about the Dewey Decimal System, but it’s really about the political nature of organizing things and how the organizing systems we create reflect our biases. (Starts 9-minutes in.)
Miller’s Law isn’t for IAs
Here’s an article that busts the myth that Miller’s 7 +/-2 concept has any bearing on navigation design. Read it, learn it, love it.
YADIA: “IA defines spatial relationships and organizational systems, and seeks to establish hierarchies, taxonomies, vocabularies, and schema—resulting in documentation like sitemaps, wireframes, content types, and user flows, and allowing us to design things like navigation and search systems.”
from Sara Wachter-Boettcher. “Content Everywhere”
Glushko’s definition of IA
Yet Another Definition of IA (YADIA):
“The activity of Information Architecture [is] designing an abstract and effective organization of information and then exposing that organization to facilitate navigation and information use.”
-from The Discipline of Organizing, by Robert Glushko
Breadcrumbs
Yes, you need breadcrumbs on your ecommerce site. You need location breadcrumbs, which show your position in the hierarchy. Because they reveal the site structure, breadcrumbs help answer “Where am I?” and “What else do you have like this?” They help the customer orient and explore.
Deeper T
So excited for Vanessa Foss & @magshanley’s new venture Deeper T. Their first round of UX workshops look amazing: deeper-t.com
Join us at the next Taxonomists’ Congress / Taxonomy Meetup in Seattle on May 16th at Dino’s Tomato Pie in Capitol Hill. Beer. Pizza. Nerdy talk about taxonomies… what could be better? RSVP here.
Partly to test this blog’s linkage with micro.blog, I thought I’d mention that I’ve been digging back into Designing the Search Experience for inspiration lately. So much good stuff in there about how to turn information behavior studies into practical design solutions. Two words: search modes!
Seth’s Blog: Survey questions
Seth Godin breaks down the difference between a survey and a census and why you would choose one over the other (or whether you should be conducting them at all).
Here’s a simple test I do, something that has never once led to action: In the last question of a sloppy, census-style customer service survey, when they ask, “anything else?” I put my name and phone number and ask them to call me. They haven’t, never once, not in more than fifty brand experiences.
If you’re not going to read the answers and take action, why are you asking?
Source: Seth’s Blog: Survey questions