You will evaluate a webpage of your interest to identify all the major elements of the information architectures in terms of Organization System, Labeling System, Navigation System, and

CHAPTER 6

Organization Systems

The beginning of all understanding is classification. —Hayden White

In this chapter, we’ll cover:

• Subjectivity, politics, and other reasons why organizing infor‐ mation is so difficult

• Exact and ambiguous organization schemes • Hierarchy, hypertext, and relational database structures • Tagging and social classification

Our understanding of the world is largely determined by our ability to organize information. Where do you live? What do you do? Who are you? Our answers reveal the systems of classification that form the very foundations of our understanding. We live in towns within states within countries. We work in departments in companies in industries. We are parents, children, and siblings, each an integral part of a family tree.

We organize to understand, to explain, and to control. Our classifi‐ cation systems inherently reflect social and political perspectives and objectives. We live in the first world. They live in the third world. She is a freedom fighter. He is a terrorist. The way we orga‐ nize, label, and relate information influences the way people com‐ prehend that information.

97

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

We organize information so that people can find the right answers to their questions, and to give them context to understand those answers. We strive to support casual browsing and directed search‐ ing. Our aim is to design organization and labeling systems that make sense to users.

Digital media provide us with wonderfully flexible environments in which to organize. We can apply multiple organization systems to the same content and escape the physical limitations of the analog world. So why are many digital products so difficult to navigate? Why can’t the people who design these products make it easy to find information? These common questions focus attention on the very real problem of organizing information.

Challenges of Organizing Information In recent years, increasing attention has been focused on the chal‐ lenge of organizing information. Yet this challenge is not new. Peo‐ ple have struggled with the difficulties of information organization for centuries. The field of librarianship has been largely devoted to the task of organizing and providing access to information. So why all the fuss now?

Believe it or not, we’re all becoming librarians. This quiet yet power‐ ful revolution is driven by the decentralizing force of the global Internet. Not long ago, the responsibility for labeling, organizing, and providing access to information fell squarely in the laps of librarians. These librarians spoke in strange languages about Dewey Decimal Classification and the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. They classified, cataloged, and helped you find the information you needed.

As the Internet provides users with the freedom to publish informa‐ tion, it quietly burdens them with the responsibility to organize that information. New information technologies open the floodgates for exponential content growth, which creates a need for innovation in content organization (see Figure 6-1).

98 | Chapter 6: Organization Systems

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

Figure 6-1. Content growth drives innovation

As we struggle to meet these challenges, we unknowingly adopt the language of librarians. How should we label that content? Is there an existing classification scheme we can borrow? Who’s going to catalog all of that information?

We’re living in a world in which tremendous numbers of people publish and organize their own information. As we do so, the chal‐ lenges inherent in organizing that information become more recog‐ nized and more important. Let’s explore some of the reasons why organizing information in useful ways is so difficult.

Ambiguity Classification systems are made of language, and language is ambig‐ uous: words are capable of being understood in more than one way. Think about the word pitch. When I say “pitch,” what do you hear? There are more than 15 definitions, including:

Challenges of Organizing Information | 99

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

1 The tomato is technically a berry and thus a fruit, despite a 1893 US Court decision that declared it a vegetable. (John Nix, an importer of West Indies tomatoes, had brought suit to lift a 10% tariff, mandated by Congress, on imported vegetables. Nix argued that the tomato is a fruit. The Court held that because a tomato was consumed as a vegetable rather than as a dessert-like fruit, it was a vegetable.) Source: Denise Grady, “Best Bite of Summer” (Self 19:7, 1997, 124–125).

• A throw, fling, or toss • A black, sticky substance used for waterproofing • The rising and falling of the bow and stern of a ship in a rough

sea • A salesman’s persuasive line of talk • An element of sound determined by the frequency of vibration

This ambiguity results in a shaky foundation for our classification systems. When we use words as labels for our categories, we run the risk that users will miss our meaning. This is a serious problem. (See Chapter 7 to learn more about labeling.)

It gets worse. Not only do we need to agree on the labels and their definitions, but we also need to agree on which documents to place in which categories. Consider the common tomato. According to Webster’s dictionary, a tomato is “a red or yellowish fruit with a juicy pulp, used as a vegetable: botanically it is a berry.” Now I’m con‐ fused. Is it a fruit, a vegetable, or a berry?1 And of course, this assumes that the user reads English to begin with—an unrealistic assumption in our increasingly multicultural digital media.

If we have such problems classifying the common tomato, consider the challenges involved in classifying website content. Classification is particularly difficult when you’re organizing abstract concepts such as subjects, topics, or functions. For example, what is meant by “alternative healing,” and should it be cataloged under “philosophy,” “religion,” “health and medicine,” or all of the above? The organiza‐ tion of words and phrases, taking into account their inherent ambi‐ guity, presents a very real and substantial challenge.

Heterogeneity Heterogeneity refers to an object or collection of objects composed of unrelated or unlike parts. You might refer to grandma’s homemade

100 | Chapter 6: Organization Systems

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

broth with its assortment of vegetables, meats, and other mysterious leftovers as “heterogeneous.” At the other end of the scale, “homoge‐ neous” refers to something composed of similar or identical ele‐ ments. For example, Ritz crackers are homogeneous. Every cracker looks and tastes the same.

An old-fashioned library card catalog is relatively homogeneous. It organizes and provides access to books. It does not provide access to chapters in books or collections of books. It may not provide access to magazines or videos. This homogeneity allows for a structured classification system. Each book has a record in the catalog. Each record contains the same fields: author, title, and subject. It is a high-level, single-medium system, and it works fairly well.

Most digital information environments, on the other hand, are highly heterogeneous in many respects. For example, websites often provide access to documents and their components at varying levels of granularity. A site might present articles and journals and journal databases side by side. Links might lead to pages, sections of pages, or other websites. And websites typically provide access to docu‐ ments in multiple formats. You might find financial news, product descriptions, employee home pages, image archives, and software files. Dynamic news content shares space with static human- resources information. Textual information shares space with video, audio, and interactive applications. The website is a great multime‐ dia melting pot, where you are challenged to reconcile the catalog‐ ing of the broad and the detailed across many mediums.

The heterogeneous nature of information environments makes it difficult to impose any single structured organization system on the content. It usually doesn’t make sense to classify documents at vary‐ ing levels of granularity side by side. An article and a magazine should be treated differently. Similarly, it may not make sense to handle varying formats the same way. Each format will have uniquely important characteristics. For example, we need to know certain things about images, such as file format (JPG, PNG, etc.) and resolution (1024 × 768, 1280 × 800, etc.). It is difficult and often misguided to attempt a one-size-fits-all approach to the organiza‐ tion of heterogeneous content. This is a fundamental flaw of many enterprise taxonomy initiatives.

Challenges of Organizing Information | 101

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

2 It actually gets even more complicated, because an individual’s needs, perspectives, and behaviors change over time. A significant body of research within the field of library and information science explores the complex nature of information models. For an example, see N.J. Belkin, “Anomalous States of Knowledge as a Basis for Information Retrieval” (Canadian Journal of Information Science 5, 1980, 133–143).

3 For a fascinating study on the idiosyncratic methods people use to organize their physi‐ cal desktops and office spaces, see T.W. Malone, “How Do People Organize Their Desks? Implications for the Design of Office Information Systems” (ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 1, 1983, 99–112).

Differences in Perspectives Have you ever tried to find a file on a coworker’s computer? Perhaps you had permission. Perhaps you were engaged in low-grade corpo‐ rate espionage. In either case, you needed that file. In some instan‐ ces, you may have found the file immediately. In others, you may have searched for hours. The ways people organize and name files and directories on their computers can be maddeningly illogical. When questioned, they will often claim that their organization sys‐ tem makes perfect sense. “But it’s obvious! I put current proposals in the folder labeled /office/clients/green and old proposals in /office/ clients/red. I don’t understand why you couldn’t find them!”2

The fact is that labeling and organization systems are intensely affec‐ ted by their creators’ perspectives.3 We see this at the corporate level with websites organized according to internal divisions or org charts, with groupings such as marketing, sales, customer support, human resources, and information systems. How does a customer vis‐ iting this website know where to go for technical information about a product she just purchased? To design usable organization sys‐ tems, we need to escape from our own mental models of content labeling and organization.

We employ a mix of user research and analysis methods to gain real insight. How do users group the information? What types of labels do they use? How do they navigate? This challenge is complicated by the fact that most information environments are designed for multi‐ ple users, and all users will have different ways of understanding the information. Their levels of familiarity with your company and your content will vary. For these reasons, even with a massive barrage of user tests, it is impossible to create a perfect organization system. One system does not fit all! However, by recognizing the importance of perspective, by striving to understand the intended audiences

102 | Chapter 6: Organization Systems

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

through user research and testing, and by providing multiple navi‐ gation pathways, you can do a better job of organizing information for public consumption than your coworker does on his desktop computer.

Internal Politics Politics exist in every organization. Individuals and departments constantly position for influence or respect. Because of the inherent power of information organization in forming understanding and opinion, the process of designing information architectures can involve a strong undercurrent of politics. The choice of organization and labeling systems can have a big impact on how users of the sys‐ tem perceive the company, its departments, and its products. For example, should we include a link to the library site on the main page of the corporate intranet? Should we call it “The Library,” “Information Services,” or “Knowledge Management”? Should infor‐ mation resources provided by other departments be included in this area? If the library gets a link on the main page, why not corporate communications? What about daily news?

As a designer, you must be sensitive to your organization’s political environment. In certain cases, you must remind your colleagues to focus on creating an architecture that works for the users. In others, you may need to make compromises to avoid serious political con‐ flict. Politics raise the complexity and difficulty of creating usable information architectures. However, if you are sensitive to the politi‐ cal issues at hand, you can manage their impact upon the architecture.

Organizing Information Environments The organization of information environments is a major factor in determining their success, and yet many teams lack the understand‐ ing necessary to do the job well. Our goal in this chapter is to pro‐ vide a foundation for tackling even the most challenging information organization projects.

Organization systems are composed of organization schemes and organization structures. An organization scheme defines the shared characteristics of content items and influences the logical grouping of those items. An organization structure defines the types of rela‐ tionships between content items and groups. Both organization

Organizing Information Environments | 103

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

schemes and structures have an important impact on the ways infor‐ mation is found and understood.

Before diving in, it’s important to understand information organiza‐ tion in the context of system development. Organization is closely related to navigation, labeling, and indexing. The organization structures of information environments often play the part of the primary navigation system. The labels of categories play a significant role in defining the contents of those categories. Manual indexing or metadata tagging is ultimately a tool for organizing content items into groups at a very detailed level. Despite these closely knit rela‐ tionships, it is both possible and useful to isolate the design of orga‐ nization systems, which will form the foundation for navigation and labeling systems. By focusing solely on the grouping of information, you avoid the distractions inherent in implementation details (such as the design of the navigation user interface) and can design a bet‐ ter product.

Organization Schemes We navigate through organization schemes every day. Contact direc‐ tories, supermarkets, and libraries all use organization schemes to facilitate access. Some schemes are easy to use. We rarely have diffi‐ culty finding a particular word’s definition in the alphabetical orga‐ nization scheme of a dictionary. Some schemes are intensely frustrating. Trying to find marshmallows or popcorn in a large and unfamiliar supermarket can drive us crazy. Are marshmallows in the snack aisle, the baking ingredients section, both, or neither?

In fact, the organization schemes of the dictionary and the super‐ market are fundamentally different. The dictionary’s alphabetical organization scheme is exact. The hybrid topical/task-oriented orga‐ nization scheme of the supermarket is ambiguous.

104 | Chapter 6: Organization Systems

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

Exact Organization Schemes Let’s start with the easy ones. Exact or “objective” organization schemes divide information into well-defined and mutually exclu‐ sive sections. For example, country names are usually listed in alphabetical order. If you know the name of the country you are looking for, navigating the scheme is easy. “Chile” is in the Cs, which are after the Bs but before the Ds. This is called known-item search‐ ing. You know what you’re looking for, and it’s obvious where to find it. No ambiguity is involved. The problem with exact organization schemes is that they require users to know the specific name of the resource they are looking for (“What’s the name of that country that borders Guyana and French Guiana?”).

Exact organization schemes are relatively easy to design and main‐ tain because there is little intellectual work involved in assigning items to categories. They are also easy to use. The following sections explore three frequently used exact organization schemes.

Alphabetical schemes An alphabetical organization scheme is the primary organization scheme for encyclopedias and dictionaries. Almost all nonfiction books, including this one, provide an alphabetical index. Phone books, department-store directories, bookstores, and libraries all make use of our 26-letter alphabet for organizing their contents.

Alphabetical organization often serves as an umbrella for other organization schemes. We see information organized alphabetically by last name, by product or service, by department, and by format. Most address book applications organize contacts alphabetically by last name, as shown in Figure 6-2.

Organization Schemes | 105

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

Figure 6-2. The OS X Contacts application (image: https:// www.apple.com/osx/apps/#contacts)

Chronological schemes Certain types of information lend themselves to chronological orga‐ nization. For example, an archive of press releases might be organ‐ ized by the date of release. Press release archives are obvious candidates for chronological organization schemes (see Figure 6-3). The date of announcement provides important context for the release. However, keep in mind that users may also want to browse the releases by title, product category, or geography, or to search by keyword. A complementary combination of organization schemes is often necessary. History books, magazine archives, diaries, and tele‐ vision guides tend to be organized chronologically. As long as there is agreement on when a particular event occurred, chronological schemes are easy to design and use.

106 | Chapter 6: Organization Systems

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

Figure 6-3. Press releases in reverse chronological order

Geographical schemes Place is often an important characteristic of information. We travel from one place to another. We care about the news and weather that affect us in our location. Political, social, and economic issues are frequently location dependent. And in a world where location-aware mobile devices have become the main way in which many people interact with information, companies like Google and Apple are

Organization Schemes | 107

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

investing heavily in local search and directory services, with the map as the main interface to this information.

Border disputes aside, geographical organization schemes are fairly straightforward to design and use. Figure 6-4 shows an example of a geographical organization scheme from Craigslist. The user can select her nearest local directory. If her browser supports geoloca‐ tion, the site navigates directly to it.

Figure 6-4. A geographical organization scheme with geolocation

Ambiguous Organization Schemes Now for the tough ones. Ambiguous or “subjective” organization schemes divide information into categories that defy exact defini‐ tion. They are mired in the ambiguity of language and organization, not to mention human subjectivity. They are difficult to design and maintain. They can be difficult to use. Remember the tomato? Do we classify it under fruit, berry, or vegetable?

However, these schemes are often more important and useful than exact organization schemes. Consider the typical library catalog. There are three primary organization schemes: you can search for books by author, by title, or by subject. The author and title organi‐ zation schemes are exact and thereby easier to create, maintain, and use. However, extensive research shows that library patrons use

108 | Chapter 6: Organization Systems

Rosenfeld, Louis, et al. Information Architecture : For the Web and Beyond, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unt/detail.action?docID=4333758. Created from unt on 2023-02-19 05:58:45.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

5. O

'R ei

lly M

ed ia

, I nc

or po

ra te

d. A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

.

ambiguous subject-based schemes such as the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification systems much more frequently.

There’s a simple reason why people find ambiguous organization schemes so useful: we don’t always know w

Collepals.com Plagiarism Free Papers

Are you looking for custom essay writing service or even dissertation writing services? Just request for our write my paper service, and we'll match you with the best essay writer in your subject! With an exceptional team of professional academic experts in a wide range of subjects, we can guarantee you an unrivaled quality of custom-written papers.

Get ZERO PLAGIARISM, HUMAN WRITTEN ESSAYS

Why Hire Collepals.com writers to do your paper?

Quality- We are experienced and have access to ample research materials.

We write plagiarism Free Content

Confidential- We never share or sell your personal information to third parties.

Support-Chat with us today! We are always waiting to answer all your questions.