what are some tips to sort through vast amounts of information on the web

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three Information Architecture
Organizing Your Data

Our day-to-day professional and social lives rarely demand that nosotros create detailed architectures of what we know and how those structures of information are linked. Yet without a solid and logical organizational foundation, your web site volition not function well even if your basic content is accurate, attractive, and well written.

There are five basic steps in organizing your data:

1. Inventory your content: What exercise yous take already? What practise you lot need?
2. Institute a hierarchical outline of your content and create a controlled vocabulary so the major content, site structure, and navigation elements are always identified consistently;
3. Chunking: Split up your content into logical units with a consequent modular structure;
4. Draw diagrams that evidence the site structure and rough outlines of pages with a list of core navigation links; and
5. Analyze your system by testing the organization interactively with real users; revise every bit needed.

Content Inventories

A content inventory is a detailed listing of basic information well-nigh all the content that exists in a site to be redesigned or, in some cases, a site to exist newly created from existing content resources. Although a content inventory is often deadening and time-consuming to create, it is an essential component of any rational scope planning for a web project. Content inventories are most useful in the initial project planning and information architecture phases, but a detailed content inventory will exist useful throughout the project for both planning and build-out of the site. The work of moving through an existing site and recording data on each page is detailed, but it's also easy to divide up amidst team members who work through unlike subsections or directories of the site. The team members making the site inventory must both take access to the site pages in a web browser and exist able to view the site file structure on the server to ensure that all sections of content are inventoried.

Spider web content inventories of existing sites commonly have the form of a spreadsheet file with multiple worksheets, containing long listings of every page in the site, along with such essential characteristics as the folio championship, url, people responsible for the content, and then on. Each page typically gets a row on the spreadsheet, with columns listing such basic information equally:

• Unique id number for project purposes
• Page title
• Page template or type
• url
• General type of content
• Person responsible for the content
• Keep/revise/discard decisions
• Create new content?
• Review status

Hierarchies and taxonomies

Hierarchical organization is a virtual necessity on the web. Most sites depend on hierarchies, moving from the broadest overview of the site (the home page), downwards through increasingly specific submenus and content pages. In information architecture you create categories for your data and rank the importance of each piece of data by how general or specific that piece is relative to the whole. General categories become high-ranking elements of the bureaucracy of information; specific chunks of information are positioned lower in the hierarchy. Chunks of data are ranked in importance and organized by relevance to one of the major categories. Once you lot have adamant a logical set of priorities and relations in your content outlines, you can build a hierarchy from the most important or general concepts downwardly to the nigh specific or detailed topics.

Taxonomies and controlled vocabularies

Taxonomy is the science and do of classification. In information architecture, a taxonomy is a hierarchical organization of content categories, using a specific, advisedly designed set of descriptive terms. Equally whatsoever experienced editor or librarian can tell you lot, one of the biggest challenges of organizing large amounts of data is developing a organization for always referring to the same things the aforementioned manner: a controlled vocabulary, in library science parlance. I of the most of import jobs of the information architect thus is producing a consistent set of names and terms to depict the principal site content categories, the key navigation site links, and major terms to describe the interactive features of the site. This controlled vocabulary becomes a foundational element of the content system, the user interface, the standard navigation links seen on every folio of the site, and the file and directory structure of the site itself.

5 hat racks: Themes to organize information

In Information Anxiety (1989), Richard Saul Wurman posits that there are five central ways to organize information: the "5 hat racks" on which you can hang information.

Category

Organisation by the similarity of characteristics or relatedness of the items. This is a especially useful arroyo when all the things existence organized are of equal or unpredictable importance. Examples include topics of books in a bookstore or library and items in a department or grocery store.

Time

Organization past timeline or history, where elements are presented in a sequential step-past-step fashion. This approach is usually used in training. Other examples include television listings, a history of specific events, and measuring the response times of different systems.

Location

Organization past spatial or geographic location, most often used for orientation and direction. This most graphic of the categories evidently lends itself to maps only is likewise used extensively in training, repair, and user manual illustrations and other instances where information is tied to a place.

Alphabetic

Arrangement based on the initial letter of the names of items. Obvious examples are telephone and other name-oriented directories, dictionaries, and thesauri, where users know the word or proper noun they are seeking. Alphabetic systems are simple to grasp and familiar in everyday life. This method of organization is less effective for short lists of unrelated things but is powerful for long lists.

Continuum

Organization by the quantity of a measured variable over a range, such as toll, score, size, or weight. Continuum organization is virtually effective when organizing many things that are all measured or scored the same mode. Examples include rankings and reviews of all kinds, such as the U.South. News and World Report ranking of colleges and universities, the best movies in a given year, darkest or lightest items, and other instances where a clear weight or value can be assigned to each item.

Brainstorming

When designing a new spider web site or extensively overhauling an existing 1, it can be useful to footstep back from the details of the content inventory and take a fresh look at both how your information is organized and the underlying paradigms that drive conversations almost content and site organization.

Some common underlying paradigms for site system are:

• Identity sites: Dominated past projected identity and marketing
• Navigation sites: Dominated past navigation and links
• Novelty sites: Dominated by news and "what's new"
• The org chart site: Designed around the organization of the enterprise
• Service sites: Organized around service, content, or products categories
• Flashy sites: Apply interaction and visual flash to describe an audience
• Tool-oriented sites: Organized around the latest engineering, such equally xml, Ajax, or "Web 2.0"

Some paradigms or mindsets are clearly amend than others: it'southward rarely wise to fall in beloved with a item technology before yous have a clear rationale for using it or for projecting your identity to the extent that you ignore the motivations and concerns of your potential readers and users. However, good sites are a residuum of meeting your users' needs and delivering your bulletin to the world. At that place is no formula for finding the right organizational prototype, but in the early planning you should always examine your standing prejudices and explicitly justify them. Why is it a good thought to organize your navigation around your business units? How does that match your users' needs and concerns? Clumsy "org chart sites" are a standing joke amidst web designers, but sometimes users actually do want to know how you are organized and volition find services and content more easily with navigation based on business organization units. If you see these underlying mindsets driving or distorting early site organization discussions, put them on the tabular array for discussion and brainstorming. Anybody has paradigms: just be certain y'all've examined and chosen yours as the best solution for your site.

Menu sorting and whiteboard sessions

Even if the major categories of your content system are clear to the design team, it notwithstanding may be hard to sort through where each piece of content belongs or what system scheme will seem intuitive and predictable to your users.

Card sorting is a mutual technique for both creating and evaluating content organization and web site structures. In classic card-sorting techniques, index cards are labeled with the names of major and secondary content categories, and individual team members or potential site users are then asked to sort through the cards and organize them in a style that seems intuitive and logical. Users may too be asked to suggest new or ameliorate names for categories. The resulting content outline from each participant is recorded, ordinarily in a spreadsheet, and all the individual content schemes are compared for commonalities and areas of major disagreement. The best card-sorting information comes from individual sessions with representative current or potential users of your site. If yous take plenty participants, combining the results of each card-sorting session produces a powerful "wisdom of crowds" assemblage of many individual judgments most what content system makes sense.

For smaller or less formal site projects you can have group whiteboard sessions with techniques similar to card sorting. Participants are asked to sort through cards or viscid notes labeled with the names of major content elements, which are then posted on a whiteboard and sorted by the group until there is consensus about what overall arrangement makes the most sense. In most cases you lot'll achieve quick consensus on the major categories of content and navigation, and the whiteboard organization becomes a useful first look at the site org chart that can help the group resolve the more than problematic questions of what content belongs in which category.

For successful content organization sessions, make certain that you:

• Proper noun the major categories as clearly as possible, without duplications or redundancies in terminology
• Have a complete inventory of all your major categories and subcategories of content
• Prepare thorough instructions for private card-sorting sessions
• Refrain from prompting or coaching individual participants
• Refrain from discouraging ideas, and let free brainstorming
• Have enough of supplies for new categories and improved terminology
• Bring a digital camera to record the proposed organizations and whiteboard layouts

Private card-sorting and grouping whiteboard sessions are fast, inexpensive ways to create and evaluate your proposed site content organization. The techniques take been used for many years, and if you involve bodily or potential users of your site, they offer "real world" validation of ideas from your sponsors, stakeholders, and team members.

Chunking information

Most information on the World Broad Web is gathered in short reference documents that are intended to be read nonsequentially. This is particularly true of sites where the contents are generally technical or authoritative documents. Long before the web was invented, technical writers discovered that readers capeesh short chunks of information that can be located and scanned. This method of presenting information translates well to the web for several reasons:

• Few web users read long passages of text onscreen. Almost users save long documents to disk or print them for more than comfy reading.
• Discrete chunks of information lend themselves to spider web links. The user of a web link usually expects to observe a specific unit of measurement of relevant information, non a book's worth of general content.
• Chunking can help organize and present data in a modular layout that is consistent throughout the site. This allows users not just to apply past experience with a site to future searches and explorations but also to predict how an unfamiliar section of a spider web site will be organized.
• Curtailed chunks of information are meliorate suited to the calculator screen, which provides a limited view of long documents. Long web pages tend to disorient readers; they require users to scroll long distances and to recollect what has scrolled off-screen.

The concept of a clamper of data must exist flexible and consistent with common sense, logical organization, and convenience. Let the nature of the content suggest how it should be subdivided and organized. Although short web documents are commonly preferable, it makes little sense to divide a long document arbitrarily, peculiarly if you want users to exist able to impress hands or save the document in ane step.

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