We've never walked in space, but we imagine the experience of weightlessness is unbelievably disorienting. When you let go of a football on the moon, the football doesn't drop to the ground and rest. It floats about from place to place. The football also doesn't float to the same place every time you drop it. Today is floats left. Yesterday it floated down and to the right.
The inconsistency and unpredictability of behavior in outer space must be incredibly disorienting. Without proper planning, information spaces can be bewildering as well. Good information architectures orient users, rather than confuse them. Done well, information architectures take users to the information they need in a way that meets their expectations. Done poorly, information architectures leave users frustrated and unable to find what they're looking for.
What Is Information Architecture?
Think about using a standard reference book. Your goal is to find information as quickly and easily as possible. Luckily, reference books (good ones, anyway) are not simply a bunch of random paragraphs run together one after the other. There are elements of a book that help you find the information you need. Someone divided up the paragraphs into different section and subsections and gave all of them headings. They created a table of contents and indexes to help you search and browse the book's contents. Each page may have headers and footers--page numbers at the very least--that tell you where you are. This work is really the essence of information architecture: designing the organization and navigation systems that help users find information.
Introduction
This article will provide a basic introduction to the principles of information architecture by way of critiquing Stars.com. We'll limit ourselves to information architecture, so we'll only address ways in which users find information on the site. We won't discuss the content, the site's technical base, or the graphic design or page layout of the site.
Rather than providing a systematic introduction to information architecture, we chose to focus on aspects of the Stars.com site that we felt could use the most improvement. The observations and recommendations in this critique are based on our use of the site in an effort to assess the site's information architecture, educated by our experience both as Web users and as professional information architects.
Please note that this article refers to Stars.com as it existed on August 24, 1997. The example pages linked from this article are not live pages. Rather they are copies of the pages as they existed on August 24, 1997.
Enough with the disclaimers. Grab your Tang. We're ready to blast off...
Think about using a standard reference book. Your goal is to find information as quickly and easily as possible. Luckily, reference books (good ones, anyway) are not simply a bunch of random paragraphs run together one after the other. There are elements of a book that help you find the information you need. Someone divided up the paragraphs into different section and subsections and gave all of them headings. They created a table of contents and indexes to help you search and browse the book's contents. Each page may have headers and footers--page numbers at the very least--that tell you where you are. This work is really the essence of information architecture: designing the organization and navigation systems that help users find information.
