In planning mode
April 14th, 2010All websites require planning—that’s so true it’s almost a tautology. But some websites require more planning than others. Blue Mouse Monkey is enjoying an influx of opportunities to overhaul large complex websites, and I’ve been in super-planning mode the last couple of weeks.
As Steve Jobs says, design is often mistakenly ascribed to how something looks, but it’s really about how it works. It’s my job as a web designer to integrate the “how it looks” and the “how it works” according to many factors. There are several useful terms to describe this type of thinking, such as information architecture, interaction design, user experience design, and website architecture.
Historically the term “information architect” is attributed to Richard Saul Wurman, who saw it as the “creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work”.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE is the categorization of information into a coherent structure, preferably one that the most people can understand quickly, if not inherently.
Understanding how a typical user will experience a decision a website asks them to make (e.g. click on link ‘X’ to access information ‘Y’) takes empathy. It’s the ability to put oneself in the user’s shoes — the user being someone who isn’t nearly as familiar with the website’s content or purpose as my client or I are.
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INTERACTION DESIGN attempts to improve the usability and experience of the product, by first researching and understanding certain users’ needs and then designing to meet and exceed them.
The first conversation I have with clients is always begins with, “Who are your audiences, and what do you ideally want them to do on your site?”
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USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN most frequently defines a sequence of interactions between a user (individual person) and a system, virtual or physical, designed to meet or support user needs and goals, primarily, while also satisfying systems requirements and organizational objectives.
Typical outputs include:
- Site Audit (usability study of existing assets)
- Flows and Navigation Maps
- User stories or Scenarios
- Persona (Fictitious users to act out the scenarios)
- Site Maps and Content Inventory
- Wireframes (screen blueprints or storyboards)
- Prototypes (For interactive or in-the-mind simulation)
- Written specifications (describing the behavior or design)
- Graphic mockups (Precise visual of the expected end result)
When I plan a website I do all these things, except the Persona one, because that’s more applicable to game design. However, we bring in a focus group to give feedback on nearly-completed websites, so in a sense we have real users acting out the experience of the site.
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WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE is an approach to the design and planning of websites which, like architecture itself, involves technical, aesthetic and functional criteria. As in traditional architecture, the focus is properly on the user and on user requirements. This requires particular attention to web content, a business plan, usability, interaction design, information architecture and web design. For effective search engine optimization it is necessary to have an appreciation of how a single website relates to the World Wide Web.
Since web content planning, design and management come within the scope of design methods, the traditional vitruvian aims of commodity, firmness and delight can guide the architecture of websites, as they do physical architecture and other design disciplines. Website architecture is coming within the scope of aesthetics and critical theory and this trend may accelerate with the advent of the semantic web and web 2.0. Both ideas emphasise the structural aspects of information. Structuralism is an approach to knowledge which has influenced a number of academic disciplines including aesthetics, critical theory and postmodernism. Web 2.0, because it involves user-generated content, directs the website architect’s attention to the structural aspects of information.
Then there’s the issue of users with different levels of familiarity with the Web. Unlike printed forms of communication such as books, newspapers, magazines and brochures, the Web is not something the majority of the population grew up with. Kids today are “digital natives“, but there are plenty of us still around who are “digital immigrants”.
An analogy is our knowledge of The Book. We all know how to read a book, so much so we barely register it as a type of knowledge. We understand the heirarchy of cover, title, table of contents, parts, chapters, appendices, index. We don’t have to consciously remember where to begin, or in what order to experience the content, because we learned that stuff on our mother’s knee. Well, maybe not appendices and indices, but by the time we’re reading those kinds of books, we have a solid framework to slot those categories into. But the Web? We’ve had to learn that as adults. And it’s so new it’s barely been standardized. No wonder many people find websites (and computers in general) frustrating. Humankind has been tossed into a new way of organizing and accessing information, and our brains, accustomed to one method, have had to adapt to another. Not unlike like the Mediaeval monk who has to be taught how to transition from scrolls to a bound book in this comedy sketch.
Not that I’m complaining. Much like how the invention of the printing press led to the spread of liberalism, the Internet communications revolution challenges many traditional structures of knowledge and information by removing gatekeepers to access and expression.
Time for me to get back planning more website architecture. There’s information to organize!



































