Session 10: information architecture

INM348 - Digital Information Technologies and Architectures
 
In this session we took a look at the idea of  'information architecture'. Morville and Rosenfeld (2007) use the term to encompass a variety of behaviours related to creating, structuring and organizing online environments to enable people to get to information in the most efficient and straightforward way, using (for example) website navigation, metadata and controlled vocabularies, and search technologies.

If you don’t organise and label your information properly, your intended users won’t be able to find it, which means that all of your effort and resources you’ve used to create your site, intranet or database will be wasted.

Tesco definitely seems to have considered key principles of information architecture on its website. For example, the Tesco homepage [http://www.tesco.com/] provides me with some easily-understandable topic categories, backed up with a search box in the top right-hand corner of the page. And, as well as making content very findable, it deploys some useful customization enabling me to, for example, store my favourites to make the weekly shop much easier.

How can I use Morville and Rosenfeld's (2007) principles of good information architecture to improve the work that I do supporting my company’s corporate intranet? We use standard HTML and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) templates across the hundreds of pages on the intranet, which means we can present users with familiar pages. We use topic classification to organise our content – our next step would be to review the labeling we use to assess whether the language we use is consistent and appropriate for the audience. We could also deploy a controlled vocabulary, to improve findability.

Finally, we should consider customization so that users can store searches and key information. In this way, we can ensure that the intranet is a tool that they can use to aid – rather than inhibit – their everyday work.

Word count for this entry: 300 words.