Information Architecture
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Information Architecture Robert Munro 2005
description
Information Architecture. Robert Munro 2005. Information Architecture. Information architecture is how your content is structured within the product: your arrangement of assets across different parts of the production, and the relationships between them. Information Architecture. - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Transcript of Information Architecture
Information Architecture
Robert Munro2005
Information Architecture
Information architecture is how your content is structured within the product:your arrangement of assets across different parts of
the production, and the relationships between them
Information Architecture
The most common architecture of websites and many multimedia productions is a hierarchy:homepage (A)sub-pages of Asub-pages of B
Information Architecture
What did the previous diagram tell us about the relative themes/content of the pages?These two diagrams are identical in terms of the links
between pages, but we would expect the relative content to be different:
Information Architecture
If your production is driven by the data you already have, what is the appropriate architecture?
The ‘boxes’ can represent a page, or something more abstract: play a sound,initiate a dialogueany event (not always mutually exclusive)
Data Management
The data management used in planning, capturing and storing the data will determine its structure
For a multimedia production, the relationships between assets can also be ‘content’
Structured data
What are the relationships between the types of information?which of these are machine-readable
Most multimedia productions will have a large degree of structural repetition:an online dictionary with a page for every word
(or a single panel/frame within a page)the ability to play many different sound recordings
Structured data
Productions can take advantage of all the machine readable relationships in your datamachine readable relationships allow scalability
For a online dictionary, you could:create a single template for a page for a wordpopulate the entire dictionary in an instant
Example: Hearing Voices
Contentsrecording (audio)photorecording namelanguage nametranscriptionspeaker name
Example: Hearing Voices
Where the data came fromrecording (audio)photorecording namelanguage nametranscriptionspeaker name
Example: Hearing Voices
This allowed a single script to import about 50 recordings / transcriptions etc, for 8 different speakers:
Example: Hearing Voices
…but it could have imported 50,000 recordings with no extra effort:
Example: Hearing Voices
Example 2: interview timings:
Example: Hearing Voices
Example 2: interview timings:
Designing your production
Your production might be data driven, but your design should be driven by user needs
Storyboarding is a good technique for negotiating the structure of your production (see tomorrow’s lecture on navigation design)
References
Garrett, J. J. 2002. A visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design. http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/
