Darell's Learning Journal

What a useful way to conceptualize the path(s) that a user would go through when visiting a site!  I was watching Alex’s tutorial on Gliffy’s workflow diagram, and for me to solidify my understanding on a concept, I use an analogy.  I got to relate it in a different way.  So I started to think about how I could relate this idea to an every day example, and lo and behold, the tutorial gave the example of the commute home.  Solidified.

I can see how the process can become very complex and intricate.  Ifs and thens in vast quantities would certainly make for a larger imaged map.  I keep thinking about if then statements when studying Visual Basic.  Each program that we would make would demand a certain amount of code, and the amount of the code would increase along with the complexity of the program.  This relation being kept in mind, I think I’m one bit closer to understanding why it is done to relate information to the ‘techies’.  It is the visual representation of code.  If the programmers are involved in the coding process and need an IA professional to properly relate this information to them, this visual representation of what the user ought to be able to do would be vastly preferential to a dialogue that went like this: “no!  re-direct the user to this page if they click on that!” and et cetera.

So a taxonomy in the Information Architecture world is essentially the map of the website.  It is, as defined by the instructor, the blueprint of the overall site.  Further, it also serves a directional purpose, stating specifically which page on the site goes to which page.

What is interesting is that after being exposed to the broad and shallow and narrow and deep, I find myself picturing a bunch of websites that fall into either category:

• Old Yahoo.com and today’s Craigslist: broad and shallow.  You visit a site plastered with no less than 1,000 different links, and you click on one link to go to a shallow collection of information.
• Google.com and Cuil.com: very narrow and deep.  There are perhaps a total of seven (maybe) links on a page.  You essentially click go, and THEN your adventure starts.  btw Cuil boasts more searchable webpages than Google.  Narrow and deep indeed.

So which would be better?  Beats me.  I think that with the specific examples I provided above, you more so conform to the website’s design.  If I want to look up volunteer opportunities on Craigslist, I know that I’ll be going to the top left corner.  This is a much more intimidating process if I am a first time visitor to Craigslist.com (especially noting the spartan design of that specific website).  With Google and Cuil, I consider the experience to be much less controlled.  I say go, and I am swept away in a search journey.  This is much more mindless than the charming classified ad design of craigslist, obviously.  But then again, Google is the premier search engine on the web today.

An IA professional absolutely needs to convey the ideas of a more functional and useful site to the development team.  So how does he/she go about doing that?  By creating a framework of how they want the site to look.  Alex exposed the class to Gliffy, then posted up a tutorial on how Gliffy works.  Gliffy is essentially a web-based architectural drafting tool for the IA professional.  During the course of 15 minutes we had seen a website’s wireframe become constructed right before our very eyes.  It is a tool like this that allows the IA to focus on the design and functionality of the website, rather than being the jack of all trades from necessity.  What appears to be even better is that you don’t need to save this as a specific file format and send off to the dev team and have them download of bunch of new software to run the specific format of the file that you sent them (man, I can’t stand that), but since it is web-based, it can be accessed and viewed so long as the user has a web browser and an internet connection.

Metadata is/are (?) certain characteristics that you can assign to, well, data.  You know the saying, a picture is worth 1,000 words?  well, it may or may not be, but the certain words that you assign to it matter in terms of searchability and retrievability (are these words?)

One immensely popular example that I can think of is facebook.  Facebook is a social networking site that allows people to connect to each other, keep in touch, and the like.  To participate, every user must fill out pre-defined sets of data (location, age, education, etc) in order to participate on the site.  This works for a user trying to find their friends on the site, but more importantly–where facebook really shines–is that it allows advertisers to direct who they want to advertise to, based on geography, age, gender, and location.  From a marketer’s standpoint, to be able to say exactly who sees an advert is very lucrative in itself.

So the ability to classify data has obvious benefits.  In the world of the information professional, this could vary between the ease of retrievability of a data commodity (see above), or could mean the ability to easy trace the digital location of a recently uploaded achival file.