Week 9 - Lesson 9 - Readings & Takeaways

Assigned : READINGS - This week, read Chapters 20 - 21 from the "polar bear" text.

Book: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web 3rd Edition, by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, ISBN 100596527349

and Web Theory An Introduction by Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall - Chapter 1 - Web of technology


CHAPTER 20

(page 429)
MSWEB: AN ENTERPRISE INTRANET

Case study on 3 taxonomies used, the IA made to support it, how the team revamped the MSWEB intranet

(page 430)
Woozer is all I have to say upfront... 3,100,000 pages, 50,000 employees who work in 74 countries and 8,000 sep internet sites...amazing....insanely huge is correct...these IA's certainly have a challenge ahead of them. Trying to determine where to begin is a large undertaking and some places were obvious but some points where scattered throughout the site.

Navigation systems not consistent due to various labeling schemes.

All the possible labesl are hard to search for and retrieve; there are too many variations.

(page 431)
Some places had different concepts for same label. That can surely be confusing to the user. So employees frustrated because they don't know when to stop searching.

There are 50 different variants to product vocabulary. This can also cause concern, frustration and difficulty finding information or to know when you are done searching.

Some IA is inhouse contained and built by inhouse technical staff and other areas are maintained by hand or simple tool like MS Frontpage.

(page 432)
Definition
taxonomy noun
/tækˈsɒn.ə.mi/US pronunciation symbol/-ˈsɑː.nə-/ n [C or U] specialized
a system for naming and organizing things, especially plants and animals, into groups which share similar qualities

3 flavors
1. descriptive vocabularies-controlled vocabularies over a specific domain
2. metadata-collection of information about a particular document
3. category labels-set of terms used for navigation systems

(page 433)
Descriptive vocabularies
Developing terms to manually index important pieces of content

Characteristics of their content determined several steps the team took to get started.
First was a search log anaylysis-needs in users own terms to decide appropriate vocabulary terms

They looked for vocabulary that already existed from inhouse work--don't reinvent the wheel.

Other issues considered at the start was politics, talking with stakeholders about concepts, and commitment and thier level of participation.

They focused on vocabularies with broad appeal.

(page 434)
They narrowed the vocabulary to certain subjects: geography, languages, proper names, organization and business names, subjects and product/standards/technology names

Metadta

Metadata and controlled vocabulary will describe content.
They focused on simplicity, balance, description for display, integration into browsing schemes.

(page 435)
They decided on core field schema's: URL title, URL Description, URL, ToolTip, Comment, Contact Alias, Review Date, Status, Strongly Recommended, Products, Category label, Keywords.

(page 436)
Category Labels=help user know where things are and where to go. The team used card sorting and contextual inquiry.

(page 437)
So all three taxonomies come together and were used to create search results.

Dublin Core schema partially used.

(page 438)
This section shows a diagram of the IA of the tools for taxonomies used.
Metadata Registry MDR, VocabMan visual basic client providing access to MDR.

(page 441)
VocabMan=used to create thesauri relationships ie heirarchical equivalence and associative between terms within specific taxonomies and between terms in different taxonomies.

Workbench for managing, creating, and tagging records.

(page 449,450,453)
Successes=Since the company has so many employees, this provides a wide area of opportunity as a test bed for improvements. They selected a major area to work on that benefited both users, employees and managers. They made the improvements in a modular fashion thereby making the improvements applicable to other areas within the project and across the company. The design was flexible across departments so it spoke to not just other IA's but to technical communication, designers, and strategists. The teams efforts saved the company money while in baby steps but was significant to support the primary goals as they rolled out.

(page 454)
Benefits to users

The prompt of the problem of too many clicks, inaccessible documents and too hard to search for them - awakened the need for improvement.

(page 457)
Measurable changes of the task success rate was +10.7%, time on task -16 seconds, and number of clicks -8 clicks where it used to be +13 clicks... big changes.


CHAPTER 21

(page 460)
An Online Community
evolt.org

They developed an IA with almost no budget.

(page 461)
evolt.org=Evolt.org is a world community for web developers, promoting the mutual free exchange of ideas, skills and experiences.

Rapid growth of members/registered users.

(page 462)
A major challenge is participation by the community.

(page 463,464,465,466, 467, 468)
evolt has classes and thier allowed levels of participation=anyone level, member level, administrator level.
Discussion list postings, tips, published articles, authors, readers, receives/pays, biography listings, new ventures, free communities,

(page 472)
Discussion lists, tips in archive, articles, member directory, web development resource directory, browser archive, development area

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and Web Theory An Introduction by Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall - Chapter 1 - Web of technology

Chapter 1 starts off with a blast from the past description about the growth of the web and directions and possibilities it was headed into which ironically are all unfolding. Virtual reality and informatoin and technology paths are taking most of the paths that Nicolas Negroponte describes in his book, Being Digital.

The promise of a better world with webs capabilities towards communication and expanding our horizons in the media world and fast paced expanding media world.

Technology is determined to expand and take the world into new and ever demanding technologies. What became apparent is the demands for communication, and how were people going to interact with the new technologies becoming available. Cyberspace was becoming the place for the chat, correspondence, digital imagery, fast paced business opportunities and more.

Approaches of how to offer these kinds of resources to the world was obviously needed to be managed and organized and done well so that users would use sites which tumbled the snowball of visibility, commerce and competition. Access to computers was blooming fast like televsion sets bloomed when they were 'born'. Instant images over the space and time, thusly instant communication and reaching audiences over the computer screen.