Seven Deadly sins of Information Architecture

Lecture held by Are Halland

Loosely inspired by the bible Are talks about seven important factors in IA.

1. Sin of Abstraction
- The risk of going to far away from the content with flow charts and other abstractions.

2. Sin of Introvercy
- Just looking at the homepage, and think all users will see that. 15% will never see anything but the content because of search engines.

3. Sin of Isolation
- Put your information where your readers are. Not isolate to the homepage only (Facebook, communities etc.

4. Sin of Information Overload
- Can't find the relevant information

5. Sin of navigation overload
- (I.e. Yahoo mail- don't distract)

6. Sin of futility
- Calls to action is needed to engage users and make the pages relevant. This builds business value, but also social value (List mania in Amazon).

7. Sin of Logo phobia
- Don't be afraid of the text in the site. That's most likely the only thing the user really care for.

Create bigger needles for people to find!

How to design for core+Paths: (Inside out design)
- Prioritizing and design the core.
- Design inwards paths to the core (Don't limit to the core website (feeds, news etc.)
- Offer relevant Outward paths from the Core.

This seems natural , but in practice this is not always done. But when done right the site will have a natural and responsive feel.

Starting on the inside will maybe get different results than starting eith the information structure.

Simplicity and infodesign for tasks. Prioritizing content is the key: What?, Calls to action then Supporting information.

Twitter and Youtube are excellent examples of making the core visible (The updates and the video).

This can all be used as tools for thinking. What is the core function? Answer this and for in to and out from that core.

Gives support for intuition
This Jumpstarts Concepts
Zoom in concept without lockin (??)
.
.
Fighting frontpage focus! (That's good)


Tips:
Subscribe to book releases in RSS format from Amazon.

URL design is important for SEO (Title and Author of a book in Amazons url's gives high hits on google)

Build great cores!

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