Web Dev Intensive

In our first class, we analyzed several websites in terms of their information architecture: how information was organized and grouped in their user interfaces.  Although many of you are accustomed to the normative standards of how to navigate websites, it’s helpful to sometimes explicitly enumerate the different ways that you, as information architect (and soon to be web developer), can lead the user to explore various parts of your site.

To that effect, here are a few of the most common architectural concepts and elements at your disposal:

Hierarchical Classification - this is a general term that refers to the hierarchical categorization of information on a site.  Most sites with a lot of content categorize information in this way, allowing users to navigate through the information by drilling-down into categories and subcategories until the desired content is found.  With this system, any category can have only one parent category.  For example, take a look at this sitemap from http://heels.com, which shows a clear hierarchy of shoe categories.  “Ankle Boots” is clearly a subcategory of “Women’s Shoe Styles”, which is presumably a subcategory of “Shoes”.

Message boards and comment boards often have a hierarchical relationship between posts known as message threading.  Threads are most often displayed visually using a tree structure, which clearly shows the hierarchical structure of the message board using indents to indicate the relationship of any message to its parent.  For example:

Faceted Classification – unlike in a Hierarchical Classification, a Faceted Classification allows information to be organized, and thereby navigated, along multiple dimensions.  For example, on a blog, users may be able to browse posts by author, by date, or by category – these would all be different facets of the same information.  As another example, it may be that users buying flowers online want to browse by a variety of classifications, such as by “Occasion”, “Color”, or “Price”.   With Faceted Classification, any flower may be listed under any or all of these classifications.  These categories are not related to each other in a clear hierarchy – they are all independent axes along which flowers can be browsed.  Most sites that use Faceted Classification combine it with some sort of Hierarchical Classification.  For example, see the Faceted Navigation links at the top of the http://teleflora.com site homepage:

Folksonomy – similar to Faceted Classification is the concept of a Folksonomy (or Tagsonomy).  Tags are arbitrary keywords that users of many social networking sites attach as labels onto any piece of content.  Folksonomies, in their purest state, are entirely user-generated, meaning that there is no top-down control or limit to the number or variety of tags that can be used.  As a result, tags are often inconsistently applied, misspelled, redundant, and generally of little practical use for large sets of data unless there is some sort of control over the vocabulary to make it more consistent.  For example, Flickr.com, a photo sharing service, allows users to tag any photo with any keyword.  Users can search for all photos with a particular tag:

Global Navigation – these are links that are available on all pages of a site that point to the top level categories of a hierarchical navigation structure.  They are often displayed in the interface as Tabs at the top of the page, or as a series of links on the left navigation section of the page.  For example, see the links at the very top of all pages on http://netflix.com

Secondary Navigation (or Local Navigation) – these are generally links to a subcategory of a hierarchical navigation structure.  They usually appear horizontally at the top, underneath the Global Navigation, as a drop-down menu that appears when a user mouses over a Global Navigation item, or vertically on the left side of the page.  For example, see the second row of tabs at the top under the Global Navigation in the New York Times World section – these links are specific to the World section:

NYU.edu‘s Home page displays the secondary navigation as a horizontal drop-down list:

The Google Reader Settings page has secondary navigation as a set of tabs.  Notice also the link to return one step up back up the hierarchy, “Back to Google Reader”:

Nth-Level Navigation – in the New York Times World section example above, you can actually see a third level of navigation as a third row of tabs underneath the second tier.  Users have come to expect categories and subcategories of content, but due to the limited amount of space and navigation tools available in a web browser, sites have difficulty displaying three or more levels of classification.  The Mac Finder offers an interesting solution to the problem of displaying many levels of hierarchy, although this is not common on the web:

Breadcrumbs – breadcrumbs are links that are used to show your position in a hierarchy of information, and allow users to navigate linearly back up the hierarchy.  They usually appear horizontally, towards the top of a page.  For example, in the following top navigation from ESPN.com, you can see a breadcrumb underneath two rows of navigation (Global and Local, in a two-tiered tab interface).  The breadcrumb, which reads “ESPN > Fantasy & Games > Basketball”, indicates that we are viewing the “Basketball” page within the “Fantasy & Games” section of the “ESPN” site.  Each section of the breadcrumb is a link to a different level in the hierarchy of information on the site.

Another example combining all of the aforementioned navigation elements in one interface is the NYU SCPS site.  For example, on the “Academic Programs” page, you can see Global Navigation, Secondary Navigation, and Breadcrumbs:

Home Button – almost all sites have a button on all pages that takes the user directly to the Home page, no matter where they are currently in the hierarchy of content on the site.  Very often, the Site Logo, which is almost always found at the top left of the page, also doubles as a link to the Home page.

Search -you may not immediately think of Search as being a navigation element, but it most certainly is.  Search functionality allows users to jump directly to content that may be buried deeply in the information hierarchy of a site.  Search is most commonly positioned as a text input box somewhere on the top of the page, as in the Amazon.com example below, although it does appear sometimes in the left navigation area, as is the case on Wikipedia.

Advanced Search – sites offering advanced search sometimes use it as a tool for browsing through a Faceted Classification system.  Using Facets is a relatively obvious way for users to narrow search results.  For example, the Phillips Academy Andover E-Store allows users to select both a Category and a Manufacturer as dimensions for their search, in addition to keyword matching and other text-based search.  The site will return only those results that match both the Category Manufacturer Facets:

URLs – yes, you can think of the URL of your pages as being navigation elements.  Short, cleanly formatted URLs are easy to remember, and often show clearly how the content on the current page fits into the hierarchy of the content of a site, making it easy for users to understand where they are on your site.  For example, compare the following URLs:

Text Hyperlinks – navigation using text hyperlinks allow for arbitrary navigation from one part of your site to another.  While it’s a good practice to use Global Navigation, Secondary Navigation, URL formatting, and the various other elements we’ve mentioned, sometimes the type of navigation an information architect needs to achieve doesn’t fit into any of these other navigational categories.  For example, Wikipedia’s entry on Hyperlinks uses hyperlinks in the text to allow users to navigate to related topics:

Contetual Navigation – contextual navigation includes simple text hyperlinks, but it may also manifest itself more obviously as links from one piece of content to other “Related items”, “Recommended items”, “Most Popular items in <category name>” or “See also” links.  Sometimes these links point to siblings in the information hierarchy, meaning pieces of content at the same hierarchical level as the current content.  For example, a news site’s article about Finance may point to another news article about Finance.  In this example, an article on NYTimes.com about Facebook has on the same page several different contextual navigation sections to sibling articles in the Technology classification:

But often, the nature of the relationships is more editorially-controlled, or controlled by complex algorithms, and less determined so easily by simple hierarchical relationships.  For these cases, the Contextual Navigation offers a chance to lead the user to more remote pieces of content on the site or to other categories besides the one they are currently viewing.  For example, see Amazon.com’s personalized recommendations, which depend mostly upon user purchasing behavior, point to books of a variety of topics:

Sitemap – when a site has a large hierarchical navigational structure, a Sitemap can often display visually how pages on the site are grouped, and where the various content is located within a site.  Sitemaps usually link to the pages displayed, as in Apple.com’s Sitemap:

Site Indexes – similar to Sitemaps and Search, Site Indexes provide yet another way for users to jump directly to content that may otherwise be buried deep in the hierarchy of the site.  They offer an alphabetical list of links to the content available on the site.  While Sitemaps work well with hierarchical data, Site Indexes are usually more useful than Sitemaps for sites that do not have a clear hierarchical classification structure, as exemplified by the UN.org Site Index: