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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Paula Hay

Paula Hay

Where the Wireframes Are: Special Deliverable #3 - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind ... - 1 views

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    Includes a description of the "page description diagram" to use as a preliminary step before creating wireframes
Paula Hay

How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web | Miskatonic University Press - 0 views

  • Kwasnick (1999) identifies four classificatory structures: hierarchies, trees, paradigms, and facets.
  • Hierarchies divide and redivide things into groups where each new group is a sub-species of its parent group; everything that is true of a group is also true of its sub-groups and so on down (Kwasnick 1999, 25). The Linnean taxonomy of living things is the classic example of this.
  • Trees, in contrast, do not have the rules of inheritance (Kwasnick 1999, 30). For example, North America contains Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and Canada contains ten provinces and three territories, but Ontario is not a kind of Canada, and Canada is not a kind of North America
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  • A paradigm is a two-dimensional classification (imagine a spreadsheet). Use paradigms when there are two independent aspects to consider. Kwasnick (1999, 35-36) uses the example of terms describing kinship relations, which can be organized into a grid, with sex (male/female) along one axis, and relation (parent, sibling, parent's sibling) along the other axis
  • Facets will handle three or more dimensions of classification.
  • Kwasnick (1999, 40-42) lists several things in favour of faceted classifications: they do not require complete knowledge of the entities or their relationships; they are hospitable (can accommodate new entities easily); they are flexible; they are expressive; they can be ad hoc and free-form; and they allow many different perspectives on and approaches to the things classified.
  • Ranganathan's Colon Classification has five facets, now classic (see Ranganathan (1962), among his many books, for an introduction to the facets and how to use them): Personality (the something in question, e.g. a person or event in a classification of history, or an animal in a classification of zoology) Matter (what something is made of) Energy (how something changes, is processed, evolves) Space (where something is) Time (when it happens
  • look to BC2 for ideas (Broughton 2001, 79): thing/entity kind part property material process operation patient product by-product agent space time
  • Spiteri follows Ranganathan and divides classification into three parts: "the Idea Plane, which involves the process of analyzing a subject field into its component part; the Verbal Plane, which involves the process of choosing appropriate terminology to express those component part; and the Notational Plane, which involves the process of expressing these component parts by means of a notational device
  • Going from Idea (which Spiteri divides into two parts) to Verbal to Notational Planes take us from idea to word to number, from the general concept of what the entity is about to expressing that concept in a controlled vocabulary to turning those words into notation.
  • My procedure for making the faceted classification system rearranges Vickery's steps, and adds to the start and finish to make it complete from beginning to end.
  • There are three questions to ask when planning how to build the web site. Finding and blending the appropriate answers will give you a good starting point for building navigational tools for the site.
Paula Hay

Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication - 0 views

  • There is a fundamental difference in the activities of browsing to find interesting content, as opposed to direct searching to find relevant documents in a query. It is similar to the difference between exploring a problem space to formulate questions, as opposed to actually looking for answers to specifically formulated questions
  • Merholz does not use the term “folksonomy.” He has written on his personal web site that the term is inaccurate due to its derivation from “taxonomy,” which he argues tend towards hierarchy and control. (Merholz, 2004) (See also Taylor, 2004, for discussions of problems and disputes with the term “taxonomy.”) Merholz prefers the term “ethnoclassification,” which is what he uses in his article, and there is no mention of “folksonomy” to be found. Ethnoclassification is also inaccurate, because as discussed, what is happening is quite unlike classification and far more like categorization.
Paula Hay

Facets In Your Future - 0 views

  • f a top-notch information architect was on your design team, she categorized and classified your content, then arranged it in one or more taxonomies to support clean drill-down paths.
  • The canonical example of a faceted directory is an ecommerce site like Wine.com, where visitors can browse by wine type, region, winery, or price
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    Faceting in information architure
Paula Hay

Jesse James Garrett: ia/recon - 0 views

  • Research benefits architecture most when it seeks to define the problem we must solve. Research benefits architecture least -- and can actually produce bad results -- when it seeks to define the solution itself.
  • When most people think of the job of being an editor, I think they imagine someone hunched over a desk, red pen in hand, marking up an endless stream of text, cleaning up split infinitives and dangling participles and the like. But the editorial role and the editorial discipline are two very different things. While there are definitely some people who specialize in this sort of work, there's usually much more to being an editor. In the broadest sense, an editor's job is to help writers make their writing more effective. This involves grammar and punctuation and word choice, sure, but a huge part of any editor's job has to do with creating effective structures. An editor might be responsible for structures at many scales, from the encyclopedia down to the textbook down to the article down to the paragraph down to the sentence. Like the editor, the information architect is concerned most fundamentally with creating information structures. But the discipline of information architecture views this responsibility in a very different light. In the world of information architecture, all structural challenges are currently viewed as variants of the same problem -- the problem of information retrieval.
  • If you asked an editor at a magazine or a newspaper if the structure of her product had been tested with readers before its publication, she would laugh at you. To her, developing effective structures is a matter of exercising her professional judgment -- judgment honed through years of trial and error and hard-won experience with her craft. To her, the proof of her effectiveness in her discipline is her ability to exercise that judgment. To her, that judgment is the very reason for the existence of her role. To her, the idea of abandoning that professional judgment and recasting her role as a conduit through which research findings become structures would be simply absurd. And you know what? She's right.
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  • It's not always easy to tell whether a research study defines the problem or defines a solution. During the research process, well-intentioned attempts to articulate the problem can turn into suggestions for solutions -- especially when the person conducting the research is also responsible for creating the solution.
  • When we hold the test up as the ultimate determinant of success or failure, we encourage specialization in beating the test. The unwritten law of usability is that the most efficient approach is the best. But again, outside the limited area in which user tasks can be readily identified and goals readily recognized, efficiency is not necessarily a universal good. Testing cannot account for all the possible goals of an architecture or its users. If our discipline continues to develop along its current course, we will have developed an entire body of knowledge about information architecture that amounts to little more than a set of tips and tricks for beating the test. Meanwhile, the real creative problems inherent in our work will remain as poorly understood as they are today.
  • The progress of the discipline depends on the development and iteration of a body of knowledge. This body of knowledge, in turn, can only come about through deliberate consideration of a wide range of architectural problems and potential solutions. What we need most of all are good test cases, and the insights that come from tackling them first-hand.
  • I have often been asked the secret of my success as an information architect. Here, I will reveal for the first time that secret. I have hunches. Of course, it's not enough merely to have hunches. They have to be good hunches. My hunches have to be better than the hunches my clients have -- that's why they hire me.
  • Currently, we are building a body of knowledge whose basic requirements -- a dedicated specialist, extensive time and money devoted to research -- automatically exclude the vast majority of real-world cases.
  • The message we should be sending is this one: Information architecture is a discipline that can be practiced by people in a wide variety of roles. Architectures can be designed to achieve a wide variety of goals, not just information retrieval. The single most important factor in the success of an architecture is the skill of its creator. This skill is applied through a combination of experienced professional judgment, thoughtful consideration of research findings, and disciplined creativity. This skill can be developed and applied by specialists and non-specialists alike. Only by being honest with ourselves about what makes us valuable can we convince others of that value. Only by being generous with our knowledge can we reap all of its benefits. And only by creating a culture in which these principles are fully embraced can we foster the growth of our field, and ensure our continued success.
Paula Hay

Content strategy: The new face of documentation | Intentional Design Inc. - 1 views

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    Slide presentation by Rahel Bailie from STC Summit 2009 in Atlanta. Excellent overview of content strategy's role in communications, very well worth the time.
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