Chapter 3. Organizing Information
The beginning of all understanding is classification.
--Hayden White
Our understanding of the world is
largely determined by our ability to organize information. Where do
you live? What do you do? Who are you? Our answers reveal the systems
of classification that form the very foundations of our
understanding. We live in towns within states within countries. We
work in departments in companies in industries. We are parents,
children, and siblings, each an integral part of a family tree.
We organize to understand, to explain, and to control. Our
classification systems inherently reflect social and political
perspectives and objectives. We live in the
first world. They live in the
third world. She is a freedom fighter. He is a
terrorist. The way we organize, label, and relate information
influences the way people comprehend that information.
As information architects, we organize information so that people can
find the right answers to their questions. We strive to support
casual browsing and directed searching. Our aim is to apply
organization and labeling systems that make sense to users.
The Web provides us with a wonderfully flexible environment in which
to organize. We can apply multiple organization systems to the same
content and escape the physical limitations of the print world. So
why are many large web sites so difficult to navigate? Why
can't the people who design these sites make it easy to find
information? These common questions focus attention on the very real
challenge of organizing information.
3.1. Organizational Challenges
In recent years, increasing attention has been focused on the
challenge of organizing information. Yet, this challenge is not new.
People have struggled with the difficulties of information
organization for centuries. The field of librarianship has been
largely devoted to the task of organizing and providing access to
information. So why all the fuss now?
Believe it or not, we're all becoming librarians. This quiet
yet powerful revolution is driven by the decentralizing force of the
global Internet. Not long ago, the responsibility for labeling,
organizing, and providing access to information fell squarely in the
laps of librarians. These librarians spoke in strange languages about
Dewey Decimal Classification and the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules.
They classified, cataloged, and helped us find the information we
needed.
The Internet is forcing the responsibility for organizing information
on more of us each day. How many corporate web sites exist today? How
many personal home pages? What about tomorrow? As the Internet
provides us all with the freedom to publish information, it quietly
burdens us with the responsibility to organize that information.
As we struggle to meet that challenge, we unknowingly adopt the
language of librarians. How should we label that
content? Is there an existing classification
system we can borrow? Who's going to
catalog all of that information?
We're moving towards a world where tremendous numbers of people
publish and organize their own information. As we do so, the
challenges inherent in organizing that information become more
recognized and more important. Let's explore some of the
reasons why organizing information in useful ways is so difficult.
3.1.1. Ambiguity
Classification
systems are built upon the foundation of language, and language is
often ambiguous. That is, words are capable of being understood in
two or more possible ways. Think about the word
pitch. When you say pitch,
what do I hear? There are actually more than 15 definitions,
including:
A throw, fling, or toss. A black, sticky substance used for waterproofing. The rising and falling of the bow and stern of a ship in a rough sea. A salesman's persuasive line of talk. An element of sound determined by the frequency of vibration.
This ambiguity results in a shaky foundation for our classification
systems. When we use words as labels for our categories, we run the
risk that users will miss our meaning. This is a serious problem. See
Chapter 5, "Labeling Systems", for more on this issue.
It gets worse. Not only do we need to agree on the labels and their
definitions, we also need to agree on which documents to place in
which categories. Consider the common tomato. According to
Webster's dictionary, a tomato is a red or yellowish
fruit with a juicy pulp, used as a vegetable: botanically it is a
berry. Now I'm confused. Is it a fruit or a
vegetable or a berry?[3]
If we have such problems classifying the common tomato, consider the
challenges involved in classifying web site content. Classification
is particularly difficult when you're organizing abstract
concepts such as subjects, topics, or functions. For example, what is
meant by alternative healing and should it be
cataloged under philosophy or
religion or health and
medicine or all of the above? The organization of words
and phrases, taking into account their inherent ambiguity, presents a
very real and substantial challenge.
3.1.2. Heterogeneity
Heterogeneity refers to an object or
collection of objects composed of unrelated or unlike parts. You
might refer to grandma's homemade broth with its assortment of
vegetables, meats, and other mysterious leftovers as heterogeneous.
At the other end of the scale, homogeneous refers to something
composed of similar or identical elements. For example, Oreo cookies
are homogeneous. Every cookie looks and tastes the same.
An old-fashioned library card catalog is relatively homogeneous. It
organizes and provides access to books. It does not provide access to
chapters in books or collections of books. It may not provide access
to magazines or videos. This homogeneity allows for a structured
classification system. Each book has a record in the catalog. Each
record contains the same fields: author, title, and subject. It is a
high-level, single-medium system, and works fairly well.
Most web sites, on the other hand, are highly heterogeneous in two
respects. First, web sites often provide access to documents and
their components at varying levels of
granularity
.
A web site might present articles and journals and journal databases
side by side. Links might lead to pages, sections of pages, or to
other web sites. Second, web sites typically provide access to
documents in multiple formats. You might find
financial news, product descriptions, employee home pages, image
archives, and software files. Dynamic news content shares space with
static human resources information. Textual information shares space
with video, infoarch, and interactive applications. The web site is a
great multimedia melting pot, where you are challenged to reconcile
the cataloging of the broad and the detailed across many mediums.
The heterogeneous nature of web sites makes it difficult to impose
highly structured organization systems on the content. It
doesn't make sense to classify documents at varying levels of
granularity side by side. An article and a magazine should be treated
differently. Similarly, it may not make sense to handle varying
formats the same way. Each format will have uniquely important
characteristics. For example, we need to know certain things about
images such as file format (GIF, TIFF, etc.) and resolution (640x480,
1024x768, etc.). It is difficult and often misguided to attempt a
one-size-fits-all approach to the organization of heterogeneous web
site content.
3.1.3. Differences in Perspectives
Have you ever tried to find a file on a
coworker's desktop computer? Perhaps you had permission.
Perhaps you were engaged in low-grade corporate espionage. In any
case, you needed that file. In some cases, you may have found the
file immediately. In others, you may have searched for hours. The
ways people organize and name files and directories on their
computers can be maddeningly illogical. When questioned, they will
often claim that their organization system makes perfect sense.
"But it's obvious! I put current proposals in the folder
labeled /office/clients/red and old proposals in
/office/clients/blue. I don't understand
why you couldn't find them!"
The fact is that labeling and organization systems are intensely
affected by their creators' perspectives. We see this at the
corporate level with web sites organized according to internal
divisions or org charts. In these web sites, we see groupings such as
marketing, sales,
customer support, human
resources, and information systems.
How does a customer visiting this web site know where to go for
technical information about a product they just purchased? To design
usable organization systems, we need to escape from our own mental
models of content labeling and organization.
You must put yourself into the shoes of the intended user. How do
they see the information? What types of labels would they use? This
challenge is further complicated by the fact that web sites are
designed for multiple users, and all users will have different
perspectives or ways of understanding the information. Their levels
of familiarity with your company and your web site will vary. For
these reasons, it is impossible to create a perfect organization
system. One site does not fit all! However, by recognizing the
importance of perspective and striving to understand the intended
audiences, you can do a better job of organizing information for
public consumption than your coworker on his or her desktop computer.
3.1.4. Internal Politics
Politics exist in every organization.
Individuals and departments constantly position for power or respect.
Because of the inherent power of information organization in forming
understanding and opinion, the process of designing information
architectures for web sites and intranets can involve a strong
undercurrent of politics. The choice of organization and labeling
systems can have a big impact on how users of the site perceive the
company, its departments, and its products. For example, should we
include a link to the library site on the main page of the corporate
intranet? Should we call it The Library or
Information Services or Knowledge
Management? Should information resources provided by
other departments be included in this area? If the library gets a
link on the main page, then why not corporate communications? What
about daily news?
As an information architect, you must be sensitive to your
organization's political environment. In certain cases, you
must remind your colleagues to focus on creating an architecture that
works for the user. In others, you may need to make compromises to
avoid serious political conflict. Politics raise the complexity and
difficulty of creating usable information architectures. However, if
you are sensitive to the political issues at hand, you can manage
their impact upon the architecture.
 |  |  | | 2.3. Collaboration and Communication |  | 3.2. Organizing Web Sites and Intranets |
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