Information Architecture

Robert Munro2005

Information Architecture

Information architecture is how your content is structured within the product:your arrangement of assets across different parts of

the production, and the relationships between them

Information Architecture

The most common architecture of websites and many multimedia productions is a hierarchy:homepage (A)sub-pages of Asub-pages of B

Information Architecture

What did the previous diagram tell us about the relative themes/content of the pages?These two diagrams are identical in terms of the links

between pages, but we would expect the relative content to be different:

Information Architecture

If your production is driven by the data you already have, what is the appropriate architecture?

The ‘boxes’ can represent a page, or something more abstract: play a sound,initiate a dialogueany event (not always mutually exclusive)

Data Management

The data management used in planning, capturing and storing the data will determine its structure

For a multimedia production, the relationships between assets can also be ‘content’

Structured data

What are the relationships between the types of information?which of these are machine-readable

Most multimedia productions will have a large degree of structural repetition:an online dictionary with a page for every word

(or a single panel/frame within a page)the ability to play many different sound recordings

Structured data

Productions can take advantage of all the machine readable relationships in your datamachine readable relationships allow scalability

For a online dictionary, you could:create a single template for a page for a wordpopulate the entire dictionary in an instant

Example: Hearing Voices

Contentsrecording (audio)photorecording namelanguage nametranscriptionspeaker name

Example: Hearing Voices

Where the data came fromrecording (audio)photorecording namelanguage nametranscriptionspeaker name

Example: Hearing Voices

This allowed a single script to import about 50 recordings / transcriptions etc, for 8 different speakers:

Example: Hearing Voices

…but it could have imported 50,000 recordings with no extra effort:

Example: Hearing Voices

Example 2: interview timings:

Example: Hearing Voices

Example 2: interview timings:

Designing your production

Your production might be data driven, but your design should be driven by user needs

Storyboarding is a good technique for negotiating the structure of your production (see tomorrow’s lecture on navigation design)

References

Garrett, J. J. 2002. A visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design. http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/