Centralizing the IA

January 23, 2003

Awhile back I attended User Interface East in Boston. There were many speakers there including Gerry McGovern, who has written extensively on content development and information architecture on the web.

One of the key things he has said is that because "information architecture is about organizing and presenting content, metadata and classification, navigation and search, layout and graphic design, it thrives on standards."

Case in point in a rough sample of folks at the conference, when shown a grid of a webpage and people are asked to place an X where the "Home" link would be, over a 100 people said it was in the upper left corner.

Another wonderful example that rings more bells in my interaction with non-web savvy content authors, is the naming of sections. Far too often folks want to come up with clever, cute names for things that don't mean anything to people. Could you imagine Grab Bag as a place you would go for Career Resources???

The truth is the web is about standards. The standards do not just include what the competition does, but what the entire web universe does. That concept extends to what sections are called and were folks look for media releases etc. Chances are companies that take user experience seriously have spent many hours and dollars researching what makes sense for users. Case in point amazon.com, travelocity, the list goes on. Those firms live and die by the ability of their users to intuitively understand the organization system and then be converted to paying customers.

The dot.com phase is over. I survived the dot bomb era. The web is now all about attract --> convert --> retain with users and that extends out to seemingly trivial things such as navigational nomenclature. Without that formula embedded in the user experience, the experience is not going to deliver on ROI.