Re: New CMS Forum

CMSListers / Bob -

Any IAs on the list? I think when faceed with an overwhelming breadth of
knowledge like this it sometimes helps to slice it the way some research
sites have done. The key is to make the categories as simple and intuitive
as possible so as to not alienate non-technical folks or even people that
are new to all this cms stuff. A key page on a site like this is a site map.
Though users have learned to trust searching with tools like Google they've
learned the hard way that site searches usually don't help at all - and if
you haven't lost them at that point they will usually turn to site maps as a
last resort.

The research site Ingenta.com provides one way you may consider slicing the
IA. They have three approaches to getting at what you want:

1. Search (and advanced search)
2. Browse by ... (publication, subject area)
3. User segment (for librarians, for publishers)

The site is not perfect, but I think it illustrates how to tackle a complex
information breadth problem. Another way to overcome this problem is to not
let on just how deep and wide your site goes. Unless Ingenta had told us on
the front page that they had 15 million articles available, I probably
wouldn't have guessed it. The site appears to be pretty simple. This
simplicity will keep your users from getting overwhelmed with information.
Remember the golden rule of Information Architecture: people can only take
in chunks of data at 8 +/- 2. If you have more than this in your global or
secondary navigation it's probably because of a lack of attention to your
IA. Techies and developers are notoriously bad at creating intuitive
navigation because they tend to think of it in terms of a data model instead
of an experience (sorry technical guys and gals).

Not sure if this help at all. My recommendation would be 

1. keep it simple in spite of the comprehensiveness of the site,
2. provide a couple of different ways to view the information, and
3. did I say, keep it simple? ;-)

Matthew Clapp
[email protected]

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