Re: Re: New CMS Forum

Testing
--- Matthew Clapp <nautis-/[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 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]
> 
> --
> http://cms-list.org/
> please trim your posts.


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
--
http://cms-list.org/
please trim your posts.