Re: New CMS Forum [Needs IA and UI design]

Matthew,

Thanks for the IA advice to improve the new CMS Forum 
(http://www.cmsforum.org).  I looked at the Ingenta.com site.

I like their Site Map. As CMS Forum gets richer, we could have one.  I 
am not sure how to implement this in Drupal. They offer a "static 
page."  I use one for the "Home Page" entry that shows up on the front 
page.  But it looks like all their other "nodes." 

I am hoping that some Drupal experts or other cms-listers will give us 
some concrete design suggestions. (Delete this. Add that.)

I will also copy this to the AIfIA list, and maybe we could get a real 
IA to look at the problem of IA for describing the CMS industry.

Right now the CMS Forum site only contains:

Forums (Topics from the CMS-list and Vendor Topics) 
(http://cms-forum.org/?q=forum)
CMS News Feeds (http://cms-forum.org/?q=import/bundle/1) and Blog Feeds 
(http://cms-forum.org/?q=import/bundle/1)
The CMSML Feature Comparator comparing 70+ CMS (from  http://www.cmsml.org)

The left navigation contains four sortings of the Forum comments. 
(Active, New, All-time top, and Last viewed)

So it is really pretty simple compared to Ingenta.  How do we make it 
look simple?

Matthew Clapp 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]
>  
>


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