What's happening

Davide Potente, University for Foreigners of Perugia, IT
Erika Salvini, University for Foreigners of Perugia, IT

The big chain IKEA approaches the information they provide in different ways:

• the products’ catalogue approach
• the web site approach
• the exhibition approach.

There is not a unique and coherent model of interaction between people and information, which could be adapted to any domain.

The catalogue is built on a hierarchic-enumerating classification: 15 classes highlighted by different colours and relative subclasses for each one.To obtain an integrated information architecture’s scheme, you need to:

• use the same products’ classification in the three domains;
• use the distinctive colour for any individual class in all three domains, adapting to the different peculiarities.

Three types of interventions are possible to transfer web advantages to the physical shop:

• more access to departments, in harmony with the web-faceted classification;
• maps and information points to make the customer's mobility easier, to make them aware of where they are at all times (wayfinding) and the distance they have travelled (breadcrumbs);
• lcd screen terminals in the central area of the shop to show products, with relative characteristics and positions inside the shop (findabilty).

In the same way, we can compare the website <http://www.apple.it> to the Apple Store RomaEst, to notice how the information architecture crosses two domains: the Web and the physical world.

This is the web navigation menu related to the Store areas:

• Home (the Apple logo): Hoardings on the walls as products’ preview
• Store: All tables showing products with related details
• Mac: Area showing Mac computers
• iPod+iTunes: Area showing iPod, iTunes and Apple TV
• Downloads: Area showing software solutions
• Support: Genius Bar for the products’ withdrawal and the assistance

The ADD Area Description Diagram can show the link between the Web and physical world. We can use it to describe our integrated Information Architecture model.

Laurent Goffin, Emakina, BE

Social network aren’t only Web2.0 start up kind of site and we can use it is many different kind of application for companies : intranet employee social network, customer & supplier network, communities, customer care initiative, knowledge management tools, etc.

In order to deliver this kind of experience, information architects have to develop new skills and techniques. I have worked on five different social networks and I d like to share my experience in developing social web experiences in different context.

Through this presentation, I’m presenting critical elements to take in account during social network conception and answer to different questions : what are the specificities of information structure for social networks? what are the specificities of a social network user interface? what are the specific user behaviours to handle? Through my experience, I have identified some kind of behavioural patterns based on data observation and data mining How can we develop user interface and architecture ensuring network will grow? What is the strategic approach we have to develop during the network lifecycle? How to go further in developing a ubiquitous social network experience taking in account the full web ecosystem and also the offline environment?

This presentation will be explained though very visual elements and I’ll interact with public. I’ll show some deliverable used during those different stages. Last, “Building social web/network experience” doesn’t aim focusing only on social networks. I wish showing to all IA community how important it is to think our conception approach within a broader scope of skills and analysis.

Planning and building user experience requires certainly user centric approach must also use web analytics & business intelligence, marketing and communication skills, persuasive interface technique, entrepreneurship, etc. I really dream of a very very big IA.

Claudia Urschbach, BBC, UK

Trends in web and software development impact Information Architecture by informing what types of products we work on and defining what skills we need. I will look at current web trends, often summarised under the themes ‘Web 3.0’ or ‘Semantic Web’, and link them to our discipline and IAs’ every day working lives. The session highlights what changes are already happening, which new knowledge areas are arising and for which parts of our work change seems inevitable in the near future. Especially the latter intends to provoke discussion; one can not expect my prognosis is shared by all IAs! My session will have 10-15 minutes for the discussion of possible changes at the end.

Ideally individuals will leave my session thinking about which current trends may impact specifically them, which best practice may need re-thinking, which area to skill up in, where to re-draw the outline of their professional remit. The informal title of my session would be ‘What’s happening on the web and what’s it got to do with me’.

Examples for trends I will link to IA:

• Personalisation – Users customising content for their individual needs means there is no such thing as THE user journey, there are plenty. Interaction design is becoming more complex, should wire frames and paper-prototypes cater for all scenarios? Should we all learn Flash?
• Navigation, Revealing Interfaces, Dynamic Publishing – Navigation does not happen in one dimension any more. Where will ontologies replace taxonomies?
• Semantic Web Technologies RDF, OWL, Sparql, SWRL, GRDDL, AJAX – How much do IAs have to know? Should we champion certain technologies?
• Cross Platform Publishing, Content Re-use, ‘Feedisation’ of content – One piece of content will be served to users in various context scenarios. What does that mean for content modelling and the definition of relevant content chunks?

James Kalbach, LexisNexis, DE

Ethnographic research methods have many potential advantages for businesses, including helping to:

• Identify opportunities for product innovation based on deep, unique insights into user behaviour
• Discover new product opportunities, vital enhancements to existing products, and reveals potential differentiators from competitors
• Make the real world visible to design and development teams, as well as to the business.

Unfortunately, the IA community has only marginally and indirectly dealt with the subject of ethnographic research. It’s essential in understanding human information experience and in innovating information services around those experiences. This presentation addressed this gap in the IA canon.

The talk has two parts.

1. First, I’ll briefly share a method we’ve developed in house for Commercial Ethnography. This will include practical details of the method based on our experiences and failures, including setting up and resourcing projects, conducting and analyzing the research, and innovating products.
   What’s more, bringing such methods into a business context presents challenges. Getting stakeholder buy-in is chief among these. I’ll offer practical advice in dealing with accelerated time scales, limited budgets, and recruitment hurdles, and getting stakeholder buy-in.
2. In the next portion of the presentation, I’ll focus on a specific set of findings to illustrate one type of information behaviour we’ve observed with the information workers we studied. In particular, the notion of ‘real’ documents, as we call it, refers to a range of qualities offline documents have that often get lost with online information. For one, document quality is essential for credibility, but many online systems provide poor document quality. And, the physical and visual aspects of print materials are used to manage and direct the flow of legal information work.

These types of information experiences can then be generalized to broader contexts. Examples range from the color-coded folders on Gmail to sophisticated systems like Press Display (www.pressdisplay.com). Or, consider the increased (not decreased) use of printers in offices to bring digital information to paper. What’s more, document genre and format play a role in navigating and using information in many situations.

In the end, online information systems fail at delivering an optimal information experience, and offline work habits still persist in many contexts. Better understanding human information behaviour is key to increasing the adoption of the innovations we create. This talk offers practical information for designing for better online information experiences.

Victor Lombardi, Smart Experience, US

From Battista Pininfarina to Rem Koolhaas, Europe has a rich tradition of designers who create concepts that look forward to the next product cycle or beyond to new strategic directions. For various reasons this practice is mostly absent from information architecture; our common practice is to move from research to feature design skipping the stage in which broad ideas are explored. Because information architecture can be the dominant skill set on new media design teams, ‘redrawing the map’ of IA process to incorporate concept deign can improve the overall solution design and introduce a strategic activity natural for IA practitioners.

Concept design is an early phase of the design process that explores far-ranging design ideas which are plausible but which often set aside immediate technical and situational constraints in order to generate new options.

This presentation will briefly introduce the practice of concept design, look at how concept design can benefit information architecture, and then offer practical tools to incorporate concept design in our work. The majority of the presentation will focus on tools to generate and document concepts, adapting techniques from other design disciplines to information architecture.

Great design concepts have a visceral effect. They force us to think differently. They carry an emotional impact that sways our opinions. They can help us develop better solutions by diverging from conventional solutions and by looking further into the future.

Chiara Fox, Adaptive Path, US

Content analysis is the examination of the content and features that make up a website. Through content analysis, an information architect can understand the relationships, interdependencies and patterns that exist within the current content on the site. This process also allows the information architect to understand requirements and constraints inherent in the content. This can be done via the content audit, or sampling of representative pieces of content. Content genres, or types, can also be identified which are used to create a content map of the site. The content map provides the basic building blocks for gap analysis, which maps user tasks with the content genres.

More and more often, clients are asking to perform the content analysis on their own. Content audits often take a long time to complete, especially on large sites. Budget constraints, as well as a desire to build competencies within internal teams, have driven clients to look for places within an information architecture project that can be completed in-house. Clients look to consulting information architects for direction and mentorship in completing this crucial step in the information architecture development process.

This session will focus on the methods used to complete a content analysis.

Recommendations on how to conduct a comprehensive content audit, when to do a content audit vs. a content inventory, how to identify patterns and relationships within content and how to determine what makes up a content genre will be included. Steps and ideas for teaching these methods to a non-IA will also be discussed. Real-world examples will be used to illustrate the points.

Scott Weiss, Human Factors Int., UK

Documenting mobile designs differs from documenting desktop designs. Oddly, mobile designs are trickier to clearly describe, since soft key labels change as the “focus” moves about the screen. These IA’s are further complicated when animation becomes not just adornment but an integral part of the interaction of an application. Touch, surprisingly, is more closely aligned with desktop UI’s, due to the direct manipulation parallels; however, gestural user interfaces present yet new challenges.

Mobile design is further complicated by the business requirements of the telecoms industry: 1. Multiple versions of a design are required to accommodate different brands and different feature sets; 2. Designs must be delivered on extremely tight and often-changing schedules; 3. Equipment samples are rarely available until after designs have been finalised. These challenges have contributed to the lightweight, quick-to-generate methods presented in this session.

This presentation walks through a documentation methodology honed from years of client-facing experience and the maturation and melding of several different strategies to produce what the presenter feels is a particularly clear and easy to follow strategy. The presentation will take a finished design, break it into its design and documentation components, and walk through how the documentation for the design was produced.

Eric Reiss, FatDUX, DK

As IAs, we often preach the value of our work by citing the self-service opportunities we can create. Yet how many of us have actually examined the foundations of customer service? And can we still learn from the service gurus of the 80s?

Having helped develop several service-training programs -- and indirectly turned two mediocre carriers into “Airlines of the Year” -- I think customer service might just be the UX motherlode.

The concept of “customer service” has been kicking around for over a century. More recently, we’ve seen it morph into “Customer Relationship Management.” Basically, we’re talking about the design and execution of a system of activities -- people, processes, and technology -- that ultimately build brand, revenues, and customer satisfaction. These services include:

• Help me services (Scotty, beam me up)
• Fix it services (My doggone printer just ate my homework)
• Value-added services (Here’s milk to go with your cookies)

Some are online, some are offline; often they are converged systems that address both areas. In this presentation, I will review the basics of customer service and show:

• Why 90% customer satisfaction isn’t nearly good enough.
• Why most service metrics don’t address the real customer pain points
• Why service redundancy is usually way better than corporate synergy
• Why sometimes we shouldn’t listen to our customers
• How we, as IAs can start to create robust service experiences that build real trust and increase conversion rates.

For decades, service gurus such as Ron Zemke, John Tschohl, Karl Albrecht, and Ray Considine, have been helping businesses understand the dynamics of customer service. Some of them finally woke up to the opportunities of the Internet around 2001 -- but their messages were buried in the rubble of the dot-bomb.

I can show you where to dig.

Andrea Resmini, University of Bologna, IT
Dorte Madsen, Copenhagen Business School, DK
Katriina Byström, University College of Borås & Göteborg University, SE
Nil Pharo, Oslo University College, NO
Luca Rosati, University for Foreigners of Perugia, IT
Stanislaw Skorka, Pedagogical University of Krakow, PL

What is the understanding of Information Architecture on which higher IA education programmes are established? That is a tough question, especially if you ask the professionals, as there seems to be a vast gap between an already established field of practice and emerging field of study. However, the field of IA will not grow and mature for long without the recognition of academia, and vice versa.

The panel aims at recognizing where IA theory and practice in the professional and academic world stand today, and why it is important that a dialog between the two withstands. Awareness of the issues at stake by both sides of the coin is the key: academia focuses on IA from the perspective of theoretical and conceptual development and practice seeks the core of IA as a profession, and both are needed for creating a solid ground of the field to flourish among other disciplines and professions. The panel investigates design methodologies, best practices, and the theories and ideas behind practical and theoretical development on the field by assessing differences, similarities, inconsistencies, misunderstandings, and the reasons behind these. Together with the audience the difficulties to join forces are discussed.

John Ferrara, Vanguard, US

The video game industry produces an enormous volume of highly innovative user interface experiences, but this rich source of creative thinking is largely unseen by communities dedicated to conventional software or Web design. As gaming becomes a ubiquitous activity among a vast worldwide customer base, its direction and conventions will become not merely relevant to HCI design, but indeed impossible to ignore. The vast market penetration of gaming systems also offers a large-scale laboratory for researching new directions in interactivity.

This presentation will explain the gaming experience and discuss its significance to the design of conventional user interfaces. It will further:

• Provide an overview of game-based interaction spaces, and the shared characteristics of all games. The presentation will posit applications to non-gaming UI’s, and review real world examples of gaming resolutions to interface problems.
• Discuss emerging interface standards in gaming, with an eye toward crafting analogous experiences in dissimilar applications.
• Review collaborative and competitive gaming interfaces used for synchronous play.
• Survey innovations in nonstandard video game user inputs, and speculate about possible applications to conventional software interfaces.

This presentation will be of greatest interest to user interface designers who have the opportunity to rethink broad paradigms for interactivity in software or Web development, or for those who are interested in integrating gamelike components into a UI.

Joe Lamantia, Keane, US

The Web is shifting to a DIY (Do It Yourself) model of user experience creation, where people assemble individual combinations of content and functionality gathered from many sources to meet their particular needs. The DIY model for creating user experiences offers many benefits in public and consumer settings, and also inside the enterprise. But over time, it suffers many of the same problems that historically made portals unusable and ineffective, including congested designs, poorly planned growth, and inability to accommodate changes in structure and use.

This case study demonstrates a simple design framework of standardized information architecture building blocks that is directly applicable to portals and the DIY model for creating user experiences, in two ways. First, the building blocks framework can help maintain findability, usability and user experience quality in portal and DIY settings by effectively guiding growth and change. Second, it is an example of the changing role of IA in the DIY world, where we now define the frameworks and templates other people choose from when creating their own tools and user experiences.

Using many screenshots and design documents, the case study will follow changes in the audiences, structures, and contents of a suite of enterprise portals constructed for users in different countries, operating units, and managerial levels of a major global corporation. Participants will see how the building blocks provided an effective framework for the design, expansion, and integration of nearly a dozen distinct portals assembled from a common library of functionality and content.

This case study will also explore the building blocks as an example of the design frameworks IA’s will create in the DIY future. We will discuss the goals and design principles that inspired the building blocks system, and review its evolution over time.

Andrea Rosenbusch, Zeix AG, CH
Jacqueline Badran, Zeix AG, CH

Public transport is highly developed in Switzerland. The geographically segmented market has lead to a complex system of tickets and prices for regional, national and international tickets.

During the last two years, we developed three applications for purchasing tickets for the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) with the method of user-centered design. The case study will present the major challenges of building IAs and processes for the product range considering all stakeholders and giving priority to user experience. We will talk about the problems which came up designing these different kinds of interfaces, the solutions proposed and those accepted by the users – and last but not least we will share some of the lessons we learnt on these projects.

The three applications contained of:

1. A touch screen application for end-users for regional and national tickets (redesign and upgrade of ca 1000 vending machines in stations). Since the vending machines are increasingly substituting salespersons, the fundamental requirement was that everyone, including elderly and handicapped people, be able to handle the touch screen process. In consequence, accessibility and error prevention were two of the main issues. At the same time, the range of products sold was expanded, thus requiring more guidance for all users.
2. An application for the SBB’s clerks for international tickets. The background of renewing the application for selling international tickets was a major improvement of back-end systems. With the integration of a large number of data into a single interface, the major challenge was to display the maximum amount of information in a way which could still be interpreted by the clerks.
3. A web-interface for end-users for international tickets. This was an adaptation of the professional application for the web, mainly focussing on reducing complexity for the non-professional public with as little loss of information as possible.

Floris Ketel, Mirabeau, NL

Mirabeau helped KLM (www.klm.com) to re-design their 7th generation online bookings engine. Within this application there is little room for error as being the e-commerce core of the website of KLM. This application should help users to find the right flight for the right price on the right date as fast as possible. This makes the booking engine a challenge from an information architecture perspective; large amounts of dynamical data, complex technical infrastructure, unique interaction models and multi lingual user base.

With the help of end-users during the re-design process, KLM and Mirabeau were able to create a new User Experience that will help users in their flight selection. In this case-study Mirabeau will address; the complexity of a booking engine, how small nuances in interaction can make differences in business and experience, how to integrate extensive multiple user involvement during a re-design process, How to implement a successful project methodology like RUP with multiple third parties.

Tim Ostler, Tribal DDB London, UK

Can IA have anything to say to the world of digital marketing (DM)? Come to that, does DM have anything to contribute to IA? What value can an IA possibly add to a week-long promotional microsite design project? How do you draw the line between IA, interaction design, visual design and creative direction?

DM tends to be overlooked at IA conferences. Perhaps that’s because many people see it as irrelevant to traditional IA. But DM is where much of the growth in online activity has been in the past few years, and it’s instructive to consider the different rules it obeys.

Some highlights:

• Traditional IA values near-instantaneous navigation to your goal; DM is all about creating an engaging journey
• Traditional sites originate with business requirements framed by a strategist or marketing manager; DM sites more often begin with a compelling idea from a creative team
• Traditional IA sets a premium on usability and orientation; with DM the priority is on engaging and seducing the user
• Traditional IA is page-based; DM is often state-based, animated transitions taking place within a page context that stays the same

Ultimately, techniques associated with DM are seeping into the mainstream of traditional websites – to their advantage. And as broadband speeds increase, so will the relevance of seductive animated experiences that are the stuff of digital marketing.

Bogo Vatovec, Bovacon, DE

Personalization has been a marketing selling argument for years and many websites support various levels of personalization. However, there are very few know methods and practices in the information architecture and interaction design community on how to conceptualize, model and specify personalization behaviour when creating the site. This case study demonstrates the experiences conceptualizing a large online social community:

• Challenges in working with an international client and several design and IT agencies.
• Methods and tools defined to specify the interaction and personalization behaviour
• Integrating various tagging concepts like editor tagging, tag clouds and user tagging.
• A critical view at what worked and what not and what would we do different now.

David De Block, Internet Architects, BE
Erik Verdeyen, Internet Architects, BE

Measuring has become more and more important to the job of the information architect.

• We need to measure the KPI's of our projects to assure we meet our customers business objectives.
• We need to measure the usage of the site to assure it's effectiveness.
• We need to measure the users behaviour on the site so we can optimize the information architecture to meet their needs.
• We need to measure business parameters such as sales numbers, conversion rates, ... and compare them to the traffic analysis.

Measuring becomes essential to define what we do but also to define why we do it. We need to justify and document the effect our work has on the overall business. A new generation of tools allows us to integrate data from traffic analysis, CRM, ERP, with our traditional work of defining navigations, taxonomies, content organization, etc.

Most usability tests only include a small sample of users meanwhile there is data available on all of our visitors behaviours, we need to exploit this data and use it to define and refine the overall user experience of our online projects.

Søren Muus, FatDUX, DK
Wolf Nöding, DE
Filip Borloo, Internet Architects, BE

This panel is presenting the draft for a roadmap to a stronger, permanent, European IA/UX network, inviting to the discussion of the ways we need to follow in order to get there, which is the goal of the proposed panel.

Background Last day on last years summit in Barcelona there was an improvised panel discussion entitled “The Future of European IA” on the topic of the measures to be taken, in order to strengthen the European IA/UX network.

This panel was partly inspired by a poster presentation and survey made on the same summit, on the same subject, that revealed a interest in such a network, but no way to get there.

One of outcomes of the panel discussion was a decision to support the plan for a workshop to propose a roadmap for the creation of strong and permanent European IA/UX network.

The workshop is now set to take place during the last weekend in august this year, with named participants from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Holland, UK, Italy, France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Norway, Poland and Hungary. And the findings will be the proposed measures to be taken - the roadmap to follow in order to achieve the final goal; a stronger IA/UX network in Europe.

This roadmap is what we would like to present at a panel discussion, at the summit, where the goal is to find out which ways on the roadmap we need to follow, to get to a stronger, permanent, European network that can support an inter-european exchange of experience, education, opinions, discoveries, job opportunities on a person-to-person level.

Christopher Fahey, Behavior Design, US

Fifty years ago, the father of user-centered design Henry Dreyfuss included merchandising among a product designer’s core job responsibilities, declaring that the successful designer “accepts the responsibility of his position as liaison linking management, engineering, and the consumer and co-operates with all three.”

Merchandising can be defined as the strategy and implementation of how a product is presented to customers as they decide whether or not to adopt or purchase. It is the aspect of design that focuses on a product’s desirability (as opposed to its utility, price, usability, etc). It is where product design and advertising intersect.

Traditionally, merchandising has been thought of as a problem exclusive to retail businesses, but in today’s interactive product design milieu merchandising goes far beyond showroom dummies and point-of-purchase displays.

In the practice of interactive design and information architecture, merchandising – when it is addressed at all – is usually only discussed as a challenge of usability and efficiency, and generally only in an e-commerce context. But in a world of word-of-mouth experiences, online reviews, test-drive videos, unboxing photos, and free beta products, merchandising must be built-in to the design of an interactive product, and should be considered in the earliest stages of the design process – i.e., during the information architecture development. A product’s style, voice, onboarding experience, customer support channels, long-term upgrade and “long wow” lifecycle, and the user community that forms around it, can and should be part of the product designer’s fundamental objectives.

This talk will show the history of merchandising in traditional product design, and will look at examples of successful interactive merchandising design (as broadly defined above) both in the retail/e-commerce context and, most importantly, inherent and emergent in the designs of Web 2.0 applications and services. In short, the talk discusses how to bring a new kind of merchandising consciousness to interactive product design to help practitioners become more conscious of, and responsible for, the greater value their services bring to their businesses.

Martin Belam, currybet.net, UK

Ask any average user to perform a task on the Internet, and the chances are that they will start by tapping a couple of words into Google. The search engine giant has become the 'map of the Internet' that everybody seems to use to navigate.

But if 'everything starts with Google', where does that leave site search? This is a particular problem for news providers. Google's universal results already include the latest news, and the Google News product is gaining in popularity - ranked as the fourth most 'trusted' news source in the US, even though it is simply an algorithm.

The challenge, therefore, for news organisations, is to deliver a site search service that offers something more than Google can. They need to offer features that take advantage of a better mapping of their own content, and an understanding of their own audience. And they need to get the results right - every single time.

Looking at a wide range of European broadcasters and newspaper publishers including Kathimerini, ORF, Corriere della Sera, El Pais, The Guardian and the BBC, this presentation shows how news providers are using their site search facilities to differentiate themselves from the ubiquitous Google search box.

The presentation includes insights from real life user-testing sessions within news organisations, and explains how search log and search usage analytics can help a news provider determine the set of search features and UI priorities that they should be delivering to their users.

Peter Van Dijck, BE

Social networks are growing all over the world, but how are the IA’s of these networks managing this? What patterns and strategies do they use? What are the challenges? What works and doesn’t?

We’ll discuss different strategies (country offices or not?), and different information architecture patterns used in global social networks. We’ll use lots of real-world examples to illustrate.

We’ll talk about the following topics and much more:

• How different business models can have an impact (the advertising market doesn’t have the same strength worldwide, for example).
• Users from different cultures can develop different interaction styles with the same software. How do you deal with that?
• Crowdsourcing UI translation is popular. When can that approach work?
• When you take your social network global, where should you start?

With examples from some well-known and a few not so well-known social networks, this talk will give you a good insight in how social networks are going global, and what the IA challenges and some possible solutions are.

Irene Manresa, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, ES

Traditionally, Information Architecture has focused most often on how information can support usability than on how information can support the overall online experience of the user. This presentation intends to offer a small step towards improving this situation by explaining a real project where information architecture has been created to promote a key goal for our institution that goes well beyond to day to day user tasks and interactions and into the user’s social needs.

The main objective of the project was to design a new version of the home page of the virtual campus of our university; by this we mean, the first page that the users visit after identifying themselves on the public portal. This new version had to meet the highest usability requirements for all different kinds of users and also to promote community identification.

To achieve this last goal we analysed how users interact between each other on our campus and we realized that our community engagement was theme centred. This means users interact around specific shared interests. This is not something new so we can see the same thing happening in some well-known platforms: you tube (videos), flickr (photos), etc.

To create the new architecture, first we used traditional user centered design methodologies such us card sorting, focus groups and so on. That provides us an AI with a high usability performance for every kind of user.

After that, we identified, and coordinated, information which was of interest to different kinds of user. Connecting information according the interests of our users allowed us to create suitable contexts for networking.

We have learned interesting lessons from this project. One of them is that creating several smaller community environments around specific topics enables users to access material which is of greater individual interest than to concentrate all the community efforts in only one point of the architecture.

Deanna Marbeck, BBC, UK
Silver Oliver, BBC, UK

“URL design for information architects” discusses why we, as Information Architects, should take responsibility for URL design. Shouldn’t we just leave URLs to the techies? We argue that URLs are part of the user experience and the site structure, and therefore fall within the IA domain. We look at the ways users interact with URLs – bookmarking, emailing, guessing, search results. We also discuss designing URLs as a method of creating the site structure. Once you have a URL structure does this supersede the ubiquitous sitemap?

We then go through the basic principles of good URL design – persistent, readable, hackable. Which is most important and how can all three principles work together? We explain the reasons behind each of these principles and look at examples of good and bad URLs. We then look at extending each of these principles with some “bonus points” actions an IA can take to make our URLs even better.

There can be a number of issues with implementing good URL design. How can we communicate these URLs to people both in our team, and other stakeholders, in an understandable manner and what do the IA deliverables look like? We give some examples of URL design deliverables.

And finally, a worked-through example of a site designed using these principles. What did we start with and how did we get to the current structure? Having suffered through the process, was it worth it? We think the answer is a resounding “Yes”.

Ruud Ruissaard, Informaat, NL

Traditionally, information architects focus on the organization and structure of content in publications. The manner in which the content components of these publications are authored in the CMS is usually tackled by CMS implementators from a technological instead of a content design perspective. As a result authors and editors, the users of a CMS, find it hard to organize and structure content in an efficient manner. The information architect can help to streamline the authoring and editing process by designing high level content structures that help authors and editors to focus on the message of the content only. As an additional effect these content structures will help to create usable, predictable and consistent publications.

The introduction of a CMS usually involves a transition from an informal to a formal, controlled and role-based content management organization. During the transition, the information architect can add value as a sparring partner modelling the content management organization and helping specify the necessary features and functions of the CMS. The activities of the IA vary depending on the stage of the transition such as the CMS requirements stage, the CMS selection stage or the CMS implementation stage. A CMS requirements inventory, a blueprint of the content management organization and a workflow model are typical deliverables of the IA.