Friday, 1:45pm, Grand Salon B
In designing transactional and content-rich web sites, rules provide an underlying structure that governs the experience: what is displayed, when it’s displayed, and how it responds to user actions. Web design today is at an important crossroads: more complex technologies offer a greater range of features and functions, which permit more elaborate experiences.
The depth of these systems means that information architects no longer design structures with specific pieces of content in mind, but instead have to design structures around classifications, categories, and abstractions. In conjunction with these so-called “objects,” information architects must consider the rules that govern their appearance, display, and response to users.
This session introduces a framework for thinking about rules, providing a vocabulary and taxonomy of rules where none has previously existed.
If conversations on the IAI mailing list are anything to go by, more and more information architects think as much about rules and algorithms as they do about taxonomies and controlled vocabularies. In short, rules define the logic that controls what information is displayed on the screen or web page.
Open an information architect’s portfolio, though, and you’ll see stacks of pristine wireframes, elaborate blueprints, painstaking flowcharts, and other documents that embed rules without really talking about them. Yet information architects love rules. On large content-driven sites, rules leverage classification schemes to determine which content to display, what parts of it to expose, when to show it, and a host of other formatting decisions. For transactions, rules are more than just character limits on input fields: they guide the system through various inputs, scenarios, and requirements.
With static pages long behind us, the job of the information architect has evolved from thinking about the inherent structures of content to thinking about the frameworks that govern the management and display of content. As rules become increasingly relevant to the user experience (describing what to display when and to whom) information architecture will need language and conventions for describing those rules. Designing
navigation these days, for example, means describing rules that drive categorizing content and displaying those categories. A navigation system now must explain how to accommodate unforeseen changes to content, how to deal with content that can live in more than one place, and how to offer flexibility in how content is found.
Rules are especially relevant in template design. A template provides an overall structure for a page, but rules govern how content fills that structure. Rules generally follow a simple conditional statement structure: if certain conditions apply, then display this content. The latest web technologies permit considerable leeway in the conditional clauses, however. There are many different circumstances and potential responses. In the case of a template, display conditions can range from the broad-like time of day-to the specific-like a user’s role and region. Rules grow only more complex and specific from there.
This session will lay groundwork for how we think and talk about this aspect of our work. It will provide a rationale for why thinking about rules is important, distinguish good rules from bad, and offer a framework for designing and documenting rules.
SESSION OBJECTIVES
After attending this session, participants will:
- See how rules can be standardized and structured
- Have a language for talking about rules
- Understand how to incorporate rules into their documentation
INSTRUCTOR
Daniel Brown
Dan Brown is founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user experience consulting
firm based in Washington, DC that has engaged with clients in telecommunications,
media, education, health, high-tech, and other sectors. Dan has been practicing
information architecture and user experience design since 1995.
Prior to founding EightShapes, Dan consulted with organizations ranging from the US
Postal Service, the World Bank, and the Federal Communications Commission to
USAirways, FirstUSA, and Fannie Mae. From 2002-2004, Dan was a Federal
employee, leading the content management program for the Transportation Security
Administration. His portfolio includes work on public-facing web sites, intranets and
extranets, and addresses most aspects of the user experience, from information
architecture and content strategy to interaction and interface design.
Drawing on his expertise in communicating complex ideas and abstractions through
high-quality visual documentation, Dan wrote a book on user experience deliverables -
Communicating Design (New Riders, 2006). Amazon reviews call it “authoritative”,
“practical, personal, comprehensive” and “a cool nerdbook”.
Dan has participated in nearly every IA Summit since its inception in 2000. He’s written
more than a dozen articles for Boxes and Arrows.