The End of DITA

So the last DITA session was today and its farewell to this part of the programme.

We were looking at Information Architectures today and it brought back a lot of memories in a strange way. Websites that were permanently Under Construction, dozens of broken links on one page, no way to find what you were looking for even though you knew it was there. Ah, the internet of the mid to late 1990’s, we shall never see your like again.

Other than a few exceptions, back then no one seemed to have any idea how to build a website but everyone was. I remember to build your free one on AOL you were invited to post them pictures via Royal Mail, they would scan and upload them and post them back. Remarkable.

These days due to a better, maybe wider, understanding of architecture born from a trillion rubbish pages, it is less likely a viewer will have the same issues. Yes, things can still be hard to find, yes there can be too many bells and whistles (MySpace being a good example in its early iterations) but on the whole things are much better and more uniform in a good way. Drop someone onto a random website and they will probably be able to navigate it successfully and with some nuance eight times out of ten.

Websites like SourceForge, Tesco and Amazon all have the ability to sign in and  - presumably – personalise your experience to a greater or lesser degree. An interesting element is where and how prominent the ‘log in / sign in’ link is.

Amazon and SourceForge are seemingly designed for the casual browser. They’re not asking you to sign in right away as they encourage browsing. Stroll around, see if you see anything you like. Tesco on the other hands puts sign in front and center.  They want you to sign in as every purchase builds up a greater and more in depth picture of who you are and what you want. Amazon has a similar function but as Tesco has such a wide range of products, including day to day products, the data it has on you is far richer. And to them that means better adverts which keep the cash rolling in.

And what of the mystery vegetable? It looks very familiar, like something that I would be forced to eat by a wife. I name it Pak Choi or Chinese Cabbage. To find this I looked at what the picture was called – mysteryvegetable. By looking for that I found a website which dealt in answering questions about what veg was what. In fact the more I look, the more websites dedicated to veg-identification I found. Is this really what the WWW is here to do?

Websites for groceries seemed to have trouble helping me identify it as I didn’t really know what I was after. But I suppose that the need for tuber identification is already taken care of by the crackpot community, so no need for the corporation to spend money on it.

When it comes to designing information architectures then, a clear plan is necessary...

You need to know what you need to know (do you need to know where your visitors are coming from? Do you need to know their age? Do you need to know anything which would be considered personal?).

You need to know what they need to know (what will they be looking for? Do they need a quick contact page? Or an FAQ? If they need an FAQ is it because your site is too complicated?).

You need to know what you need to know about them (should they be able to set up an account? How much detail will you need? How much of the site can they personalise? How individual will their experience be?).

This is really the first 10 feet of the iceberg as well, the subtle things, the nuances all will be changed by who and what you are selling (or what you are discussing / presenting) and to whom. As a collective experience humanity (not all of it of course, just the long term wired parts) seems to have evolved a generally better innate sense of information architecture and now the complexity lies not in a website that works for all, but one that works for you as an individual surfer.