Jason Bedell - Interactive Marketing & Technology Blog

An Exercise in Information Architecture

One of the most challenging activities I see web professionals work through is coming up with the right  Information Architecture. The process ranges from pulling navigation out of thin air (the process I think most commonly used) to incredibly ellaborate and expensive studies with plenty of Ph.d.'s and one-way glass.

The following process is one I have found strikes the delicate balance between simple and arduous. This is best used as a brainstorming exercise with key stakeholders to ensure the business and marketing requirements lead the discussion.

It all startes with identifing your audiences. This usually includes consumers but could also include dealers, distributors, and media professionals. Each of these audiences will have specific needs and thought processes.

Once we find our audience, its time to identify user missions for each audience. So for instance, a consumer's missions may include trying to find a product, getting copies of past invoices, or locating a dealer. A dealer may want to download sales collatoral, learn about upcoming marketing campaigns, or access technical product specifications. If you have the time and resources, you can even find individuals that represent each audience and straight ask them what they are looking for and what they would find value in (careful here, many times they don't really know, so don't take their responses as definitive).

Now that we understand their missions, its time to break down what functionality and peices of content are needed to accomplish them. The functionality will help drive your software development requirements or a product selection if you are planing on using a content mangement system. The content identified will become your content inventory.

This inventory will need to be organized, usually into something resembling a heirarchial structure. This is where your sitemaps and navigation schemes will fall out.

While the process of organizing this information is beyond this entry, a very common approach is to use a 'card sort'. This is where you logically group pieces of content and feature is into intuitive collections. There are several online tools that will help you through this process include Websort.

The user experience of your website has every bit of an impact on your brand as cranky call center rep.

Using User Generated Code To Deliver Your Message

Some people say its not the tech that matters, its the message. And that is true, to a degree.

Web sites today commonly resemble full-blown web applications in sophistication and complexity. Anyone who is charged with the maintenance and development of new features and functionality understands that the underlying technology certainly plays a significant role in how responsive you can be to market demands and how expensive it is to respond and maintain.

So, when it comes to choosing a technology to deliver your message, I put my faith in open source.

To a developer, open source is the ultimate user generated content (UGC), or should I say user generated code. Just as we see the Internet being enriched and becoming a living, breathing thing, open source provides the same breath of fresh air to the global software development community.

Looking for a rock solid security framework? So have hundreds of thousands of others in the community, many of which are more specialized in security than anyone on your team. Odds are "they" have built something and offered it up to the community, free, for you to download and customize to your needs.

Looking for a presentation framework to deliver engaging interfaces that act predictably with performance. Yep, someone else in the world has too. And if you choose the right one, you will receive free updates and enhancements from the community, free.

Looking for a rock solid operating system? Well, we know how that story goes... ;)

Don't get me wrong. I deliver solutions for my clients built on the technology that makes the most since for them. If someone has a team of Microsoft .NET developers and Microsoft infrastructure, it absolutely makes since to use technology that will leverage their existing investments in equipment and people. But if the slate is relatively clean, and there is no significant investment in a technology strategy, I embrace the community in open source.