Information design
Key question
How do you organise information?
Before anything is designed, the information must be organised. The structure determines whether people find what they are looking for, and whether they understand the connections.
Learning objective: You are able to select organising principles, hierarchise content and design a simple information architecture.
First organise, then design.
2.1 / Five organising principles
Almost every system follows one of five principles.
Richard Saul Wurman described five fundamental ways of organising information, summarised as LATCH:
L
Location
Location: by spatial position, such as on a map.
A
alphabet
By name, for example in an index.
T
Time
Time: by date or order.
C
Category
Category: by type or topic.
H
Hierarchy
Hierarchy: by size, importance, or rank.
The same content tells a different story depending on how it is arranged. The choice depends on what people are looking for.
Sort by what people are searching for.
2.2 / Hierarchy and Groups
First things first, keep related items together.
Content needs structure: a headline, a core message, and details. The inverted pyramid model from journalism puts the most important information first, allowing even those in a hurry to grasp the essentials.
Groups relieve working memory: related items are bundled together, different items separated. More on chunking and Gestalt principles in Design Psychology, Sections 2.2 and 5.2.
The most important things belong at the top.
2.3 / Information Architecture
The structure behind navigation and menus.
Information architecture organises the content of a website, app or publication: which sections exist, what are they called, and how are they connected? It is often represented as a tree structure (sitemap).
In card sorting, users group terms written on cards themselves. This reveals which structure matches their expectations, rather than an organisation's internal logic.
Structure around the minds of the users, not the organisation chart.
Exercise
Develop a structure
Task: Organise the content of a club, a school, or a museum for a website.
STEP 1
Collect all the content on cards, one term per card.
STEP 2
Have two people organise the cards into groups and label them.
STEP 3
Choose an organising principle and draw a sitemap.
STEP 4
Use three search tasks to check whether content can be found quickly.
Evaluation: Where did your structure differ from the arrangement of the test participants?