Develop a user-centered
structure for your site
For your site to be successful, you will need to
organize information in a way that makes sense to your users. People
develop expectations for how to find different types of information
and how to accomplish particular tasks. They may expect to search
alphabetically (as when using a phone book), according to groups of
similar items (as in a grocery store), or in a sequence of steps to
fulfilling certain tasks.
Recruit some representative users to help organize
the information content of your site in a way that seems most logical
to them. Card sorting is a test method we have used:
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Create cards of topics your site will cover |
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Ask representative users to sort the cards into
logical groups |
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Analyze the groups that your users create and
determine the optimal organization structure for your site |
In your user analysis, you may have done a task
analysis--analyzing how people accomplish the tasks that your web site
will facilitate. You can use this analysis to organize the steps
within the tasks according to user preferences.
Use the information from your task analysis and/or
card sort to create a flow diagram showing the relationship of
elements of information with each other.
Create a flow
diagram
A flow diagram defines the site structure,
identifies all pages within the site, and shows the pathways linking
each page. Its purpose is to organize the development of the site, and
should be easily visible to all members of the team. Below is a
portion of the navigation map for this site (dotted lines represent
paths to pages not shown here.)
![[sample navigation map for this site]](images/navmap_small.gif)
List the
elements and links for each page of the diagram
Make an itemized list of each page's contents. Your
list should include text, images, sounds, video and audio clips, image
maps, animated GIFs, Java applets, downloadable items, controls such
as print buttons, and all links. Organize your list into categories
that distinguish those items that will appear on every page versus on
certain groups of pages or on individual pages only. For instance you
may have a link to your home page on every page, and a print button
only on certain pages. Organizing your list into categories this way
before beginning your layout will help make sure you leave enough room
in your layout for everything you need, and will help prevent you from
forgetting items.
Design
hierarchies of breadth rather than depth
Research suggests that users begin to lose their
bearings within a hierarchical structure once they go beyond the third
level. As William Horton notes, flat hierarchical structures may cause
users to have to scan longer lists of menu items, but users "will get
lost less often" (1994, p. 170). Refer to Horton's Designing and
Writing Online Documentation for more detail.