Off the Top: Information Architecture Entries
Showing posts: 211-225 of 308 total posts
Tablet Hotels gets Experience Design and IA right
The November 2002 edition of ID Magazine reviews Tablet Hotels. For those that are not familiar, Tablet Hotels is a Web site that focusses on well designed hotels that are not from the cookie cutter molds of the large chains. These boutique hotels presented are from around the world. The site allows users the ability to select by location, amenities, and the traveler's agenda.
The response to "What was the biggest design challenge in creating the site?" points to the success:
The booking path was the greatest design challenge. We built our own proprietary real-time reservation engine, and when we began, we really wanted to create something outstanding and above and beyond the sterile process that's out there now. However, as we got into it, we found ourselves handcuffed by the antiquated systems that the engine had to connect to (GDS and hotel inventory systems). Throw in the fact that our site caters to an international audience and that the language terms and general policies of hotels vary greatly throughout the world, and we had our work cut out for us in our information architecture.
The small site of Tablet Hotels had not only their own information architecture (micro IA) to work through be the semantic variations of an industry so to digitally interact with various players (macro IA). The pairing of these two extremes seems to be wonderfully executed. The visual design of the site attracts the international customers searching for design and customer focussed hotels. Each hotel has a well written snippet and are photographed from design friendly perspectives. The reviews also offer a "citysense", which is a, self described, sensory guide to region covering: look, listen, taste, touch, and smell. The interactive components are also executed very well with allowing the user a the ability to select the elements/facets that are important to them when making the selection for their hotel.
The Tablet Hotel site is very well thought through and has spent much time and consideration walking through the whole array of Experience Design/User-Centered Design roles, including information architecture, to make a site that raises the bar for other hotel sites.
Go back
I had an early preview of a site this past week so to add comments. It is odd to me that sites are still being built with the frame of reference that the user will come through the "font door". If you read your log files the users come in at every opening. It is about even odds that a new user to the site will come there from a search engine, an external link, or from another pointer (e-mail or article). The frame of reference should always try to provide some orientation to the user, such as breadcrumbs or some other link out to related or parent information.
The item that I found a little jarring was a "Go back to the previous page" and it was not a javascript, but a link to what the developer thought was a next level up page. Pure linear navigation is a practice that is no longer a practice, if it ever was. Somebody last night at the DC-IA book club asked whether we navigated or searched, as always it seems to depend. With sites like Amazon we mostly searched, while some smaller sites we would click around. It seemed the greater volume of information lead to a greater instance of searching.
We did not talk about this for long, but it has been resonating all day. One of the things that Amazon does extremely well is end-search navigation. Most folks seem to search Amazon to find a particular item, but then Amazon's navigation and related offerings that could attract the user to the item, which they were searching for or to a similar item. The search result pages offer links to narrow the results or to ensure the user is looking for the musician Paul Young or author Paul Young. A user arriving at an Amazon book page would have all the options and information they needed to find related information and where they are in the Amazon site.
DC-IA book club
Those of you in the DC area the DC-IA group has their book reading tonight at Barnes and Noble in Bethesda at 7:30pm. The book for this month is Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd edition (the polar bear). Dan Brown who organizes the book club is reminding folk of the free coffee.v-2 redesign
V-2.org redesigns, which is making reading the wonderful content much easier. Adam and others at V-2 provide great insights in user-centered design and information architecture. Adam is also a fellow Boxes and Arrows alumni.AIfIA launches
A group of around 20 Information Architects gathered together in person and in digital environments over the last half year to put together a non-profit organization to help the Information Architect profession. We are proud to announce The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture has opened its doors to provide resources to full-time IAs as well as part-time IAs and even to those curious about Information Architecture. We would love your help and support and we will give all we can professionally to support you and the industry.IA primer
This evening I went to Content and Coffee a networking/information sharing event for content editors and writers for the Web. This evenings event was focussed on IA and had Thom Haller, Cinnamon Melchor, Vera Rhoads, and Sharyn Horowitz on a panel. This was essentially a light overview of IA, but the folks did a really nice job explaining IA and how they sell IA and its benefits to their clients or management. I may also go to the November 11 event covering 508 accessibility issues as it is a fun topic and it is good to get other perspectives.I am not a somebody I am a persona
... I am Terrance Austin. I am a persona.Wahoo, Books
What a wonderful week in books. I just received Christina Wodtke's Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web today and it looks fantastic. I have only leafed through it briefly, but it seems to cover the basis wonderfully and provide excellent guidence on how to get through IA successfully.
Saturday I picked up Jesse James Garrett's The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and have read it in little snippets and have made it through a very good chunk in no time. Much of what I have learned over time, from experience, or from great thinkers like Jesse, which leads to successful Web sites or information applications is in this book. Knowing the steps and phases of approaching development will help you greatly. Jesse has it down for all to read and it is wonderfully written.
I am very glad to not only know these to folks, but that they are sharing what they have learn for others to gain from their experiences. This sharing is what the Web was build upon and will keep the Web improving into its next generations and incarnations. Congratulations guys!
Google for your enterprise
I went to a small meeting at work today with some folks from Google who were showing their Google Appliance, which was very impressive. Having the Google search generating the search for your enterprise/organization's site would be great, but it got much better than just that bonus. The Google Appliance has the ability to augment the search with a thesaurus to offer the user the option of adding "personal safety restraint devices" when they searched for "seatbelt". This functionality works similarly to Google's spelling corrections.
The advantages did not stop with Google's great search engine, but it also comes with Google's hardware that they have specified and built with failover (if buying more than one rackmounted hardware piece). This just rocks, a software company that is responsible not only for their software, but the hardware it runs on. Apple has had success with this combination and Google's systems are renoun for their great uptime and their ability to return results very quickly. Google boasts having the hardware and software up and configured in one day (when is the last time you have seen this happen, nearly all other search engines are in the 10 to 15 day range). Color me impressed with this demo and seemingly end-to-end search hardware and software package. Google search that can be augmented to provide additional assistance to users, which could let IA's focus on providing great navigational structures for the folks that do not always search to find their information.