Thread by @brownorama

Let's try something new. Here's a Twitter mini case study thread about a sticky information architecture problem. Serious IA nerdery ahead.

You been warned.

In the space of an hour, my client and I unpacked a challenging problem and determined a better approach to the navigation. It was a fascinating process that involved a few key insights.

Some Background
We're building a new product to replace a couple of existing products. The domain is confusing because it comprises some basic widgets that can be classified in many different ways.

Insight #1
In their designer's first draft mock-up, there were three types of concepts: concepts that arrange the widgets hierarchically (structural), concepts that describe aspects of the widgets (topical), and a miscellaneous set of concepts.

Insight #2
The menu in the draft design included a mix of all three of these concepts. I pointed out that the menu was apples and oranges. (Never ceases to amaze me that things so clear to us IAs are not clear to others.)

Insight #3
The structural and topical concept types are orthogonal to each other: there is a meaningful intersection between each level of the structure and each topic. I suggested that we do NOT conflate these two in the navigation. That is, pick one to serve as the backbone.

Insight #4
The client understood that the hierarchy is like a "zoom level". When he thought about it like this, he poked a hole in my "orthogonal nav systems" idea. He said that the topics are overlapping but different at each level of zoom.

Insight #5
The client also pointed out that the concepts I'd lumped into miscellaneous were actually different ways of grouping the widgets. So now we had two more ways of looking at the widgets: ownership and ontological. I called these perspectives.

Insight #5 continued
This is like looking at a recipe from three perspectives: the cuisine (eg: Mediterranean vs. Northern African), the meal type (eg: appetizer vs. dessert), and the diet (eg: vegan vs. kosher). (image: veganuary.com/recipes/middle…)

Insight #6
Furthermore the original hierarchical concept was just another perspective. So now I had a mess of topics (stuff *about* the widgets) and three distinct perspectives (ways to group the widgets). Each perspective had some light hierarchical structure.

Conclusion
We decided that the perspectives would form the backbone of the navigation, much like Kayak gives you different ways of navigating through a list of flights. The topics would be content exposed on each screen, prioritized based on the perspective.

You can think of these perspectives as questions:
• Hierarchical - Where does this widget live?
• Ownership - Who is responsible for this widget?
• Ontological - What type of widget is this?

Hey! This was my first substantive Twitter thread. What did you think? What should I do differently next time? What kinds of IA problems are you working on?

Thanks for reading!

Elaborating:
For a recipe web site, the menu would include Cuisine, Meal Type, and Diet. Clicking one would display the recipes sorted by those concepts.
Click on Cuisine: the page would show a list of cuisines, and "topics" important to cuisines (like ingredients and methods).