Think out of the box

Sites with a reasonable amount of complexity can be rearranged and reorganized many different ways. One site that I’ve worked on organising and reorganising countless times is FlashDen. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve looked at that menu and rearranged it. In some instances we just move pages into different sets and groups so that they seem more logical, and in others we’ve introduced more out-of-the-box thinking.

For example some months ago the menu was becoming overly complex so we removed a whole heap of the more "fluffy" menu items and created a blog that now houses competitions, newsletters, subsite links and other pages that were cluttering up the menu.

Recently we’ve found we have many of what I call "stragglers" – that is pages without a home in the menu. From an information design point of view, stragglers are terrible – even I can’t remember how to get to some of them! The solution this time is to build a wiki system, pipe top level content into the menu behind the scenes, and then use the wiki to house deeper levels of information with its own search, tagging and categorization facilities.

The point of my experiences with FlashDen is that organising information doesn’t even necessarily have to be about putting it into menus and submenus. You may find that some information shouldn’t be on a site, or that it requires a subsite, or that you need to do something else altogether. With FlashDen I have the advantage that it’s been almost 3 years now that I’ve been looking at the content and still to this day I find new arrangements and solutions.

To be an effective information designer and to find the most optimal solutions often requires thinking out of the box. Of course saying "think outside of the box" is much easier to say than to do! Sometimes we are constrained in a box we can’t even see. Some time ago I heard of an experiment where a bunch of jumping bugs were placed in a glass box and over time learnt to jump only so high. When the glass lid was removed the bugs continued jumping the same, restricted height not even realising they could if they wished get out.

So how do you overcome a box you can’t see? Simple! With the help of others who aren’t restricted by the same issues you have. For complex information designs I will often ask other people for organisational ideas giving them only the raw problem and not my own permutations. Getting say a programmer’s ideas or a user’s views will often surprise you as their perspectives are completely different from your own and unhindered by the same set ways of thinking.

If anyone has a huge website, it has to be Chevron. How would you organise all that information?

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16