Oftentimes, our IT departments attempt to solve the problem through the procurement of new technologies that come with the promise of improving findability only to find that the more technology we throw at the problem, the more complex it becomes and the further behind we fall.
Information Architecture
Information architecture is about helping people understand their surroundings and find what they’re looking for, in the real world as well as online.
Typical activities include: User Research and Analysis, Navigation and Hierarchy Creation, Wireframing and Taxonomies and Metadata creation.
Five Hat Racks, The LATCH Principle
Information may be infinite, however… the organisation of information is finite as it can only be organised by LATCH: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, or Hierarchy.
— Richard Saul Wurman
Responsive Gallery of Responsive Design Interfaces
Another development resource, beautiful in its utility, from the good folks at ZURB. Built with their wonderful Foundation front-end framework.
Supersedes Weedy Garden’s HigherEd RWD Directory and Brad Frost’s Responsive Navigation Patterns as my favourite source of responsive design inspiration.
Anatomy of a search result
I recently wanted to check my knowledge about the structure and origin of search results as served in a Google SERP before a meeting with a stakeholder. I specifically wanted to check their design and how to influence their utility for users.
Here’s a great, but slightly dated (2007), primer from Matt Cutts, a Software Engineer at Google.
Search Result Structure
The major components of a search result snippet:
Legend
- Title
- Query term “City University”; emphasis applied and styled bold
- Content Snippet
- Cached version
- Site Links
- Google index of the domain
Notes
- Developers and content creators have
a great deal of control
over the content in their results. - Critical to consider labelling and information scent; especially in the document title which will become the result Title.
- Description Snippet is drawn from many places, including:
- Meta description tag. Particularly important if content cannot be crawled or is missing.
- Page contents. Weighting to query relevance rather than just location in content order and hierarchy.
- Open Directory Project; especially if content missing or cannot be indexed
- Can use Webmaster Tools to A/B test conversion rates for different Titles and Snippets.
- Cached copy a clue regarding indexing freshness and indexing frequency.
- Site Links are based wholly on search algorithm.
- Search terms are styled bold to provide visual emphasis. The algorithm understands stemming and synonyms but these will not receive any visual emphasis if returned in results.