When I started designing websites it was all about space. That’s how I thought about it anyway. I had a set of information that I had to present logically but I had to factor in how people were going to move around that information. The easiest way for me to think about it was to imagine someone moving through space. They had to feel oriented, that was the key to making your website usable. That is, making people feel comfortable using your website. If they knew where they were and felt comfortable about where they were going all would be ok.
That was in the old days.
Now there’s a whole new breed of websites/applications that make the spatial simile a little redundant, or at least force those of us who think like that to think a bit harder.
The key thing now is connections. It’s about networks and most importantly it’s about how one piece of information or content relates to another and this relationship can be arbitrary.
The biggest influence on this change is the advent of user-supplied content. Of course, for an information architect, the idea of content created on the fly is horrifying. How the hell am I supposed to deal with content that just appears? How can I make sure it all fits together, that it all slots into place? You don’t. They do.
This is even worse. I’m going to leave classification to users? Yes, and you’re going to sit back and watch what they create. And my, what a thing of beauty it is. If you told me 18 months ago that people would be uploading/bookmarking material and CLASSIFYING it and that their classification would work and would spawn even more connections (think RSS feeds from del.icio.us tags) that would create even more content avenues, my mind would have been in melt-down.
Now it seems logical. So obvious it was too obvious to see.
So what’s my point? The way people think about information is changing. They’re not always trying to work their way through systems of classification that are applied, they’re applying the systems. The systems are always in flux. They are open to graphic reprensentations of information. They are classifying their material with an eye on what others do. There is a desire to have their stuff found so they look for tags that fit with those of others. Sure, there are some tags in terms of things like Flickr that are incredibly personal and have no resonance outside of the person who created them but even within those there is consistency. (Check out how many people have tagged their del.icio.us bookmarks ‘toread‘ or ‘toblog‘).
People aren’t operating in a vacuum. They are happy to classify their own material but there is always an eye on the bigger picture. We’re social animals I guess…
Cross-posted on Stack.
