infoarch. improving online experience.

While mind-mapping and coming up with my three directions for my wireframes I studied usatoday.com to figure out the information they had most prevelant to my section and what they currently have and what is and is not working. I started to realize that I absolutely cannot stand their website. In moving from the main page to the subsection's main page to an article within that section, the entire layout can change every single time. No three pages are set up the same way. The organization was all wonky, in the secondary navigation, the link to the taxes, can also be found in the drop-down menu directly to the left of it. There are many things like this where things pop up in more than one spot that cause annoying redundancies. Also, the types of tags within the articles changed from article to article. Some were tags of sections, some were author tags, and some were even different from that. All of this has got to stop. Below are my three proposals.

The first set is a grid-based design with hierarchy within bigger squares.

The second set is based on a left and right scrolling page with information scrolling vertically.

The third set is another grid-based design but more open and less about drastic heirarchy through different-sized squares.

I ended up going with the second set to take further. I was drawn to it the most of the three. Marty commented on it saying that it felt very ipad-like which I completely agree with. But why can't we take the sleekness of ipad design and apply it (successfully) to website design for a computer?

infoarch. wurman reading.

so this article was written around 1996, so some of this stuff is a bit out-dated, but still completely relevant today. in fact, this very class that we had to do this reading for is the very answer that wurman was wanting.

The amount of information out there today is crazy-huge and it seems no one knows what to do with all of it. Us as a society were brought up to come across as smart, intelligible human beings to peers and colleagues. It's supposedly looked down upon if we say don't understand something, which makes absolutely no sense. I must say that I suffer from this occasionally, when I'm in class and everyone else seems to be understanding something and I don't quite get it, I just won't say anything and figure it out later. But how can you possibly grow and become smarter if you never ask questions or push yourself? This is exactly what Wurman is trying to get at with information architecture. There is all of this information out there that no one knows how to sort through it and figure out a logical order to it all. How can we give it order and structure if no one is willing to step forward and say that they are willing to push themselves to figure out something new. Wurman believed that there needs to be an entire degree focused on solely this, the architecture to knowledge, to information, to research. We will only be able to fully understand information to its fullest until it is organized. I personally loved his LATCH acronym. That all information can be organized in fives ways:

1. Location
2. Alphabet
3. Time
4. Category
5. Hierarchy

This is definitely something to keep in the back of your mind from here on out when organizing information. It's quite a nice place to start organizing when you have no idea where to begin.

infoarch. usatoday research.

USA Annotation Presentation

typefour. concept map.

Symposium vs Conference. what we could come up with was that a symposium is more relaxed and laid-back. It's also more hands-on and personal, whereas a conference is a more formal type of meeting.

This is my beginning concept map for our Typographic Symposium. This is the start of a fourteen week group project with the entire junior class to create a typographic symposium for high school students and kcai freshman. This symposium is hopefully going to give high school students and freshman here at kcai exposure to what design is, is not, and what it can be.

i feel that i definitely over-worked this concept map design wise. i kept pushing and pushing it. if i had more time i would have gone back and stripped it down some. but for the amount of time we had, i'm quite pleased with what i was able to come up with.