Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
31 lines (15 loc) · 3.52 KB

module4.md

File metadata and controls

31 lines (15 loc) · 3.52 KB
Raw

Module 4: Information Architecture

What You'll Learn

In this module you will use what you've learned about information architecture to develop an organizational structure for your portfolio and you'll be able to rationalize the choices you made when designing it. You'll be able to explain the differences between a sitemap and navigation and be able to use tools to produce them on your own.

What You'll Produce

You will develop a complete list of all of the content you will include in your portfolio site (a sitemap) and you will develop a navigation scheme that will be intuitive and enable users to quickly find what they need.

Step-by-Step Instructions

  1. Brainstorm a list of all of the types of content you'll need/want in your portfolio. Using what you learned in your own research and the best-practices guide developed by the class, sketch out a list of content you can imagine including in your portfolio. Do not overthink things at this point - consider it a freewrite, a braindump - just get things down on paper.

  2. Organize your content into related categories. What content is related? What isn't? If you can group things, what are those groups called? Now that you've brainstormed all of the content you might want, collapse all of those things down into related categories and give them clear names.

  3. Consider: how might a user navigate that content? Develop a navigation scheme that will help users find content quickly and efficiently. Questions to consider: who are your users? What will they need? What will they want to see first? Again, think about the portfolios you saw and the best-practices guide.

  4. Sketch out your site map. Look at MSU's sitemap, for an example. A good site map groups similar information and gives the most important content first. Obviously, your site map won't be as extensive, but be sure to explicitly name all types of content and organize into a hierarchy according to importance.

  5. Sketch out your navigation. Now it's time to explicitly name how your user will navigate your site. What are the top-level links users will utilize? Are there sub-pages? Which links come first, and why are they important?

  6. Save Your sketches. It's difficult to know if your sketches will be useful in the future, so it's a wise idea to save them. Take a picture with a camera phone, scan them, whatever will work for you. Your instructor will take photos if you need. Save the sketches to a service of your choosing (consider using Evernote and use tagging appropriately).

  7. Select a diagramming tool and make digital versions of your sketches. Pick from the tools presented in class (or another of your preference) and make digital, printable versions of your sitemap and navigation scheme. Invest the time to make them look good - thing of these as possible items in your portfolios. Save your designs as PDFs when you're done.

  8. Write a brief explanation of your design decisions. Being able to explain your choices is crucial - design cannot, by definition, be accidental. Briefly outline your decision making process (where did you go for inspiration, what examples helped you, etc.) and then give your rationale for the pages and organization you chose.

  9. Upload everything to your AFS space. Be sure to link to everything on your course page (photo sketches, sitemap, navigation, rationale). Use nested lists to group multiple links under your "Module 4" entry.