Designing Hierarchical IAs

A few days ago I asked a simple question of information architects. The question was this: “When designing, do you create hierarchical information architectures?”. I promised to summarize the results, and since they were very interesting that’s what I’ve done here.

Fortunately, the comments had a lot of intriguing ideas. I only wish the authors had written more! So, here are they are, in no particular order:

* browsing allows for serendipity
* direct search allows for accuracy and speed
* site maps tend to appear hierarchical
* some hierarchies lose users, no matter what tools are offered
* problems comes when you try to force a hierarchy where one shouldn’t exist
* site maps help designers understand how the site will work
* tree structures limit possible combinations that are useful to explore during the design
* the home page is visually different than other pages of a site
* humans perceive the world hierarchically

My goal, as I stated, was to figure out why so many sites are built hierarchically. This question was borne out of my recent inquiry into folksonomies, and the idea that navigation systems can emerge from artifacts of behavior, rather than being created beforehand. (Via Bokardo)