There’s a fairly new thread over on SIGIA-L at the moment with respect to differentiating complex taxonomies from navigation on a website. Alongside that, how the information architecture of a site doesn’t necessarily conform immediately to either the taxonomy or the navigation.
It’s an interesting thought, and one that I find clients particularly and junior IAs often have difficulty in differentiating. Me too frankly, as very often each of taxonomy, information architecture and navigation bear significant superficial similarity to each other. As an IA, I think it’s very important when doing client work for sites that the difference be very clearly identified.
While what I’m about to say is by no means definitive, and probably open to significant argument, here’s my take on a useful, client-friendly differentiation between the three:
- Taxonomy - the information about the information on your site or the metadata. With a good taxonomy, your content providers and subject matter experts will be able to quickly and accurately classify each piece of content available on your site and that will assist visitors in tasks such as searching.
- Navigation - the components of your site that helps visitors move around. Navigation is informed by your information architecture and taxonomy, but is not either of them. Navigation should be simple to use, intuitive for casual visitors and should direct visitors to the material they want without having to search.
- Information architecture - (now this gets harder for the client to understand and even harder for you to explain without babbling) the structural design components of your site that help to build the navigation and look and feel. Informed in part by your taxonomy (which may be an input to or output of your IA work) but also heavily influenced by factors such as types of site user, nature of site (sales, company info, intranet, product data, etc.), good design rules, organisational structure and user-centered design.
Now, by no means are these definitions necessarily scientifically accurate. I’d go so far to say that they aren’t at all. But they are useful when dealing with clients, and that’s the point here.
What do you think?
This post caught my eye on the cfb feed; I think it is an important distinction, and one that needs to be more clearly understood by site designers, developers, clients, and anyone else involved in the construction and deployment of information-rich services.
I like your client-friendly definitions; they get right to the heart of the matter. I add as an alternative way of looking at this question my typical explanation: I tell my clients (typically professors, as I work at a university) that you can distinguish between taxonomy and navigation through use.
A site visitor uses taxonomy to find information related in various thematic ways; it answers the question, “What is this (page/article/image) about? What is it’s subject?”
A visitor uses navigation to enter information spaces - collections of content designed to work together to provide a unified experience or message.
The IA’s job is to design those information spaces and help a site owner to make a decision about which ones are relevant, whether they are clearly defined, and to design the experience. The IA also has input on taxonomies (or folksonomies, if the information warrants user-generated tagging) and helps to identify complementary indexing structures.
I’ll give the same disclaimer you did, with complete sincerity - I don’t claim that these definitions match up with anyone else’s, but I find that it helps my academic clients to differentiate between these terms and gets them thinking in terms of experiences and usage/usability rather than in terms of their own organizational structure. /ejt
interesting post.
>…even harder for you to explain without babbling
I liked this one :-). There really is the need for a solid multi-language IA glossary.
Eric talks about this too in my little interview with him:
http://thehotstrudel.blogspot.com/2007/08/five-questions-to-eric-reiss.html cheers.
Hi Steve,
I would argue that taxonomies are one facet of a navigation solution, and one alone… taxonomies are useful for illustrating why taxonomies don’t work as the total navigation solution, which works for me as a way of selling clients on the idea that the simple solution is not always the best.
Cheers, Andrew