Friday, January 25, 2008

info layout

Thinking about info architecture, but down real basic-like.

Take the page. Most folks on the Earth can deal with a page -- they've got some kind of cultural place for the page, even if not for print or for books. We can sort a page out -- right-to-left, left-to-right, up or downwise, lots of us have context for markings on a page.

Web browsers are new, computers are new, and as common as they seem to us in the bizzness, plenty of folks yet have zero context for making sense of the computer. The mouse? Keyboards, more common. Web browsers? Web pages?

Folks'll be thinking "Where is this page, like? On web-what?" Does it go forward-back, back-forward, front-to-back? Which way am I moving through it? How do I get to where I began, and how do I know where to go next?

Old territory for some of you. Usability stuff back to Nielsen. Peter Morville and info-structures.

But let's look at this anthropologically, culturally. How do grammars affect layouts? How do kinship models affect category trees?

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