Chapter 2. Organizing the Content:
Information Architecture and Application Structure At this point, you may know what your users want out of your application. You may know which idiom or interface type to use, such as a graphic editor, a form, web-like hypertext, or a media playeror an idea of how to combine several of them. If you're really on the ball, you've written down some typical scenarios that describe how people might use high-level elements of the application to accomplish their goals. You have a clear idea of what value this application adds to people's lives. Now what? You could start making sketches of the interface. Many visual thinkers do that at this stage. If you're the kind of person who likes to think visually, and needs to play with sketches while working out the broad strokes of the design, go for it. But if you're not a visual thinker by nature (and sometimes even if you are), then hold off on the interface sketches. They might lock your thinking into the first visual designs you manage to put on paper. You need to stay flexible and creative for a little while, until you work out the overall organization of the application. High-level organization is a wickedly difficult topic. It helps to think about it from several angles, so this introduction takes two aspects that I've found useful and discusses them in some depth. The first, "Dividing Stuff Up," encourages you to try separating the content of the application entirely from its physical presentation. Rather than thinking in terms of windows, tree views, and links, you might think abstractly about how to organize the actions and objects in your application in the way truest to your subject matter. You can postpone the decisions about using specific windows and widgets. Clearly this separation of concerns is useful when you design multimodal applications (e.g., the same content presented both on the Web and on a palmtop, with very different physical presentations), but it's also good for brand new applications or deep redesigns. This approach forces you to think about the right things first: organization and task flows. Second, "Physical Structure" gets into the presentation of the material in pages, windows, and panels. In truth, it's very difficult to completely separate presentation from organization of the content; they're interdependent. The physical forms of devices and web pages can place tight constraints on a design, and on the desktop, an application's window structure is a major design choice. So it earns a place in this chapter. |
