For the November meeting of the NHUPA, I did a 10-minute talk about the effects of social media on information architecture. This blog entry provides some additional resources for anyone interested in doing further research on the topic. You can also download the original slides and handout. For those who missed the presentation, I’ll give you a brief overview.
Overview
Due to social media and social networks, Information Architecture is changing. We, as user experience professionals, need to change the way we think about it if we’re going to keep up. IA is no longer constrained by the bounds of a single website, or even a set of web properties owned and managed by the same organization. It has now become critical to consider all of the content an organization produces or contributes to across the web, including through the use of 3rd party applications.
This inevitably leads to questions about a site’s navigation, interface design and the amount of 3rd party integration to allow. Each situation is unique and, as always, user experience design should be done on a case-by-case basis that puts the users’ needs and preferences first. As this emerging area of IA becomes more prevalent and we begin to establish best practices, we must guard against such guidelines becoming formulaic. We need to think outside the box, know when to break the rules and measure such efforts so we can continually improve our solutions.
Resources
- History and evolution of social software:
- Framework for understanding social software:
- Presentation on building social features and software:
- On rising to your own potential, being genuine and showing authenticity:
- When to use certain social tools:
- Jakob Nielsen’s take on Mega IA:
- Examples of ”hub” websites (other terminology: “lifestream”, “digital footprint”):
If anyone else has any thoughts, experiences or resources on this topic, feel free to share them by posting a comment below.
2 Comments
I enjoyed your presentation at NHUPA last night. When I was talking with you after I meant to mention that your talk made me think of Peter Pirolli’s work on Information Foraging Theory. There seems to be some overlap with the proliferation of brand touch points resulting from social networking, and the implications of that on people finding what they want, which IFT may provide some insight into.
I did a very short presentation that gives an overview of some aspects of IFT. The slides for that are posted on my website. For an in depth understanding of the subject I’d highly recommend reading Peter Pirolli’s book – Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information.
Thanks for the info, I’ll definitely look into it.