New topics around Responsive Design such as Responsive Content and Responsive Content Thinking are emerging, and this ClickZ article handles these in a Feb. 1 post titled Responsive Design, Nimble Architecture. The bottom line is that a lot of upfront preparation and thought go into achieving a responsive site and good information architecture is essential. Web analytics can play an essential part of migrating an existing site into a new information architecture and responsive design. On the other hand, implementing a new design/architecture is a great time for a web analytics implementation checkup.
Archive for Information Architecture
I’m still keeping lists of useful sites as I learn about information architecture (IA) concepts, taxonomy, user experience (UX) and knowledge management. The Taxonomy Guide at the University of Toronto in Canada contains many useful links and resources on these topics.
The University of Minnesota, Duluth is not to be outdone by UToronto – there are dozens of links to IA materials at their site. This site digs deep into IA methods such as card sorting, content inventory methods, prototyping and wireframing.
Here’s another site chock full of IA links.
Something for everyone…
There is definitely a site out there for everyone. This site is all about site indexes and there is even a special index group (SIG) dedicated to building a site index for any site.
Picking up again on the taxonomy topic, I found that Heather Hedden has written and spoken extensively about taxonomies, indexing and search. Her site contains links to numerous whitepapers, articles and presentations.
There’s even a Taxonomy Bootcamp (gasp!) in D.C. this November. It is co-located with some other related events such as the Knowledge Management World conference, the SharePoint Symposium and the Enterprise Search Summit.
Before getting too deep into a new information architecture, it may be time to chill out and take a content inventory.
While looking for Information Architecture (IA) tools recently, I just came across a new Firefox plugin which will be useful for User Interface (UI) prototyping and design called FluidIA. I’ve been using the Pencil plugin for Firefox off and on for a year now, so it will be nice to work with a new tool. FluidIA promises Fluid Information Architecture in the category of agile UI prototyping, which sets a high bar for usability and end results.
Along the same theme of this post…. have a look at the Midwest User Experience 2011 conference slides from last week. Something here for everyone, and a neat little web analytics presentation as well. Enjoy!
Don’t let the fact that this link will take you to a page written in Brazilian Portuguese (my second language) hold you back: all the links are to content written in English. The IdealMind blog contains many valuable tips and discussions about web development, web analytics and more. But this list of conversion rate tips all in one place is a great find. What’s more, there’s a link to the post which originally inspired IdealMind’s author: a link to more than 600 (at the present time) links to help you improve your site’s conversion rate. Enjoy!
Google Insights for Search is quite an interesting tool. Even though its been around since 2008, it is still in beta as is most of Google. There is a lot of intelligence that can be gathered by using this tool along your web analytics package of choice. The only drawback to me is that the search data doesn’t go back farther than 2004. With this tool you can gauge interest and demand for the search terms you specify and you can compare multiple search terms in the same ‘report’. There is even a bit of forecasting so can test out Google’s trending and forecasting prowess over time. Try it out and compare the data you see with that from your web analytics package and other tools such as Quantcast. Enjoy!