Chapter 4
INFORMATION
ARCHITECTURE
PATTERN
Dr Irni Eliana Khairuddin
What is Information
Architecture Pattern?
Design pattern is a way to structure the content. It allows
you to choose the direction at the very beginning of IA
building or website redesign activities.
2
Types of IA Patterns
Simple Pattern Combined Pattern
▪ Hierarchy ▪ Simple hierarchy + simple
▪ Database database
▪ Hypertext ▪ Catalog
▪ Hub & Spoke
▪ Linear
▪ Subsites
▪ Focused entry points
▪ Tagged
Hierarchy
The relationship between items is one of parent and child;
broader and narrower. It’s about aggregating upwards into
broader groupings or splitting downwards in narrower groupings.
Hierarchy
▪ Hierarchies are a simple and familiar way to organise
information, they are suitable for a wide range of content.
▪ They are particularly good for small websites that need
nothing fancier than a couple of levels of hierarchy – a top
level (home page), some second level pages and maybe a few
more detailed pages beneath them.
▪ Although hierarchies are particularly good for small websites,
they can also be used for larger sites as well. They are
particularly suitable for content-heavy websites where the
content is quite varied.
▪ They are also good when your information contains different
levels of complexity. For example, you can present overview or
broad information first, and allow people to drill down into
more detail as they need it.
Hierarchy
Database
▪ the common aspect of databases (technical ones) is that
there’s a planned structure (or model) and all information has
to t into that structure.
▪ The database pattern has a consistent structure. The
individual pieces of content may have no relationship to one
another – they certainly don’t have the parent- child
relationship that hierarchical content does – but they have
the same structure, and are made up of the same pieces.
Database
▪ The database pattern can be used for quite small sets of
information, or ones that are very, very large!
▪ Can store the data once then use the pieces of the structure
to display information in different ways.
▪ For example, on etsy, you can view content via category
(which is a small hierarchy), colour, whether it is local, and
even recently added. This gives your people different ways to
find content they’re interested in.
▪ Database structures are good for music, product catalogues,
books, articles, weblog posts and much more – really,
anything where the content pieces have a consistent
structure. They are great for situations where people may
want to access the content in more than one way.
Database
Hypertext
▪ In this pattern, content pieces are connected to one another
simply according to relationships between them. The content
is just joined together via links.
▪ The best example of a hypertext structure is a wiki.
Wikis don’t have a pre-planned structure – content is joined
by links embedded in the text.
▪ And the best example of a wiki is Wikipedia. It’s a perfect
embodiment of the hypertext structure. There’s no master
hierarchy for Wikipedia content, nor is there a strong
database structure. Each page is independent, connected to
other pages by associative links.
Hypertext
Hypertext
Linear
▪ A linear pattern is just as it sounds – one thing follows
another in a straight line.
▪ Linear patterns aren’t particularly common on the web – we
mostly use patterns that let people jump to content in a way
that makes sense for them.
▪ Use a linear pattern if you have a situation where people must
understand one thing before they move onto another.
Simple hierarchy + simple
database
▪ One of the main challenges with this type of pattern is
deciding what pieces you’ll turn into structured content and
what you’ll leave as hierarchical. Consider:
▪ Do you want to re-use something in another part of the
site? If you have no need to re-use something, don’t
worry about structuring it more than necessary – it’s just
overskill.
▪ Database structures can help you manage larger
volumes of information. If you have a handful of news
stories a year, you can manage them as hierarchical
content. If you have hundreds a day, you’ll probably want
to leverage the power of the database structure to
automate the display.
Simple hierarchy + simple
database
Simple hierarchy + simple
database
Catalog
■ If the hierarchy + database is the most common pattern on
the web, the second most common would definitely be a
catalog pattern.
■ This structure is really just a database pattern, but is worth
mentioning because it’s so common, particularly in e-
commerce.
■ Jared Spool has written about this pattern extensively and
describes three different types of pages between the home
page and the content page:
– Gallery pages: these provide direct access to the content
pages.
– Department pages: provide access to the galleries.
– Store pages: provide access to the department pages.
Catalog
Catalog
Hub And Spoke
■ The hub & spoke pattern is really just a hierarchy. However, it
is worth noting as a separate pattern as the way people use it
is different to a hierarchy.
■ With a hub and spoke, people move down one level into
something more detailed, return to the starting point (the
hub) then may move to another detailed page, back to the
hub and so on.
Hub And Spoke
Subsites
■ This pattern is particularly useful for large organisations that
have a range of responsibilities or a range of brands, but still
need to represent themselves as a whole.
Focused entry points
■ These entry points don’t have to cover the whole site content
– you may use them to provide easy access to just key
information.
Tagged
■ A tagged pattern uses either the basic database or hypertext
pattern. Each item in the site is ‘tagged’ with keywords, and
those keywords are used to provide access to the content.
Flickr includes tags on all photos, letting you browse all photos
with a particular tag – photographers and visitors can both add
tags ([Link])
Summary
Summary
THANK YOU
