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Develop a user-centered structure for your site

For your site to be successful, you will need to organize information in a way that makes sense to your users. People develop expectations for how to find different types of information and how to accomplish particular tasks. They may expect to search alphabetically (as when using a phone book), according to groups of similar items (as in a grocery store), or in a sequence of steps to fulfilling certain tasks.

Recruit some representative users to help organize the information content of your site in a way that seems most logical to them. Card sorting is a test method we have used:

• Create cards of topics your site will cover

• Ask representative users to sort the cards into logical groups

• Analyze the groups that your users create and determine the optimal organization structure for your site

In your user analysis, you may have done a task analysis--analyzing how people accomplish the tasks that your web site will facilitate. You can use this analysis to organize the steps within the tasks according to user preferences.

Use the information from your task analysis and/or card sort to create a flow diagram showing the relationship of elements of information with each other.

Create a flow diagram

A flow diagram defines the site structure, identifies all pages within the site, and shows the pathways linking each page. Its purpose is to organize the development of the site, and should be easily visible to all members of the team. Below is a portion of the navigation map for this site (dotted lines represent paths to pages not shown here.)

List the elements and links for each page of the diagram

Make an itemized list of each page's contents. Your list should include text, images, sounds, video and audio clips, image maps, animated GIFs, Java applets, downloadable items, controls such as print buttons, and all links. Organize your list into categories that distinguish those items that will appear on every page versus on certain groups of pages or on individual pages only. For instance you may have a link to your home page on every page, and a print button only on certain pages. Organizing your list into categories this way before beginning your layout will help make sure you leave enough room in your layout for everything you need, and will help prevent you from forgetting items.

Design hierarchies of breadth rather than depth

Research suggests that users begin to lose their bearings within a hierarchical structure once they go beyond the third level. As William Horton notes, flat hierarchical structures may cause users to have to scan longer lists of menu items, but users "will get lost less often" (1994, p. 170). Refer to Horton's Designing and Writing Online Documentation for more detail.

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