Harnessing Innovation - Web 2.0
By Stephen Zafir, 31 October, 2007
Just as the World Wide Web brought each of us access to millions of points of content around the world, Web 2.0 now mobilises the information and allows us to interact with it. Social networking and folksonomies offer an engaging new level of connection between people and ideas. Like all innovative technologies, however, they represent a great set of concepts and features, but not necessarily the full realisation of their potential. As user-centred designers, it is our role to understand the extended meaning and potential of these innovations so that we can apply the approaches and learnings to the real-world requirements of our customers and their users. For example, the use of tagging, tag clouds and organic information hierarchies points to a new way forward for traditional Information Architecture. Although traditionally most company websites or intranets are a static proposition, each user brings a unique approach to the information. Consequently, even a good static Information Architecture represents a compromise between the different mental approaches brought to the website or intranet by the range of users. Allowing users to tag information elements essentially creates an evolving categorisation model whereby users can form their own logical relationships across existing information structures. These relationships can then be utilised in two ways;
- By the system, to provide a mechanism for direct linking to related elements.
- By the Information Architect, to inform evolution of the Information Hierarchies themselves.
In this way traditional, off-line analysis techniques for Information Architecture (such as card-sorting etc.) can be augmented by new on-line information, provided by real users whilst engaged in day-to-day interactions with the information. The result may be a measured movement toward more fluid information architectures which, over time, can evolve to reflect the mental approaches of their users.
