The Content King: Interview with Louis Rosenfeld

 

Gallery

Posted on 18 Nov 2002 at 13:23

Don't we still need a grand vision to begin with?

You are not talking about how do we think about it architecturally. When most enterprises start to grapple with these problems, they do a very top down architectural effort. Often they will build a portal at the very upper levels of the site and that might fit in for the look, feel and behaviour of the site. But it's skin deep and, when you drill down, you still have the same garbage so you also need a bottom up architecture which looks to exploit what we know about the information on our website, the destinations, what we know about users and how they find their way to their destination. What I'm talking about is contextual navigation. For example there are a range of British e-government sites, but I'm interested in Portsmouth. In order to find that information, I have to go up the top of one site and down and up another site and down. Wouldn't it be better if I could just have another view that just said "Portsmouth"?

So you look to develop a horizontal navigation rather than a vertical one?

Exactly. The grain is currently vertical and we need it to cut across to a more user-centric approach. Now we can start making links between content at the bottom and not require people to hop up and down the hierarchies.

What are the top five things that a person implementing an Information Architecture on their site should be thinking about?

In my opinion there are five critical junctures where users interact with their information architecture, the five places that you should really think about. These are, the home page, the search interface, the search results, how they are presented, whatever the interface is and then the actual documents that are found and what kind of contextual navigation they may have, how they link to each other. Those are the five places to really consider. The mistake that people make is that they get really fixated over the home page and it becomes a real political battle.

What do you see as the future for information architecture?

What makes me comfortable with where Information Architecture is going is content. I often quote the saying that in the last five years, more information has been recorded than in all the rest of human history. With all the new technologies we have, we are dealing with an exponential growth in content. The other problem we have is that the content we have today may be very good. It may be appropriate, accurate and authoritative. Give it six months, its not any good any more and its sets into something we call 'rot' - redundant, outdated and trivial. That's what happens to content when we leave it alone. So we need to be vigilant not only with exponential growth but vigilant with what we have. As that problem becomes clear to everyone, I'm confident that I'm not going to have to sell this stuff as a concept but as a specific type of service.

Author: Steve Malone