Changes are coming to the Pure Visibility website! In the not too distant future, we will unleash a new site architecture followed by content changes and a visual redesign.

As this effort got underway, we knew it was important to employ the same skills that we bring to our clients – to eat our own cat food, you could say. We did user research and captured that information as personas and then used those personas as the basis for our information architecture work. We then took our early website prototype out to real users to gather some data about how it worked for them. Read More

UXmatters is a great resource for (unsurprisingly) UX-related articles, such as information architecture, usability, and user research. An article from February 22nd, “Review of Information Architecture Evaluation Tools: Chalkmark and Treejack,” provides a great overview of two user research tools from Optimal Workshop.

The first, Chalkmark, allows unmoderated testing of static mockups. You can put up a mocked up page, ask people where they would click to find information about something specific, and then Chalkmark tells you where users clicked.

The other tool that this article discusses is Treejack, which lets you test an organizational scheme, abstracted away from the actual interface. In Treejack, you build a tree that reflects how information on your site is organized into categories and sub-categories (or how you want to organize this information in the future). Again, you ask people to tell you where they think they would find a specific piece of information, but with this tool, they can click around in the tree and think about it before giving you their final answer.

The article on UXmatters goes into further detail about the analysis capabilities that both of these tools provide, and they sound pretty exciting.

Yesterday I wrote a post about how one theme in Lakoff’s book “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things”, the way that categories display prototype effects, can be applied to web classification schemes.

The second major takeaway from Lakoff’s theory of categorization, the status of basic-level categories, requires some understanding of what is so unique about Lakoff’s approach to category theory. Lakoff bases his assertions on an understanding that categories as we create them are embodied, that is based in our experience before any conceptual activity takes place. This is fundamentally different than the standard understanding of categories as abstract containers. Our ability to perceive gestalts combines with experientially-based structural ‘schemas’ to create categories. The schemas, specifically “Kinesthetic Image Schemas”, are directly-understood concepts and/or relations like link, part-whole, container, up/down, source/path/goal … Together with gestalt perception they form the complex concepts that are human categories (which Lakoff calls by a similarly heady term, “Idealized Cognitive Models” or ICM’s).

So where does the basic-level category come in? Well, a study done by an anthropologist named Berlin in studying the speakers of Tzeltal living in the Chiapas region of Mexico found that plants and animals was categorized at a level that corresponded to the genus level of scientific classifications. Analysis of other societies has been consistent with genus as the level at which humans are most likely to turn to name an item; sub and superordinate categories are then created around above and below this middle level of the hierarchy. See this article for a little more information, or just read the book!

This phenomena can be attributed to the fact that human capacities for perception are utilized in the same way, with gestalts playing a big role. Lakoff breaks down the basic category into four aspects:

Perception: overall perceived shape; a single mental image; Gestalt.
Function: interaction with the world.
Communication: Shortest, most commonly used terms; first words learned.
Knowledge Organization: Most attributes of category members are stored at this level.

So, back to information architecture. Often methods for designing a classification scheme for a website are divided into top-down and bottom-up methods. What Lakoff’s book suggests is an entirely different approach, centered around the basic level category, or the middle of the hierarchy. From there, a designer could move up and down to create the higher and lower levels.

What does a very dense book written by a cognitive linguist have to do with Information Architecture, especially when there are some good texts already on this subject, such as the O’Reilly book, or the one written by Peter Van Dijck? More than you might think. So much, in fact, that this may turn into a several post series.

George Lakoff’s study “Women Fire and Dangerous Things” is the book in question. The book was a big deal when it came out in fields from linguistics to philosophy to computer science, due to some of the assertions the author makes about how human beings construct categories in order to make sense of the world. Information Architecture is about classifications – what if we could apply the key findings from experiments throughout the history of category theory in order to predict how users will label the content in a website, saving time and money in usability research?

Info Architect Donna Maeur summarizes many of the points in this document, including the important point Lakoff makes about prototype effects. Classical category theory is based on set theory, in which categories are envisioned as real-world ‘containers’, mutually exclusive. The categories we construct using language, however, don’t have one-to-one mapped real-world counterparts. Instead, they exhibit prototype effects, in which one member is more central, the ‘best example’ while others are peripheral at best. People have demonstrated in experiments that they are slower at categorizing these items.

Prototype effects imply not that one member is more (or less) of a member than others. Instead, the point is that there is some internal structure to our categories as well.

One of the coolest examples in the book of a result of prototype effects involves a story by Jean Luis Borges, in which a categorization scheme for animals is described. It includes a) those that belong to the Emperor, b) embalmed ones, c) those that are trained, d) suckling pigs, e) mermaids, f) fabulous ones … and so so. Lakoff writes of how a long-term study of an aboriginal tribe’s classification system revealed that such a scheme is not so far-fetched: their classification lumped together women, fire, and dangerous things in one group, while me, kangaroos, storms, and rainbows made of another, in addition to several more equally ludicrous ones.

Now for the take-away related to information architecture: the researcher found in the system that there was one category that could only be explained as “miscellaneous”, or “everything else”. Mythology connected men and kangaroos and rainbows, same for women, fire, and dangerous things. But this final example had no rational explination.

So, next time you are knocking your head against those last couple pages as you map out the categories in a navigation menu, consider the miscellaneous category. The hardest part, in my experience, is the name. While I can’t speak for the results of usability research with regard to such categories, I know that I tend to accept them, and even look for them on complicated sites.

Next time, I’ll talk more about the other “basic” application to info architecture, basic-level categories.