Make Me Think About Organizing
The following is a hemispherical discussion regarding the classification and organization of birds.
Giuseppe sat almost statuesque as he gazed upon the many different pigeons greedily pecking at the crumbs he so generously tossed about. His mind began to wander from this flock of feathered opportunists to the other avian scenes playing out about the park. There was the rotund robin slurping down another worm, a mallard with his bill in the mud and his arse in the air, an arrogant gull demanding, and finally stealing a child's moon pie, and a majestic eagle, of some sort, flapping for altitude with Mrs. Abernathy’s shih tzu firmly in its grasp. “So many different birds, how would one organize such a diverse group” he thought.
As Giuseppe contemplated this perplexing issue he quieted himself and centered his being. Soon there was no outside noise, all that Giuseppe could heard was his inner voice, or rather, voices.
G’s Left Brain: Before you get all wound up (again) into some sort of holistic thinking, artsy-fartsy designing cyclone, I’m going to ask you to ground yourself and help me take a logical approach to organizing this project. This project needs to follow strict guidelines. We must adhere to LATCH. It is the most basic and simplistic manner in which to organize web content for online seekers of information. According to organizational thinkers like Curtis Newbold there REALLY is only five ways to organize content, oh, and by the way, he’s a PhD.
G’s Right Brain: Not so fast, File Cabinet, I read that blog post too. Granted, Dr. Left Thinker is a “Five Hat Racks” guy, but he also clearly states that there are indeed other organizational themes out there as well. Our subject matter, all North American birds, is far too vast and diverse to leave to your highly groomed north and south pathways with only an occasional ninety degree scenic turnout. We don’t want a website that is what Bernstein warns against: sterile, inert, and distant. We must develop the content in a more abstract way allowing artistic and imaginative thinkers to access the information in a manner more understandable to how they are hard-wired. If you need an acronym, how about: MATT? You know: Metaphor, Audience, Task, Topic, aka ambiguous organization schemes.
G’s Left Brain: Absolutely not, R, I could not disagree with you more. You must understand that the subject matter that we are designing this site around begs to be organized upon the five hat racks principle of web site design. We are talking about organizing birds and this means that we have very clear cut avenues of thought that logical thinkers will be able to grasp with ease. Avenues such as the types of birds: are they birds of prey, song birds, sea birds, game birds, or wading birds and so on. We must catalog them by color, region, migratory vs not among and many other things. The best possible start is to list all the birds by category. This must make sense even to you?
G’s Right Brain: With few exceptions, you know I have never been a big fan of your LATCH theory of web organization.
G’s Left Brain: Okay, Mr. smart guy, lets hear your ideas.
G’s Right Brain: I see a more ambiguous organizational scheme —
G’s Left Brain: You would.
G’s Right Brain: Tisk-tisk, L. There will be plenty of users that simply do not know what the bird is that they are looking for. They may have just seen a glimpse of a bird before it took flight and perhaps only saw some color and maybe its size. How about a nice visual metaphor? You know, lets show images of regions which will allow the user to close in on their mystery bird. Regions have many different habitats within them like Minnesota, woods and lakes in the north and farm lands in the south. A visual metaphor showing both would allow the user to click on the particular natural environment within the region they spotted the bird, e.g. an icon of a prairie or of woods. Like Connor Turnbull states, “…They’re a great way of communicating familiarity and attracting readers to a design.”
G’s Left Brain: Visual Metaphor? Ugh, I just threw-up in my mouth a little. I swear you could complicate a safety pin. The problem is that the user may feel a sense of place, but the metaphor-driven approach it is not all that intuitive. I fear you are making this way too complex. What might be familiar to one user may not be to another. Without properly analyzing and categorizing content prior to placing it before our users we, are essentially sentencing them to wander alone and lost in the vast “wilderness of unplanned content.” Lets keep it simple and place a list of bird categories along the top and also utilize a sidebar list of geographies. If the user cannot identify the bird by type, then they can choose a region and zoom in on it from there and thus locate their bird by location.
G’s Right Brain: Sure, and why not make it black and white, and in one font and font size. Hey, we could sell energy drinks there too, because it will be so boring that users will need a boost to navigate it! Maybe you can wrap your analytical grey matter around using audience as an organizational theme. Whenever we produce content for the web, we are in essence writing to a particular audience. We could orientate the site in three specific areas: educators, students, and general public users.
G’s Left Brain: I actually could get behind the audience organization, but our site is already going to be massive and I think that this would be adding too much to it. How many levels of education are we talking about? However, the National Park Service website does have category and audience working together on the same tool bar. Perhaps we could combine audience with another scheme. It seems to be working for the Park Service.
G’s Right Brain: Oh, oh, sounds like someone’s wandering into my camp.
G’s Left Brain: Easy, Picasso, I’m not just throwing you a bone, there is a distinct possibility that this might actually work. We could add it to our nice clean rows of categorized content along the top tool bar and —
G’s Right Brain: You and your nice neat rows, you’re such a tight ass.
G’s Left Brain: No need to get nasty, R. That’s the problem with you creative types, you’re too emotional. What we need is a place for everything and we need to put everything in its place, regardless of how we organize it. So, I suggest that we start with an organizational scheme like category, you know as in latCh, and then we could add one or more ambiguous schemes such as the audience scheme you suggested. The site will have the organization that it needs to be functional for users looking to get on our site, find what they need, and move on with their lives. This will also offer users not necessarily looking for a particular piece of information the opportunity to browse and locate information in a more equivocal manner.
G’s Right Brain: I understand what you are saying, but I think it needs to go further.
G’s Left Brain: Wow, I give you an inch and you take —
G’s Right Brain: Now just hear me out, Mr. Connect-the-Dots. Lets build upon this epiphany of yours. Allow me to even wander into your camp a bit. I say we continue to work towards common ground; you say category and I say topic. I don’t think we are too far apart here. I see our content organized in bold colors and arranged in a thought provoking manner. With birds as our subject just think of how colorful the home page could be. Birds could be grouped by their color, by their region, by the foods they eat, or by their size, or by so many other ways. If we group them by region we could use one large color coded map. Users would find our site useful, specifically if they do not know what it is that they are actually looking for. Just like yesterday when you-know-who couldn't figure what type of bird of prey relieved Mrs. Abernathy of her fur-kid.
G’s Left Brain: I don’t see your artful topic driven organization working. I have no issue with a colorful page; however, it cannot be so chaotic that the average user gets lost before they get started. I could, however, see a combination of links from the home page tool bar to pages build upon your thoughts of more visualization such as topics. I think what we are talking about here is a hybrid organizational theme. Some experts feel this is dangerous ground because if not implemented correctly it will become confusing to the user. However, on the other hand if we only utilize what is absolutely necessary from each scheme we could have a very workable front page such as the National Park Service has.
G’s Right Brain: Hey, now you’re talking. We could even fit my final T (task) in there as well. It would fit right alongside the audience scheme. Here users such as teachers or students would be directed to fill out their information in order to receive something in return.
G’s Left Brain: Agreed, that is if you can see your way to accepting the remaining schemes holding my LATCH together. Two of which, Alphabetic and Time, are not different than adding your task scheme. If we carefully blend what works best from each camp and work it into some kind of hierarchical scheme there is no reason this will not be the best birder website ever, bar none.
G’s Right Brain: Hierarchy? Wait, what? Oh, I guess we can work it out, you’re wearing me out, L. Hey, where the hell are we?
G’s Left Brain: We seem to have wandered off, we’re certainly not in the park any more.
G’s Right Brain: You’re right, what happened, where are we?
G’s Left Brain: It looks like we’re in a mall. What’s he buying?
G’s Right Brain: Um, it looks like a bird book and a bottle of aspirin.
G’s Right and Left Brain in unison: I wonder how it’s organized.
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