[Sigia-l] mixing apples and oranges and tomatoes

Wed Apr 10 12:17:48 EDT 2002

So you're having trouble with some people with slightly doctrine attitudes who don't care to listen to your professional advice, and don't seem to shop for food much. Sounds like men to me, I'm afraid :)

Well you could don The White Coat of Professional Respectability and go ask the  users. But luckily for the time and money of your project, you don't have to. Someone else has already done it for you: Grocers. 

When you or anybody goes to your supermarket do you find the Tomatoes in the Fruit section. No

Do you perhaps find a helpful note in the Fruit section saying, "Are you looking for Tomatoes, try the Veggies...". No 

Come to that, you don't find additional Bananas in the Herb section either. 

And the reason is usage: you use tomatoes in salads and sauces and generally in savoury cooking: not as a snack fruit or in deserts; which is exactly how you do use bananas - hence there non-appearance next to the Basil and Parsley.

So stick to your guns, and don't get The White Coat all dirty till you really need it. Ground abstract arguments about classification in actual examples of users normal usage. Who cares if the banana "tree" isn't a really tree (making it technically a herb) - people use it as a fruit. And if they still don't get it, threaten them with a hammer - it can kill, but you wouldn't normally label it a weapon, or put a note in the weapon session ("see also blunt instruments" perhaps).

There are some other fairly serious business reasons for not doing it. For example, if you do some promotional activity in Veggies, how would know what contribution Tomatoes made to the profits if they are also sold through Fruits too? Then there's the data maintenance issue, every time you updated your tomato product offering, you'd have to double the content management effort and double the testing effort. And what is the likelihood that eventually a error would occur and the tomatoes in veggies had some details different to the tomatoes in fruit (100% of course).

This isn't to be confused with "cross-merchandising" where a product which are strongly associated with other products can be sold next to them. Barbecue sauces, for example, are obviously going to be sold with other sauces, but would also be cross-merchandised with pre-marinated meats, and possibly even with other BBQ bricker-brack (fire lighters, tongs, etc). Cross merchandising is a common tool, but does not lose sight that Barbecue sauces are sauces, it just uses the power of related links to try and sell them at other appropriate moments while the user is performing their task (getting stuff for a BBQ).

As for comment 2, this isn't cowboy country any more. You only break the rules for a really good reason. Wanting to break the rules is definitely one of the times when The White Coat does get an airing.

As for comment 3 - the worst that can happen is financial unaccountability, duplicated data out of synch, and slightly bemused users who feel your site isn't professionally constructed.

Hope that helps. The hammer thing was only an analogy, I advocate violence to clients in extremis.

Robert van Tol  
Information Architect

-----Original Message-----
From: Katherine Lumb [mailto:KLumb at novocorp.com]
Sent: 10 April 2002 15:04
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] mixing apples and oranges and tomatoes

Hi listers. I need some help.

I'm redesigning a corporate website, and I'm running into some conceptual roadblocks with my client.

Here's the problem: let's say, hypothetically, that my client publishes information about food on their website. They have the following categories in their global left hand nav: "Fruits", "Vegetables", "Meats" and "Beverages". I want to put "Tomatoes" as a second level item under "Vegetables." I recognize that some folks might come looking for tomatoes under "Fruits," so I suggest putting a prominent link on the Fruits landing page that says "If you're looking for information on Tomatoes, visit our Vegetables section."

My client insists on another arrangement. They want to put the exact same content about tomatoes under Fruits and Vegetables. And so they want Tomatoes to appear as a second level nav element under both Fruits and Vegetables. I've tried to convince them that this is the wrong way to go about it, but they won't budge.

The three arguments that I have the most difficulty countering are:

1. You claim to be an advocate for the user, but isn't the solution you're proposing more confusing to the user? If they go looking for tomatoes under Fruits and click that link, they get whisked away into the Vegetables section and lose their context. If they want to continue exploring information about other fruits, they have to navigate their way back to that section.

2. You claim to be a new media expert, but you seem hung up on conventional ideas of classification and taxonomy. This isn't a book, it's hypertext, and we can break the rules. C'mon, think outside the box!

3. Why not do it our way? At worst, isn't it just benign redundancy?

So, can you give me some bulletproof arguments and evidence to support my case? Or, conversely, convince me to let my client have their way?

Thanks very much,

K

Katherine K. Lumb
Content Designer
NOVO/Giant Step

2001 Adweek "Top 20 Interactive Agencies"
2001 IDC Ranking  "Top 25 Professional Services Firms"
2001 InfoWorld 100 "Most Technically Innovative Companies in the World"

Voice 646.336.3418 | Fax 646.336.3433
klumb at novocorp.com
http://www.novocorp.com

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