[Sigia-l] Information-centered Design

[Lyle_Kantrovich at cargill.com]

Matt wrote:
---
Yahoo!'s new team pages do this well (at least this is a start to what 
I am
talking about). Take a look at the North American NHL Team the Detroit 
Red
Wings' page:
http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/teams/det/ Notice that not only does this 
page
have basic info like News, Next Game & Last Game, but it almost has
"everything" Detroit Red Wings: standings, point leaders on the team, 
goalie
stats, injuries, *community sites*, *shopping*. While this is still only
local to Yahoo!, can you imagine a Red Wings site that had every item of
merchandise from every vendor, ability to buy/sell tickets, 
advertisement
space in the stadium, recent trades, team history, time/locations of 
athlete
appearances, etc, etc, etc... That's what I want to see.
---

Sure, that's what YOU want to see.  

Maybe someone else would want to see ALL the NHL Teams, not just the 
Red Wings
...or all the professional sports teams in Detroit 
...or all Detroit sports teams of any kind
...or all the history of the Detroit area, including sports
...or all tickets available for a given week in Detroit for sports, 
movies, theatre, etc.
...or all things related to fighting 
...or all things related to bad hair styles (see 
http://www.angelfire.com/sd/DavsHomePage/mulletspot.html)

It's hard enough to get companies (with financial incentives) to do 
content analysis, user research, task analysis and usability testing.  
Who would do those things on such a monolithic scale for all users, all 
content, all tasks?  Better yet, WHY would they?

Furthermore, what problems are we aiming to solve?  Do we need one 
world-wide furniture site because people lack access to furniture?  
*Some* information is trivial (see ROT) and therefore not worth 
maintaining, categorizing, indexing, and otherwise shepherding.  Where 
do you draw the line?  

Your utopia would be too costly.  Ever think about how much less new 
information the human race would CREATE if they were spending all their 
time documenting and organizing all existing information?  If I could 
have your utopia at no cost, I'd take it, but that's not realistic.  

Lyle

---
Lyle Kantrovich
User Experience Architect

Croc O' Lyle:
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com/
Commentary on usability, information architecture and web design.