[Sigia-l] The 3 Factors of I/A

[Richard_Dalton at Vanguard.com]

jess at cognissa.com writes:

[ snip ]

> For your list I'd wonder about -
>
>    - Similarity of Content  (based on what? similarity is driven by 
users
> and the business. Apples going with apples is fine, because users
> understand that. But on a stock photo site, maybe it should be Granny 
Smith
> with other green things, and Red Delicious with other red things. Which 
to
> choose depends on user and business goals.)
>    - User Tasks (User Goals are more valuable)
>    - Business Goals (definitely)

[ snip ]

Great points! The one above is something I think about a lot. You're 
correct that the Similarity of Content factor is driven by the User 
Tasks/Goals and/or Business Goals - in the example above if the User Goal 
was "create a picture that matches my red room" then you'd group all red 
things together, if the User Goal was "create a picture of things that 
roll", then you'd group apples with other round things - both of those 
groupings utilize attributes of the object that are immediately apparent 
(color and shape) so you can reverse engineer possible groupings and their 
associated User Tasks/Goals.

When a User Task/Goal cannot be reverse engineered from an object's 
attributes, however, it becomes more important to consider User 
Tasks/Goals first - for example, if my task in the above example was 
"create a picture of a magic trick I saw on TV" - then i'd need to group 
the apples with the bows and arrows - something which is completely 
non-obvious from the attributes of each object.

Now I realize that the last example is fairly extreme and this obviously 
doesn't work in all situations - especially those in which the User 
Tasks/Goals are many, varied and not predictable - however, if you have a 
situation in which your User's Tasks/Goals are few and predictable, 
wouldn't you want to base your organization scheme on them?

 - Richard Dalton