[Sigia-l] Top-down/Bottom-up, was: IA research?

[Jess McMullin]

Anne wrote:
>How do we bridge the gap between problem space conceptualisation in people
and information architecture...?

A perennial challenge, and not just for IAs or capital-D Designers.

The short answer, in the language of IAs, is that information architects use
top-down and bottom-up tools to create a structure for the content they are
working with and bridge the gap between requirements and interface design.

Top-down tools are focused on users. They draw on user research to
understand how people conceptualize the world, as well as things like
prototype theory. Card sorting, ethnographic and contextual interviews, task
analysis, creating personas focused around goals, scenarios, etc. are all
ways of expressing this, as you already know from your HCI work. The IA
toolkit is not particularly differentiated from other UX disciplines in the
methods, but more in the space they are applied (information categorization,
findability, etc.).

Bottom-up methods focus on the content itself, and draw heavily on Library
and Information Science to look at commonalities across the collection of
content. Methods for indexing, abstracting, and cataloging are all
applicable, as well as automated keyword analysis, Bayesian filtering, and
other machine analysis to take a first pass before a person looks at the
commonalities.

Creating a content inventory and then looking for themes across sections
would be an example of bottom-up IA. A more sophisticated bottom-up approach
is Amazon's 'People who bought X also bought Y'. Using social classification
is another bottom-up approach (see the conversation sparked by Gene Smith
and Thomas Vanderwal re: folksonomy).
See http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=folksonomy&btnG=Search

Content structure is the expression of both top-down and bottom-up
approaches. There's still a lot of hand-waving about integrating top-down
and bottom-up approaches though. Often this consolidation is the art of IA,
rather than a science, as practitioners make judgment calls about what
top-down categories and terms should relate to which bottom-up categories
and terms.

Adaptive Path's mental model is the best publicly available method I know of
for bridging the two approaches.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/events/training/construct/
[See 'Workshop Assets' on the right of the above page]

Facets themselves, while valuable, are simply an expression of a
classification scheme - facets can be derived from both top-down and
bottom-up approaches.

Cheers,

Jess
--------------------
Jess McMullin
www.nform.ca