[Sigia-l] Site maps for web apps, vs for content sites?

[Lyle Kantrovich]

On 2/9/06, Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen at gmail.com> wrote:
> <soapbox> And in my experience, organisations that have workflows that
> imitates that organisation tends to get things done with less pain. I

I would agree...okay, not really.  There's "less pain" for the
organization...the user's workflow (if they are outside of the
organization, new to the organization, or otherwise don't understand
the organization) may actually involve a lot of pain if you imitate or
reflect the organization's structure.



> can't provide hard evidence for this, of course, but it seems that the
> politics of an organisation needs to be considered in the workflows we
> set up as well.

Yes, of course.  Change management is all about mitigating pain as
workflows and organizations change.



> As with any real answer; it depends. Sometimes they *are* valuable,
> especially in places where hiarchy is an important facet of the
> organisation. In smaller more fluid organisations, yes, they're
> pointless, apart to perhaps the press and outside parties.

I disagree.  Your assertion here is that the need for a (hierarchical)
site map is based on how important hierarchy is to the organization. 
You're ignoring the realities of the web site.  If a site is large
enough that it needs to be broken up into sections in order to make
sense, then a hierarchical site map may have a lot of value. Breaking
things up into groups (chunking) helps people get their heads around
the scope of the site.  For example, the ability to say "we're going
to have a Products section, and 'within' that section there'll be a
section for Furniture, and within that a section for Chairs" helps
people understand the scope and organization of the site. In reality,
the "organization" (i.e. company) may not have a "products" or
"furnitutre" division at all.  A site map can help the team identify
where cross-organizational collaboration needs to ocurr to create a
better customer experience.  In most large organizations,
"cross-organizational collaboration" is English for pain.  :-)

How you *draw* the site map itself doesn't really matter...as long as
people understand it and can "see" the "sections" you're breaking
things into.  As with any deliverable, you need to ensure that people
can understand it, and that it readily communicates what it is
supposed to communicate.  Some site map layouts I've seen are very
difficult to understand (i.e. not usable).  For example:
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/dynamicdiagrams2.gif or
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/sitelens_large.gif or
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/ptolomaeus_large.jpg



> I work in a governmental organisation of about 500 people, and here
> those hiarchies are quite important, not because we're all anal
> retentive, but because the organisation *itself* is quite well
> designed; the tree-structure here *means* something, it has semantics
> and ownership built into it, and workflows follow quite closely that
> organisational structure. It works quite well.
>
> But hey, that's just us. What about you?


I hope you aren't implying that governmental organisations "work quite
well" and that web sites that reflect those kinds of organizational
structures would involve less pain.  I just left a company of over
120,000 people, and much of my work there involved advocating better
customer-facing processes.  This often involved that
"cross-organizational collaboration" stuff...and it's amazingly
powerful when it happens.  In some cases, changing a customer facing
process online eventually (years later) lead to a reoranization of the
people in the organization.  Optimizing the web process was a
precursor for optimizing the organization.  If we'd just mimicked the
existing org structure, no real progress could have occurred.


--
Lyle

--------------------------
Lyle Kantrovich
Blog: Croc O' Lyle
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com

Usability Professionals' Association
http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org