stekker :: repository

Making Categories

We are continiously categorizing the world around us. Just because it is the most efficient way for our brain to work I guess. So why is it that categories in site menu’s do not work so well? One problem is that everybody works in different ways. Especially when it comes to making categories. If it comes the point of hierarchies, people are really bad. We do not work so systematically. People rather make connections (just as our brain does with different neurons). And if something is really important the connections are stronger and easier to be remembered.

Hierarchy and structure

Developers like hierarchal menus. If it comes to programming or scripting it is the easy solution. In my years up to date I have not seen one good menu. (Ok the simpler the better). While instructing people to maintain a site, you always have to explain them how the menu structure (hence hierarchies) work. Menus with pages are ok: it is a way to make pages in your site accessible. Menus with sub menus and sub sub are awful for finding pages and hard to control (these cascading ones). You cannot see what is content is about. You as a user have to guess what category you page can be in.

Making good structures is hard

If you have to make a interaction design for a site you almost always end up with pages that are really hard to categorize. For the same reasons mentioned above. Which will end up that some categories will only end up with one page (links category is a good example). Some categories have so many pages in them that you really need sub categories to avoid menus with more than 10 pages beneath them. If you have more than a hundred pages, search functionality is an option. But if that is not the case you have to find another solution.

What to do?

Users are generally scanning pages for the right information. Menus in that sense are generally avoided. People do not read the categories as a text but they scan them. Then most of the time you guess what category your page is. Just clicking the menu and hoping it is correct. Because we are working with hierarchal structures here, one page can only be inside one category. Why is this? Probably it is because for developers it is more difficult to link a page to two categories or more or that’s not the way they think.

• Solution 1: Not making categories.
  So what would be the problem if pages are placed under more menu items, as long as people know that menu items are them to guide them. If you visually make clear that the pages displayed in the menu are somewhere else in the menu I don’t see the problem. Actually if the menu is not so dynamic that it changes every time you use it you know how you got there. The advantage is actually that the system is multi interpretable.
• Solution 2: Keeping track of the user and gathering his most visited pages.
  So make a user customized menu item. Ok, you need a cookie for this, but if you explain why you want to set it in the first place, probably it will be no problem.
• Solution 3: Leting other people categorize (or tag) your pages.
  A solution i found on the web (and which I though of myself) was by chris j davis who lets users tag posts he put on his blog(?). More than one person is deciding what a page is about.

What to do at the back end?

In order to avoid categorizing every page, a page should be judged on content. In short descriptions a user maintaining the site can ‘tell’ a cms what the page is about. Maybe an extra can be categorizing the page multiple times so a user can see what the maintainer had in mind while putting the content online.

Order within the short description is valuable information but not the main part. If a more than one page fits a description it can be grouped into a menu item. Pages in their term can be part of more groups. The order can be used to order the menu item pages. For example, say you have four pages with the following short description:

• Page 1: Content and ‘information architecture’.
• Page 2: Maintenance of site relating to content through CMS.
• Page 3: Different kind of CMS related to the content and maintenance.
• Page 4: How to make better menu items through ‘information architecture’.

The menu could look something like this:

All the similar words have been picked out and made into menu items. Pages appear in different menu items. If you say limit the the number of menu items and increase the number of pages the systems should figure out what the best combinations are. This way probably the pages that fit best together will be grouped into one menu item.

In the next coming weeks I’m going to try to make this work.

Comments closed (due to slpog) if you want to leave a comment send me an email to mic at this domain…