Finding information or completing a task is a part of user experience. While we have many takers for interaction design… people don’t see creative scope to the information architecture.
So far these 2 are treated as 2 sides of the same coin, rather the IA plays an over powering role.
Most of the times it imparts structure to the interface.
But do the traditional navigation metaphors derived from IA, really cater to the user centered approach? Probably yes and probably NO. It gives a logically sequence to the scheme of things… information hierarchy, scents blah blah … As a user, one may easily overlook these structures in the UI… most definitely because he doesn’t care! So in this sense it is really user centered? There is again a grey answer to it that the essence of UCD lies in its least noticeability. The user tendency is to create a ruckus of things that are not acceptable. And it is also true that users are victims of habit. He will again and again follow same pattern of things until a rude shock jilts him.
So the question is how do we cater to the users, break from the traditional navigation paradigms and also create a compelling user experience that fits into to the IA?
Hi, I am Charvi 