1. Describe
the five stages of integrating information architecture into the web development
process.
Research
– In research stage, high-level understanding of an organisation, its business
needs and exiting IA is looked at. Research involves researching organisations
through various methods such as document analysis, interviews, surveys and
contextual enquiry. This is done to gain to extract requirements.
Strategy
– In this stage, direction and scope of the project determined, which will
guide the project through implementation. Top-down and bottom-up approaches can
both give perspectives of the information architecture requirements.
Design
– It involves conversion of high-level strategy into an information
architecture. This is done through the activities like blueprints, wireframes,
metadata schema etc. This is the stage where Information Architecture plays an
important role.
Implementation
– Building, coding, testing and launching is the main components of
implementation stage. In this stage, design work is implemented into actual
deliverable.
Administration
– It involves the tasks of maintaining and updating the content of the website.
This is a continuous process.
2. In
terms of assessing technology, what is a gap analysis?
Assessing
the technological environment of an organisation before designing begins can
help to ensure a well considered development decision takes into account the
current technological environment of what is in place, in process and who is
available to help and what their skill set is. The gap lies between what is
currently there and what needs to be in place for the end result. The decision
of what tools or technologies can be adopted to bring technology up to scratch
can fill the gap and ensure the ongoing administration role is not impossible.
3. When
gathering content for content analysis, describe an approach that would capture
a representational sample of a site’s content.
The Noah’s Ark approach to sampling
content involves “capturing a couple of animals” of each type. This means, to
take samples of documents and information from all parts of the information system
within an organisation can give a broad idea of the format, document type,
source, subject and existing architecture of the organisation in order to gain
understanding of the needs.
4. Describe
the differences between structural metadata, descriptive metadata, and
administrative metadata.
1)
Structural metadata - describes
the intellectual or physical elements of a digital object.
2)
Descriptive metadata - uses
individual instances of application data or the data content.
3)
Administrative metadata -
provides information necessary to allow a repository to manage objects, such as
when, how and by whom a resource was created and how it can be accessed.
5. What
is competitive and before-and-after benchmarking?
Competitive benchmarking - It can
be defined as the continuous process of comparing a firm's practices and
performance measures with that of its most successful competitors.
Before and After benchmarking - These benchmarking tests can be done on
performance to seek data on improvements made to a system for example measuring
time to find a document, negative impact on user efficiency improved customer
seeking habits.
6. What
are the benefits of competitive benchmarking?
Benefits of benchmarking include: -
1)
Knowing
the secrets of your competitor’s success.
2)
Helps you
to add more features
3)
Helps to
establish the current position of this organisation in the market to help measure
improvement.
4) Establishes current position with respect to competitors and creates
a point of reference against which to measure speed of improvement
7. What
are the benefits of before-and-after benchmarking?
1)
It helps
to identify the IA features of existing website.
2) Creates a point of reference for future
measurements
3) Encourages transition from
broad generalizations
8. What
is clickstream analysis, and why is it important?
Clickstream
is the path users trace as they move through a web site, therefore it’s
important as you can learn how long a user spends on each page of your site
9. What
sort of information can you learn about users from search log analysis?
It
helps in: -
1) Track
and analyse the queries entered into the search engine
2) Useful
for prioritising terms for a “Best Bets” strategy
2)
Building controlled vocabulary and thesaurus.
10. 10.
What should be the goals for surveying users from an information architecture
perspective?
Surveys can be used to identify: -
1) Which
content user found useful.
2) Which content
frustrates them.
3) How the
problem can be resolved
4) The
level of user satisfaction
An Information Architect
can use the above information to make useful changes in the existing website
Information Architecture.
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