IxD Methods, Patterns and Principles
Information architecture and interaction design can be defined by naming its associated methods, patterns and principles. This page lists the common elements, although it is not comprehensive.
Methods and documentation
- Card sorting
- Content inventory
- Site maps
- Interaction flowcharts
- Wireframes
Communicating Design by Dan Brown covers documentation including site maps (ch. 5), flowcharts (ch. 6) and wireframes (ch. 7). Information architecture methods include various versions of card sorting.
Patterns
The Tidwell text covers most of the patterns we will discuss in HCI 454.
- advance organizer
- breadcrumb trail
- button interaction states (static -- hover -- click -- visited)
- call to action (most commonly addressed with a pop-up dialog)
- confirmation (for error prevention, e.g. repeated password)
- five hat racks (ways to organize: alphabetical, time, location, continuum, category)
- hub and spoke
- progressive disclosure
Principles
Below is a list of principles and terms associated with information architecture and interaction design. By the end of the quarter, you are expected to recognize them, explain them and indicate what they predict for human behavior (if appropriate).
- affordances
- bottom-up vs. top-down information processing
- chunking human memory vs. visual display (understand distinctions)
- cognitive load theory
- consistency (aesthetic, functional, internal, external)
- cost-benefit
- control-effect mapping
- degree of control (as a function of user expertise)
- depth of processing
- difference threshold (also signal detection theory)
- earcon
- Fitts's law
- flexibility-usability tradeoff
- Gestalt principles (closure, common fate, good continuation, law of Prägnanz, proximity, similarity)
- Gutenberg diagram
- Hick's law, effect on practiced users
- inattentional blindness
- information foraging theory
- interference effects (e.g. Stroop effect)
- locus of attention
- modal error
- Occam's Razor
- one-to-many (data entity relationship)
- priming
- recognition over recall
- satisficing
- signal-to-noise ratio