Page Laubheimeris a former NN/G employee who worked on research, teaching, leadership, and design thought leadership. His expertise focused on web applications, AI, and projects in complex domains. His many research findings and recommendations were also informed by his background in library and information science, and his work often involved information architecture, navigation design, taxonomy construction, and ontology management.
Websites with many categories can benefit from showing navigation menu options in a vertical list: vertical menus allow for easy expansion, are easy to scan, plus users are familiar with this design pattern.
Segmenting a website's navigation by audience categories will often degrade usability, either because users belong in multiple categories, or because they feel the need to look at content targeted at several segments.
Polyhierarchy is used to place a single item in more than one IA category. This can support users with different mental models but should be used judiciously.
A taxonomy is a backstage structure that complements the visible navigation. Taxonomies support consistent information retrieval by creating formal metadata rules.
Archetypes and personas used for UX work contain similar insights, are based on similar kinds of data, and differ mainly in presentation. Personas are presented as a single human character, whereas archetypes are not tied to specific names or faces.
Table design should support four common user tasks: find records that fit specific criteria, compare data, view/edit/add a single row’s data, and take actions on records.
When organizations optimize metrics at the cost of all else, they expose themselves to metric corruption. Ultimately, as the Facebook scandal illustrates, they may fail their users and their business goals.
