NT Redesign 2011: Information Architecture

Nuketown’s information architecture has taken on several different forms over the years. At one point there where two major buckets: News and Features. This then evolved into the current, broader buckets that break out the old News section by media: Books (Bookshelf), Games (Game Room), Hoaxes (Hoax Central), Links (Link Port), Music and Audio (Music Hall), TV and Movies (Theatre) and Podcasts.

Cutsy names aside, from my perspective the problem with this structure hasn’t been the top level links, but rather the secondary ones. Each section has subcategories, such as reviews and columns. The major sections have sidebar navigation elements that exposes the subcategories, but they are buried in the sidebar, and not readily apparent. They’re also not comprehensive, exposing only the first tier of subcategories: there’s no easy way to get to finer-grained categories like “Savage Worlds”-related posts.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post when I look at the the existing sitemap, another problem I see is that its hard to tell what’s a column, and what’s not. There are no buckets for columns, and at a glance its not easy to see that “Off the Bookshelf”, “Game Day” and “The Libertarian Gamer” are columns. Adding a parent taxonomy might help.

Another issue with the columns — and with “news” and “reviews” as well — is that there’s no way to aggregate all of them into a single view. There’s no master category news items or reviews. This was by design; at the time I felt that a somewhat flatter structure was better, but I personally would like to be able to see such comprehensive lists. I believe this is an easy fix within Drupal — I’d simply need to tweak the existing taxonomy to allow the news, reviews and columns categories to have multiple parents.

When it comes to thinking the interaction of the implied information architecture and the actual navigation, there are important elements missing. For example “games/reviews/” and “games/playtests/” are potentially popular indexes, neither has a taxonomy listing — go to those urls and you get an error message. That’s something that’s an easy fix, and could yield usability benefits for visitors.

Finally features — like the Mac RPG Tools page or Monster Week — are utterly disconnected from the navigation and the larger taxonomy. It’s very difficult to find them unless you do a site search.

In terms of major changes to the taxonomy, one of the biggest I could make is to overhaul the top level categories to focus on the type of post. For example:

  • About
    • About Nuketown
    • Writers’ Guidelines
  • Blog
    • Easton, Pa.
    • Geek Dad
    • Events
  • Columns
    • Game Day
    • Libertarian Gamer
    • Off the Bookshelf
    • Top of the Comic Pile
  • Features
    • Mac RPG Tools
    • Libertarian Science Fiction
    • Monster Week
    • Windows RPG Tools
  • News
    • Book & Print News
    • Hoax News
    • Game News
    • Movie & TV News
  • Reviews
    • Book reviews
    • Game reviews
    • Movie reviews
  • Podcasts
    • Nuketown Radio Active

The problem with this is that it trades one set of silos for another, even more restrictive set of silos. Now instead of not being able to aggregate news and reviews, all of the media-specific content is scattered throughout the navigation. This is part of the reason I moved away from this structure in the first place; the other was that the media-specific approach seemed to map to Nuketown’s audience (e.g. the gamers could find everything they wanted in the “Gameroom”; the book nerds could do the same in the “Library”).

My thought now is that I should normalize the naming conventions for my existing top level categories (e.g. About instead of “City Hall”, “Books & Print” instead of “Library”) and introduce a secondary taxonomy and navigation structure that consists of Columns, News, Features, Reviews. This allows people to aggregate this content while still allowing for the primary categories to remain intact.

So we’d have these primary categories:

  • About
    • About Nuketown
    • Social Media
    • Writers’ Guidelines
  • Blog
    • Easton, Pa.
    • Geek Dad
    • Events
  • Books
    • Book & Print News
    • Book Reviews
    • Book Columns
      • Off the Bookshelf
      • Top of the Pile
  • Games
    • Game News
    • Gane Reviews
    • Game Columns
      • Game Day
      • The Libertarian Gamer
  • Hoaxes
    • Hoax News
    • Hoax Debunkings
    • Urban Legends
  • Music
    • Music News
    • Music Reviews
  • Movies & TV
    • Movies & TV News
    • Movie Reviews
  • Podcast
    • Nuketown Radio Active

They would be complemented by these secondary categories:

    • Columns
      • Game Day
      • The Libertarian Gamer
      • Top of the Pile
      • Off the Bookshelf
    • News
      • Book News
      • Game News
      • Movie & TV News
      • Music News
    • Features
      • Mac RPG Tools
      • Libertarian Science Fiction
      • Monster Week
      • Windows RPG Tools
    • Reviews
      • Book Reviews
      • Game Reviews
      • Movie Reviews
    • Tachyons
      • Books
      • Games
      • Hoaxes
      • Music
      • Movies & TV

You’ll notice a new aggregation category called “Tachyons”. It’s the name for the microblogging content that will be incorporated into Nuketown’s content feeds and pushed out to Twitter, Facebook and the mobile versions of the site. We’ll talk about Tachyons more once we get into the wireframing phase of the redesign.

I’m painting this revised information architecture in broad strokes, but I think it works.
That said, this is one of the areas I’m most interested in hearing from folks about. Does it make sense? Do you like the setup of the existing site? What organizational changes would make it easier for you to use Nuketown? Let me know by taking this short poll or by leaving a comment below.

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