I'm trying to design the IA for an application that has strong elements of two different organizational patterns.
Looked at in one way the information very much resembles a directory or phone book (primary use cases are things like "find the phone number of $NAMED ORGANIZATION"). Looked at another way the information very much resembles a net- or tree-like hierarchy (example case "find the company for which $NAMED PERSON is the sales representative). Unfortunately, about 30% of the data elements do not fit into the hierarchy. They'd be a very large group of "others". Preliminary interviews with users shows about a 50-50 split between the two types of use cases, with no strong bias I can find. The users are demand-driven, responding to unpredictable requests from other people so they can't control ahead of time what requests or even what types of requests they get. I don't think I want to create two screens for the same person, nor do I want to make things strongly modal. (But maybe I'm wrong about that?) I'm looking for any good examples of cases where people have blended these two types of organizational schemes. TIA, --Alan ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
