Saturday, March 1, 2008

Information Hierarchies

It really is amazing the amount of information most people can absorb quickly if it's organized effectively. The 2 screens linked below illustrate this...

Yahoo Desktop1:

before-page-hierarchy

Yahoo Desktop2:

after-page-hierarchy

Differences between the first and second screens:

- 4 main content groupings: the search field, sidebar, main content area and tag cloud

- Data grouped to align with user goals like music, photos and documents

- Icons are used effectively to break up the different groups with the main content area

- Even fonts are used to group similar items with categories

[Proximity, shape, size and colour are all examples of some of the visual cues we'll use to group related things together.]

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