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Information Architecture of eds.activemath.org

Where to Put and How to Find Items at eds.activemath.org?

Preliminary reference points for classification/taxonomy:

  • Information Architecture (IA)
    • Labelling
    • Navigation
    • Re/Organisation
    • Search
  • Usability
  • Accessibility.

eds etiquette ?

The person opening a forum or book topic assumes the responsibility and task of digesting the responses and synergizing the chronological threads into a dynamically systematized version.

Chronology and Systematization?

Systematizing chronological threats: Recent contributions to a previously created item do not seem to be recognized as a recently updated item, and are not reflected as such on the front page? Why?

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a stab to enhance usability

Well, all this grows organically, so I can only try to project my ideas:

  • I believe that a first usability enhancement would be to polish much more the home page and probably separate the many dashboard-like blocks into a separate dashboard.
  • I still believe that mail input of forums would help a lot, it’s a technical matter to get it running
  • more pictures should be used, probably: author’s pictures ? decorative math representations ? (picture of the week?)
  • the performance should feel considerably better (again a technical matter)
  • I would love to hear opinions and criticisms about the appearance quality at each and every browser’s !

Among the debatable things:

  • the home page is displaying the recent fresh contributions, should that be different ? It clearly is only as good as the contribution…
  • put even less navigation features for non-logged-users ? this seems to be a general wish but I cannot think of making it smaller except maybe suppressing the right column on the home page

In Response To: A Stab To Enhance Usability

Non-linear response: Having read your comment I am trying to be more precise and more structered with my initial question, exemplifying that chronological development requires systematic reorganisation along the way to facilitate intelligibility.

From my limited experience, systematic and dynamic reorganisation is much facilitated by outliners. David Winer’s outliner concept developed some time ago, and his original Radio Userland implementation allowed ease of use of reorganising and publishing ever changing information structures.

How can something like that be integrated with eds?

outlining on drupal

well… outlining as I know it in OmniOutliner is very nice and I keep doing this actually before publishing to eds. Basically, this is manipulations along a tree. The table-of-contents and inner-page sections as can be found in the books here are similar to these though less flexible. I am not sure, however, that this flexibility is good for users reading.

While using an outliner, I only see re-organization made easy by the use of copy-and-paste (CnP) and drag-and-drop (DnD). CnP is there for inner page parts in drupal, DnD is missing, indeed. Is it the direction you wish to go ?

There is the potential of having special books in here that would be fed by an outliner, for sure… would that be enough ? It would potentially ignore the contributions of others.

paul

I like Freemind

I like Freemind for outlining: http://drupal.org/project/freemind

freemind for taxonomy edit ?

Hello Christian,

I understand freemind is a taxonomy browser. The taxonomy is the space where the categories live, right ? Indeed, the taxonomies of Drupal can be put to a great work, for example to provide thematic pages and that could help accessing the content.

But categories need to be adjusted and maintained permanently.

Could you use Freemind’s Drupal integration to actually edit the taxonomy? There’s a whole lot of manipulations to make to make a taxonomy clean and freemind could do this but it seems to claim to do navigation only.

E.g. right now I erased the usage of OQMaths converting to OQMath, a typo to my taste, but i had to do much manipulations to arrive at such and merging two terms is an elementary manipulation of a taxonomy.

paul