So much of design is about deciding how to categorize things properly.
The user doesn’t care if we’ve designed the prettiest screen in the world – if the content isn’t arranged logically, if the navigation is senseless and the layout unintuitive, it won’t matter how much lipstick we put on that pig.
Taxonomies are important at every level of design. Information architecture, the top layer of our discipline, hinges on classifying content properly. Visual hierarchy, page layout, and even semantic markup relies on categorizing information and metadata at the root level. Macro-content and micro-content alike need to be classified correctly for a design to look, feel, and work as smoothly as possible.
In fact, design and taxonomy share an identical goal: carving order out of chaos.
This is the thought that crosses my mind as I sit staring at a list of nine seemingly-unrelated items. Each item is a button; the client needs the buttons to fit on a single iPad screen, and each has to be visible at all times. The usual cheats – hiding things, placing things below the fold – are out of the question.
It sounds like a bad riddle, but this is the design problem I’m facing. The key is to find a way of grouping the buttons logically; rather than present the user with nine items, let’s see if we can present them with just a handful. Once they find the group they need, they can find the exact item within. We can decrease the cognitive overhead of one big decision by enabling them to make two small decisions.
I end up finding a logical classification that will allow us to have three groups of three items each. When the user sees it, it should seem completely intuitive. As designers, it’s our job to accept the mental load and do the heavy lifting for the user. What the user sees is the result of the designer’s preprocessing of the information.
Order out of chaos. Just another day’s work in the design field.