A Taxonomy for North Oyster Elementary: Journal Reflection Activity #3

For this assignment, I have chosen to create a taxonomy of the North Oyster Elementary website. I made this choice for very practical reasons. Our community was given word just over two weeks ago that our school, École Davis Road Elementary, is being permanently closed in June 2014. The French Immersion program will be relocated in its entirety to North Oyster Elementary, a currently under-subscribed rural school situated just north of Ladysmith. I am hoping to move, along with the rest of my French Immersion “family”, into this new home. In the spirit of “killing two birds with one stone”, it seemed appropriate to make the North Oyster Elementary website the focus of my LIBE 465 assignment. I was particularly curious to see how effectively the library and its various programs are currently represented on the school website. Using Figure 2 in Lesson 7 as my model, here is the taxonomy I created for the North Oyster Elementary school website:

Before beginning my analysis of the North Oyster Elementary (NOE) taxonomy, I find it necessary to state that this site follows a very similar organizational structure to that of many schools in our district. The basic architecture was created by the District #68 Senior Library Technician, with schools subsequently having the opportunity to enrich and modify their webpages based upon individual need and initiative. There are advantages and disadvantages to such an approach. A primary advantage is underscored by Faulkner and Hayton in their article “When Left Might Not Be Right”. They discuss the benefits of using a design a user already knows: “if a site follows the conventions of every other site then it is easier to use because the user knows exactly what to expect”. In the case of the NOE website, a serious drawback is that certain school-specific information gets buried too deeply within its hierarchy. I will clarify this particular shortcoming when I get into the “nitty gritty” of my description of the NOE architectural structure. Generally speaking, the navigation menu located at the top of the NOE homepage is clear and provides a reasonable starting point for site exploration. It is suggested in Lesson 7 that “good, clean pages are no more than three levels deep”. As the above taxonomy shows, his benchmark for “good storytelling” is met in the Our School, Parents, and Staff pages. The Students page, however, is very problematic. At first glance, navigation is quite straightforward. On the second level of the Students page, users are directed either to an Information for Students or to a Resources for Students link. A click here connects users to architectural level three, where links to 33 different “approved websites for student use” are displayed. “Minimal click-depth “(Lesson 7) is therefore well respected, that is until we reach the 33rd and last student resource label. Unfortunately, this obscure link provides the only connection to the North Oyster Library webpage. I consider this a tragic flaw in the NOE architectural structure. One must seriously question how many students would actually have the tenacity to navigate through three webpage levels, and read to the very bottom of a 33 item list in search of a library link. To complicate matters further, this lengthy resource list is not even organized alphabetically. Regrettably, the North Oyster Elementary site’s navigational challenges are not limited to “click depth”. Lesson 7 highlights effective “cross content linking” as a vital element of successful web design. As I attempted to maneuver through the NOE site, I experienced a severe lack of these crucial internal links. Nowhere was this more prevalent than within the library webpages. As a user, it was my expectation that once I chose to access the library webpage, I would be able “make myself comfortable” and browse different areas of interest. Unfortunately, none of the library pages were internally linked. For example, when I clicked on the North Oyster Library Staff Room and opted to peruse New Professional Titles, this is what I saw:

Perusing completed, my instinct was to click on the “Go Back” link located in the top left hand corner of the page. It seemed reasonable that this navigation label would take me back to my point of entry, where I could continue browsing. Frustratingly, the “Go Back” link did nothing at all. Eventually, I realized the only way to continue library exploration was to return to Resources for Students, scroll down to the 33rd item, and re-click on North Oyster Library. Despite my initial motivation, it didn’t take long to conclude that the information was not worth this cumbersome and time-consuming navigational process. When faced with this absence of internal links, I can only imagine how quickly students would similarly lose interest and attention. The North Oyster Elementary website is based essentially on a pure hierarchy. In their book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld describe a pure or “strict” hierarchy as one in which “each term appears in one and only one place”. On the NOE site, only the District Resource Centre and SD#68 Home Page labels show up twice. According to Morville and Rosenfeld, “polyhierarchy”, where certain terms are “cross-listed in multiple categories”, is a common evolution from pure hierarchy. I feel the needs of NOE site users would be better met with a greater degree of “polyheirarchy”. Currently, the only link to the Library’s teacher Staff Room is found by clicking on the North Oyster Library link, which resides exclusively in Resources for Students. I think we can agree that this is not the most logical placement. At the very least, this same information should also be available within Resources for Staff. Such a “polyheirarchical” approach would not solve all this website’s problems, but it would at least provide teachers more direct access to library information from the NOE homepage. The fundamentally “pure” hierarchical structure of the North Oyster Elementary website is reflected in the following sitemap:

I appreciate the opportunity this LIBE 465 assignment has given me to put the North Oyster Elementary website “under the microscope”. Not only do I have a better understanding of the myriad of issues surrounding information architecture in general, I also have a great starting point for specific improvements which could significantly enhance the experience of users visiting this site. These modifications will definitely be on my “To Do” list for next year!