Information architecture of mobile phone products

Information architecture is a process of collating information, mediating information systems and users ' needs, and is mainly about making it into a structured, categorized, and browsing system.

Mobile phone and user interaction process, is actually information interaction, mobile phone and users are in the output and input information, touch screen and button is just the way users enter information.

The Web information architecture includes organizational systems, tag systems, navigation systems, and search systems, which are useful for dealing with large amounts of data, and for mobile products such as WAP sites, web apps, and part of mobile clients that have a strong web attribute (and frequent data processing by the Internet's database), Only because of the screen and operation of mobile phone features such as the implementation of different ways.

Web properties are most frequently encountered with information organization problems than weaker mobile clients. The navigation system usually uses the controls that are in the phone's operating system, such as the tab bar at the bottom of the iphone interface. Tag system and search system is to deal with large data will be used, for the data are manually entered by the user of the mobile client, the two systems use less, for the manual classification of data is a very basic label, such as the type of mobile phone number when you choose to classify students or colleagues.

such as the Android phone click on the "dial-up" and "contact" access to the interface has dial-up, call histories, contacts, and collections, in addition to the contacts are alphabetically, there are very useful by contact times, display the user's common contact, can meet the personal 90% to find contact person's needs. Alphabetical, dial-out, access, not connected, and commonly used sorting are the specific ways to organize information.

Then take awesome note as an example, the middle of the home page shows the categories and items of notes, including new, synchronized, edit classification and increase the classification functions, the interface as a whole or task to organize.

The overall design in the mobile phone client is very complex, the use of individual iphone with the control, the function of complex, user-defined ability. The interface design is beautiful, the icon is too exquisite, some icon clicks inconvenient, but the interface organization structure logic is clear.

Microblogging, browsers, mailboxes and SNS and other domestic common mobile phone client home more to task classification for the organization system, embodied in the nine Sudoku, tables and tabs of the Organization interface, which is also in line with the client easy to operate and rich interactive experience good characteristics. A personal summary of the tree structure (or hierarchical system) has the following design methods:

1. The branches are not crossed as far as possible. Cross-jump between interfaces like Web sites is very small on mobile clients, keeping the structure clear. Cross-jump because of the large amount of data, branches and a wide range, return to the superior in the selection of links will result in complex operations, it is not appropriate to find the unstructured relationship between the content.

2. Control the number of branches. The home page displays the commonly used function, the unusual function placement setting, has the function which uses the story to spread to the lower level interface. Too many functions, will weaken the most important function, even in strict accordance with the structure of the organizational system, users daily use of mobile phone products on the time is limited, it is difficult to spend time using all the features, do not want to copy the functions of the computer to the phone.

3. Do not repeat, focus on a particular branch. Similar features can be considered for merging, and in most cases the function will have primary and secondary points. Like the Android phone book, which is an example of an article, the alphabetical sort looks structurally clear, but it's more user-friendly to sort by user behavior. Also like 2 do focus on using the home page, the first interface will be able to display most of the content and functionality.

4. Maintain branching similarity. The two branches under the trunk are similar, easy to learn, add new interface layout, operation mode and operation logic as little as possible. Even if the visual effect is good, but there is no functional significance, there is no need to increase.

5. Reduce the level of the branch. If you click on a tweet in Twitter app, show the action directly, instead of jumping to the next level, like the domestic phone microblogging. The other reason for not advocating interface jumps is that the next interface also does not show meaningful repetition of the text content. The combination of 1 and 5,web in the deep breadth balance is not applicable in mobile phone products. Because of the screen-and-operation relationship, the first consideration in the face of large amounts of data is how to ensure that the most important information is displayed, rather than ensuring that each data is placed in the appropriate hierarchical diagram.

6. Give full play to the function of the trunk. The main page of the interface structure as far as possible, the same structure can appear in the branch, even if the interface development jump, visual smooth transition, users still feel the current interface is the home page. such as Sina Weibo right, the bottom by the tab bar can not become a toolbar, the interface can contain comments and hair transfer function (click Forward [1] and comments [0]), collection and more can be put into the menu, save a return.

The use of tree structure is top-down approach, first brainstorming or collecting user needs to get the main content of the product, and then draw the corresponding organizational structure. In addition to keeping the structure clear and suitable for users to find, this structure can avoid the late product reconfiguration due to logic ambiguity, and maintain good scalability.

Source: http://daichuanqing.com/index.php/archives/2052