Story

Whether you’re a student in college, a design professional, or an author of a book, you have all experienced the clutter of notes, reminders, memos, drawings, and documents scattered across the surface of your desk. There comes a point in this chaotic, unorganized display, when your tidy instinct begs for some order.

If your lucky, you quickly find materials you can use: a binder, file folders with the colored tabs, paper clips, even a stapler. You initially grab the content, sort and filter as a means for organizing and making order. As you organize, you may classify the data by such lateral relationships as (see Chapter 3, Display of Information):

Having now integrated your organizational skills with those office supplies, you can marvel at the clean desk. On its surface lay a faceted arrangement of folders. Each folder is clearly labeled with colored tabs housing written descriptions. Within each folder, a hierarchy exists of related content.

As discussed in Chapter 3, Displaying Information, we understand the importance of organizing an information structure across a single page, or an entire OS. To recap, we know that are two main types of organizing with information architecture.

  1. Hierarchy – which organizes content based on top-down, parent-child relationships.
  2. Faceting- organizes based on information attributes without the parent-child relationships. The structure is based on heterogeneous content, that share the same level within an information architecture.

Lateral Access and the Mobile Space

Now that the content has been organized and designed to follow an information architecture, you will need to consider how the users will access all of that information on a mobile device.

Important things to consider:

To account for these issues, consider presenting the information with lateral access. Content that is organized laterally is at the same level tier in the information architecture.

Benefits of lateral Access:

Mapping - Use our knowledge of cultural metaphors to understand the relationship of object and its function.

Patterns for Lateral Access

Using appropriate and consistent lateral access widgets will provide an alternative way to present and manipulate content serially. Within this chapter, the following patterns will be discussed, based on how the human mind organizes and navigates information: