8 ideas — week of Feb 2

Eight ideas (and one excerpt) from my week:

Top 3 💡

The 4 use cases of websites for information-seeking users: focused, exploratory, exhaustive, recovery

When someone is looking for information, he/she is usually in one of four mindsets:

1. Focused: “I have something very specific that I want to find out.”
2. Exploratory: “I have some general idea of what I want, but nothing specific. I want a survey of what’s out there. I want to be inspired.”
3. Exhaustive: “I’m trying to learn everything there is about a topic. Give me everything you’ve got.”
4. Recovery: “I’ve found this specific thing before and now I need it again.”

These come from Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, although I’ve changed the names a little bit. Here what Morville and Rosenfeld named them:

The reason the authors called these out was to highlight that the information architecture of a website needs to address these different use cases.