Portal designers can learn much from architects and builders. Well-designed buildings are easy to use and structurally sound. We can find what we want, components like doors and windows appear in logical places, and, most importantly, the building stands up over time. We cannot go into a building and find the structural integrity the same way we can find the heating and ventilation units or the corner office. Structural integrity is a property of the way the building was designed and constructed; it is not a single feature added at some point in the construction process. The structural integrity of a portal is similar to that of a building. It is a fundamental property of the portal design, reflected in turn in visible characteristics, such as ease of use, functionality, and reliability.

In this chapter, we look into structural integrity from a user’s perspective. The core question we address is “How will portal users find what they need?” Actually, we break this question into a number of more specific questions to which we can provide general but concrete answers.

First, we discuss how to organize information on a page. This may sound insignificant compared to other challenges that await us in portal development, but poorly designed pages hamper the portal’s adoption. Next, we look at design patterns for logically grouping related content and applications to provide a sense of context for our users. We can all appreciate the sense of being in a particular section of a department store and knowing in general how to find other sections. We should provide something analogous for portal users. Without contexts users can easily become lost in an apparent jumble of hyperlinked pages. Finally, we look at specialized techniques (such as taxonomies, faceted content models, and visualization) that can aid navigation, especially in large and diverse portals. A case study shows how visualization and logical restructuring techniques improved customer care services for one organization.

Much has been written about usability and Web design techniques, and this book does not try to add to these well-discussed areas. The main concern here tends more toward architectural issues, which sometimes abut or even overlap with usability issues. For questions about usability and design layout, I defer to any of the well-written books on the subject such as Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug and Roger Black [2000] and Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen [1999]. I will address the types of structural elements required in well-designed portals but won’t try to describe the finer details of their layout, formatting, and other visual elements.

The Need for Structure in Portal Interface Design

The underlying structures are core services, such as authentication, access controls, and metadata management, as well as the policies and procedures that govern the evolution of the portal. These structures are not necessarily visible when they work well, but their absence is all too apparent. When users cannot work with essential applications because of access control problems or when navigation tools direct searchers to inappropriate content because of miscategorized metadata, users become all too aware of these underlying services.

Page-Level Structures

Figure 1.1 Many portal pages use a basic three-part layout

The global area is consistent across the portal and often provides links to a home page, contact information, accessories, or other frequently used applications.

The navigation area provides a localized context for users. If you went to the human resources area of a portal you would expect to find navigation links to training, policies and procedures, benefits information, and related material; in a health and safety area of the portal you’d expect to find information on material safety, accident prevention, and reporting procedures. The role of the site navigation area is to provide an immediately visible and easily accessible path to related components in the portal while keeping the user from being overwhelmed by the full breadth of the portal.

There are several common approaches to organizing the navigation area. First, the area can be organized by subsite or neighborhood. The CNN Web site (http://www.cnn.com), for example, uses this approach by consistently listing subsites (such as Weather, Politics, Business, and Sports) in the navigation area. A variation on this model is to display subtopics when a topic is selected. A third approach focuses on tasks rather than content and is more appropriate for portals or subsites oriented toward content management. Yet another approach is a hybrid that combines content-oriented with task-oriented links. Care should be taken to clearly distinguish the two types of links, remembering that the purpose of the navigation section is to provide a sense of context. Intermixing content and task links could make it more difficult for users to perceive their location within the portal.

The main content area delivers the core information and application access that the users seek. By framing this information and the applications in navigational frameworks, you provide users immediate access to locally related topics as well as global landmarks, such as the portal home page.