Logic
April 6th, 2004
Recently I had to write a critique of a site. and it occured to me about halfway through that the process was more like solving a logic problem than simply applying some critical faculties and saying ‘good’; ‘bad’ ‘so-so’.
It was like this: Someone used some kind of logic to put the site together. They must have done – there are a whole bunch of pages which are arranged in a hierarchy and relate to each other in meaningful ways. The only way for an architect to arrive at a structure for the site in the first place was through the application of logic.
This makes necessary sense: Logic is the only tool a user has to find what they’re looking for on a site. Your site better be structured logically if you want your users to be able to intuit their way around.
My job was to work out the logic – to discover the thinking behind the categorising and architecture of the site, and then figure out if this system was valid.
By studying the existing site I could get most of the understanding I needed – but not all. The kicker is that if the site is flawed in some way then it’s impossible for me to get a complete understanding of the logic behind the structure
but the site was more like a a clue in this hunt, rather than the complete solution to be disovered – I couldn’t be sure that the site was built sensibly, after all (indeed, it was not!)
It was ultimately quite a cathartic job. Rearranging the structure to make more sense was satisfyingly like slotting tetris shapes together, but on the way I frequently found myself thinking "what the hell did they do that for?" (and worse). I can report that profanity seems to be inversely proportional to apparent logic.