Scent of information

“..Scent of information..”
(This is based on a reference sentence as seen in Krug’s User experience book)

The above extract from Krug’s book caught my attention since often we deal with IA components that ensure scents of useful information while navigating or searching through the web site. The need to keep the user less distracted with meaningless information and ability to provide relevant information for each click is very important.

Lets look at scion.com and from the first look, the website targets young audience who likes “cool” and sporty stuff and are driven by constant scent of information where ever they look for. The inherent IA of the website supports this goal and thus the organization schemes, organization structure, labeling, navigation and search systems are designed and tuned accordingly. The eye catching graphics and icon based information organization, navigation and retrieval makes its more appealing to the user who has similar taste. The home page itself supports basic goal of enabling quick understanding of what kind of information is available through the website and how user can assimilate the needed information. The information need may be to support buying decision or it might be to learn the price and features of all scion model cars.

Cool images, animated scroll of cars which supports display of price and feature on mouse over, hierarchy based information organization structure (the top navigation bars) and audience oriented organization scheme (eg: cars – new user, owners- existing users, culture – scion enthusiasts) are well designed to create fresh “scent of information” during each click or mouse over actions. All information is available within less than 3-4 click away. For example, to know the ‘performance’ information of the ‘XB’ model, I just need to do 3 mouse moves and one click on the top navigation bar to see the information. The most cool feature is that user is less frustrated with constant page refresh while navigating deeper to find more granular information.

Reference:
Krug S. (2005). Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition.