Dmitriy Sintsov wrote:
>
> When one looks for educational / academic content, rich and colorful
> interface only distracts the reader.
> The following site is not mediawiki / monobook based, yet the visual
> design is simple:
> http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html
> There is nothing wrong with it. Actually, there is real beauty in
> simpicity.
> Dmitriy
>
>
The visual design is fine here, but information architecture is
seriously lacking here.
Of course, it's hard to design a navigation interface for a
heterogeneous collection of concepts as you see here, but the
alphabetical index doesn't play as well online as it does in print. The
eye and hand can scan alphabetically much faster in a book than you can
do online.
There are the really obvious problems that show up in alphabetical
listings: for instance, many people forget to fold "The" when they do
queries against online library catalog systems; more modern systems
ought to do the folding for you automatically, but there's really no
incentive for libraries to improve the services they offer their
patrons. Similarly, today it's pretty reasonable for a system to
accomodate people who are looking for "Adorno, Theodore" or "Theodore
Adorno".
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