Model of Attraction Saturday, 11:15 - 12:00 Session One Thomas Vander Wal Model of Attraction Thomas VenderWal, Senior Technologist and Web Support Manager, INDUS Corporation The field of Information Architecture has relied on navigation, taxonomy, metadata repositories, as well as many other terms and metaphors to describe to clients what we do and used to help us think about information structure. The IA field has been lacking a central framework to think about information. The Model of Attraction (MoA) fills these gaps by providing a unified framework. As well, MoA a literal description of how the Web works and how users interact with information. The Web is based on a user literally drawing information to themselves. This is the same as a magnet does acting as a catalyst. The Web is not only a tool of one-way attraction, but sites are developed to visually and cognitively attract the user to information the user seeks. The MoA works on many levels of attraction: a user trying to draw information to them by searching using narrow or wide terms to attract or repel all but the needed information; attraction is based on the user's mental model of user's visual and cognitive expectations; and what a user does with information (including personal and mobile uses). View the Conference Schedule

American Society for Information Science and Technology 1320 Fenwick Lane, Suite 510, Silver Spring, Maryland 20910, USA
Tel. 301-495-0900, Fax: 301-495-0810 | E-mail: asis@asis.org
Copyright 2002, Association for Information Science and Technology