Donna Maurer of Maadmob Interaction Design has a session explaining to IA’s why they ought to take seriously George Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, a book basically about Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory. (I’m about to start writing about this in my book.) It’s a difficult book to read, despite its great title.

Categories, she says, have been taken as being existing/natural divisions that can be expressed in clear definitions. But, Lakoff says (says Donna), categories have prototypical examples. We can organize by similarities to the prototypes without having to define the category.

Donna talks about the concept of basic level categories— you generalize up from them and down to the specifics. BLCs are the level you learn first and usually has a short name, e.g., “dog.” It is the “highest level at which a single mental image can reflect the category.” [In English we can’t form an image of furniture but we can of chair.] BLCs depend on the culture. E.g., city dwellers will say “a tree” while a country dweller might say “a maple tree.”

Donna looked for a web site that organized information by laying out BLCs, but she couldn’t find one. E.g., the eBay site’s category list mixes BLCs with more specific categories.

Prototype theory is important to IAs because the classical theory of categories is built into much software. She says this is her most important point: “Recognize that categories occur and you’ll be less stressed about categorization that is not neat.” Messiness is ok. No scheme is going to include everything and be perfect. (Someone from the audience points out that Sotheby’s “Other” category has an “Other” sub-category.)

Other implications for IAs. Donna suggests using less prototypical items to describe edge cases. And, she says, you can derive BLC names by doing research to see what they are for your users. “Basic level items are easily recognized and likely to have good scent.” Card sort, she suggests, with basic level items rather than more granular content elements. “Get people to the basic level of the hierarchy as soon as possible.”

She wonders whether tags are often BLCs, accounting for their popularity. (Livia from the audience says that they probably are basic level if the taggers are typical of the group.)

Q: Does Lakoff deal with the cultural differences?
A: Definitely. That’s what the title is about.

Q: Folksonomies can help us get away from us imposing a taxonomy on a system.

Q: The same category may be basic level for one group and high level for another…

Q: (Christian Crumlish) When you focus on basic level categories for navigation, where should they be on the site, typically?
A: On the home page, if possible.

Q: (me) How stable are BLCs and what size group do they vary over?
A: They’re pretty stable over time, and the size of the group depens on the domain.

[Excellent talk. Exciting to me to see IA’s taking this stuff up.] [Tags: iasummit donna_urer george_lakoff prototype taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous eleanor_rosch]

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