Five Hat Racks
There are five ways to organize information: category, time, location, alphabet, and continuum.1
The organization of information is one of the most powerful factors influencing the way people think about and interact with a design. The five hat racks principle asserts that there are a limited number of organizational strategies, regardless of the specific application: category, time, location, alphabet, and continuum.2
Category refers to organization by similarity or relatedness. Examples include areas of study in a college catalog, and types of retail merchandise on a Web site. Organize information by category when clusters of similarity exist within the information, or when people will naturally seek out information by category ...
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