When you — or your bank, whichever fits best — own a house with a yard, you sometimes find yourself doing stuff in/to/with it. This year, we’ll for example put up a new fence, to keep our new puppy from running into the street.

Since we also need some other stuff for the house, I figured that I’d check what’s the best place to start … from the comfort of my couch, obviously.

First, I visited sites like Byggmakker.no and Byggeriet.no. Then I stopped by Monter.no…

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One thing that has crossed and stuck on my mind lately, is how information is presented on topic maps based web portals.

Topic Maps based portals typically, or should I say obviously, use a subject centric approach for presenting information: every page presents information about a subject (represented by a topic in the topic map).

And most topic maps based portals lay out the information about those subject in much the same way:

• Page name = topic name.
• Page body = occurrences; e.g. description or article text.
• Right column = associations.

(In addition to this, the left column will most likely consist the standard global navigation menu).

Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Screen shot of government.no.

Screen shot of bergen.kommune.no.

Screen shot of www.forskning.no.

Now, what’s interesting is that one of the most interesting parts of the topic map (as far as I consider), the part that enables associative navigation and makes a difference compared to other technologies; the associations, are placed in the right column — a common spot for banner ads and less-important/interesting information that users have learned to overlook.

This makes me wonder: has anyone ever done user testing on topic maps based portals that might reveal how many users use the associative feature of topic maps - excluding the use of menus and the like?

How many users figure that the right column holds interesting information about related subjects and actually click these links?

I doubt topic maps based portals are wide spread enough for users to know that the associations are of interest — and in any way, which user knows - or cares - what goes on behind the scenes? And does it even matter, as long as the site is usable (in general)?

I am pretty sure it is important (as always) to use effective visual cues in order to direct the user’s attention towards the associations. Some of the examples above do better at presenting the associations visually — forskning.no almost appears to be hiding them, while bergen.kommune.no’s approach doesn’t seem too bad — for user’s to spot them while scanning the page for useful information. Still, it makes me wonder …

The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard is well worth a read.