informative: “instructive: serving to instruct of enlighten or inform. providing or conveying information”
intrude: “to come in rudely or inappropriately; enter as an improper or unwanted element”
privacy: “the quality of being secluded from the presence or view of others”
In Information Architecture (IA), it is important to maintain sources of information informative, but not intrusive.
Let's take a look at two examples of Web tools where the line between “being informative” and “intrusion” is crossed; interesting to note are the importance of permissions and in some cases privacy. Also to note is that in both examples below the web site owner makes the decision about making their web site intrusive regardless of what the readers (the target) want.
The first example of this is Snap Preview, which provides a snapshot or preview of web sites when the user hovers his/her mouse over a hyperlink (I would argue the usefulness of Snap Preview, as the preview itself doesn't provide useful information about the web site beyond how it looks). While initially this preview may look “cool”, it quickly becomes intrusive, getting on the way and thus degrading the user experience. The user can reconfigure the tool to disable (not permit) the preview to occur. I do wonder how many people turns Snap Preview off.
The second example of intrusive IA is MyBlogLog (recently acquired by Yahoo!) which is a tool that provides both web site visitor metrics as well as a widget that shows the most recent (MyBlogLog registered) people who have visited the web site. But this is a different kind of intrusion though, more in the area of privacy. In this example, a MyBlogLog registered user visiting a web site may or not want to be identified as a visitor, for whatever reason – in this specific tool (as far as I can tell) there is no way to enable/disable being identified (even for paying users), which in turn becomes a privacy concern.
In IA always keep in mind the right balance between being informative, intrusive, and privacy concerns. Always give the user the choice, even if you have the best of intentions (for the user or yourself).
ceo