use it.com Alertbox June 1999 Content Integration Search Jakob Nielsen 's Alertbox, June 27, 1999: Content Integration The Internet is a net . Much of its power comes from dissolving the boundaries between hitherto isolated pockets of content. Many of the best hopes for improving the Web bring separately-sourced content together in integrated designs: - A huge multi-national corporation wants to build a " mini-Yahoo intranet portal that allows employees to navigate and search documents from different divisions as well as various licensed content feeds from outside information providers (e.g., news about their industry). Chaos ensues with directory listings and search results that resemble pack-rat nests.
- A small country wants to create a unified interface to all online government information , including the many ministries and departments of the national government as well as a large number of local jurisdictions. Of course, each ministry has its own information architecture and does not want another department to dictate its design. To say nothing about the difficulty of getting a city or county administration to follow guidelines from the capital.
- An e-commerce site sells several different product lines , each with different characteristics: books have authors and page counts; videos have stars, directors, and playing time in minutes; compact disks exist with multiple recordings of the same Mozart symphony by different orchestras. Each product line has its own database, category listing pages, and search engine. But for some sales situations, it makes more sense to organize the user experience around customer needs and the buying situation: for example, gift ideas for a certain occasion. Or cross-sell between a film based on a book and the book itself.
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