Five Hat Racks

Or the LATCH principle in one element of an amazing little pocketbook I came across a couple of months back called "The Universal Principles Of Design" and wanted to share one element of it with you. I really believe that if we incorporated more of this design thinking in the things we get up to in IT, it would go a long way to help foster a better all-round reputation but at the very least expose us to some tried and tested strategies that have been successfully used in most other industries for generations.

So in principle, the Five Hat Racks is a metaphor representing the five different ways information can be organised and how that influences the story that data then tells.

The five ways to organize information are:

1. Location (geographical or spatial references) - Emergency exits and travel guides for example.
2. Alphabet (alphabetical sequence) - Dictionaries for example.
3. Time (chronological sequence) - Timelines and tv guide schedules for example.
4. Category (similarity relatedness) - A store organising products by aisle or a library organising books by subject for example.
5. Hierarchy / Continuum (magnitude; highest to lowest, best to worse) - Batting averages and search results for example.

I'm a visual person so have a look at the following example:

Can you see how framing the same information in the five different ways influences the story that is being told?

If you now think of everything from how we communicate operational health, categorise the enormous amount of data we collect every day within IT, or the various ways we present IT services then hopefully this offers you some ideas about maybe doing things a little differently.

I for one have had moments where I have wanted to create a monthly operational report from a different perspective in order to get more stakeholders interested in reading it so this gives me some other avenues to pursue and test.

Have a think and let me know of some examples of where you think this could benefit you in your current roles or if you have already used this then let me know how successful it was!