There are some IA and usability folk who believe that site maps are not only useful but an important tool to help convey to IA of a site to a user. Thanks to elegant hack for getting me thinking about this.

Is conveying the IA of a site really that important? Would this always be the case? Are there ever any sites that work very well for users even when those users lack a fundamental understanding of the site's organization?

In my opinion, absolutely yes.

Case in point: Amazon.com. I love this site; it's easily one of my top 20 sites to visit. I always end up finding something interesting here to add to my wish list. But one of the reasons I love the site is that I don't have to understand how it's structured. I don't even know all the different kinds of products they sell! Despite the sheer number of departments they have, I still generally only shop there for books, movies and music. Once or twice I've taken a peek at their kitchen stuff, but that's about it. I have no idea how many departments they have. I have no idea how many subcategories in each department they have. In fact, I've only once tried to look for a book through their "category" list because I found it confusing and not terribly representative of their collection.

Does this mean I find the site unusable or somehow harder to navigate? Absolutely not. That's the beautiful thing about Amazon. I type in a word or two, I get results, and from those results I can see related things, things other people recommend, and a plethora of other options. No directory structure needed. I just hop and click and hop and click and browse. Just like the good old days of the web. And you know what? I end up finding better and more relevant information than I do through most other sites that force me to understand a hierarchy before clicking on a link.

Does that mean that hierarchies and site maps are obsolete? Not necessarily. But really, I believe that most sites (once they reach a certain size, at least) would be better off polishing their site's search intelligence than providing some kind of browsable hierarchy. As information grows to even more stupendous proportions on the web, I think computer-based filtering (search, at least at this point in the web's history) is far more valuable to the user than manual filtering (hierarchies or classifications that the user must read and understand in order to use). And I can't help but think that this value will only grow over time.

As with everything on the web, only time will tell, I suppose.

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