Here is an example of a hybrid organization. What can you to do improve it? Draw a sketch.

It’s worth analyzing for objects and actions (nouns and verbs). Here is a possible first analysis:

Objects Actions Individual accounts Open an Account New Customers Track a Package Small Business Center Schedule a Pickup e-Commerce Support Order Shipping Supplies



Actions often lend themselves to a task-oriented organization. Looking at the objects, it appears that there are new customers, individual customers, small business customers and e-Commerce customers. While the distinction between small businesses and e-Commerce businesses is definitely a bit on the fuzzy side, the best fit for this set of objects would be an audience-specific organization.

Since this is such a small number of links, you could put the tasks in one menu and the audiences in another. As long as these are physically separate on the page, it’s a good solution. Here are a couple possibilities:

Here, one set of links is horizontal and runs along the top of the page. The other is vertically oriented and runs along the left side of the page.
This is also perfectly acceptable. Both sets of links appear on the left side of the page, but they are physically separated from each other.
Commentary to instructors: Note that the solutions presented here are sketches. It’s important that they sketch this by hand rather than using HTML or a Web authoring tool to create it. Students get caught up in the tool rather than spending time analyzing the content. It’s important that the students do not invest a lot of implementation time on an early prototype such as this. This is an untested prototype, which means that it will need changing once it undergoes user testing. So why spend implementation time now?
It’s the same distinction as between implementation and algorithm. We ask students to build binary search trees on paper to demonstrate their grasp of the concept. It’s the same here. As long as the sketch is legible, we recommend basing the grade solely on content organization.