When I saw this slide on Josh Porter's terrific preso on Psychology Of Social Design the clouds parted and the angels sang.

There is a desired behavior that we need to create, we have no control over the person but, via interaction design, information architecture and interface design we control the environment.

Perfect, and succinct. I need to make a T-Shirt.

entire presentation:

 Rosenfeld Media recently did an analysis of user experience mentions in prominent Business Magazines. What they discovered is quite fascinating.

• The Harvard Business Review dramatically differs from its peers in its information focus. Knowledge management (26.7%) and information management (61.7%) combined to account for 88.4% of its results, while the average for all of our business publications is 28.2% (8.5% + 19.7%). Of course, HBR is the most academic publication on our list. If this is the explanation, does that suggest that the research and academic side of the business community is more focused on information management issues? If so, why?


• The Economist is quite focused—at the expense of all other UX topics—on branding: 96.7% of its results, versus a 42.4% average among all analysts. Of all the terms on our list, branding has been in use perhaps the longest. Does The Economist see newer topics as flighty and not worth deeper coverage?


• Conversely, Business Week seems to have the most balanced coverage, with six terms accounting for at least 5% of the results each (branding, content management, industrial design, information management, knowledge management, and user experience).

Admittedly a difficult name to decipher, it is pronounced Wood-Key. Nonce, I'm impressed he came up with three alternatives to that choice.

I'm incredibly flattered I'm quoted, I realize I shouldn't be so arch. It's a bit weird to be interpreted. The "pants" entry was my last foray into people taking my words and viewing it as the impending death of IA; here I'm a sign that IA is bigger than design. I can't say I would make the analogy of IA is to design as architect is to construction worker; I'm in the camp of IA is to design as architect is to design. But then, I'm not sure I'd make that statement wearing a pig mask on Halloween either, so viva la difference!

I was just uploading some old slideshows to slideshare, and found this guy. IN 2004, I was invited to give some talks in scandanavia. Since talking about basic IA principals was starting to bore me, I thought I'd jazz it up by trying to guess where IA was going to go next. I just realized that I got 6 out of 7 dead on. Feeling kinda sassy right now.

(note, first half is about IA, takes awhile to get to the actual predictions.)

prelude GK Patterson offered to let me participate in "structured" conversation with Bob Goodman and Joshua Porter, both people I quite respect and I said yes. The I read Unidentical Twins. And then I decided to pass on the structured conversation. I can't be caught up in a long defining the damn thing conversation again. But now, some days later, I find myself haunted by what died in my outbox. On the off chance anyone finds it helpful, here is my response, which, after sending, decided to kill. unedited, half-baked, but hey, it's a blog. Enjoy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well, if you thought I was angry before... I cannot tell you how badly this pains me, being included as an indicator of something wrong with IA. I had a point, and apparently I didn't make it at all, and here it is, if you want to know it:

Designers tie too much of their identity into their profession, and this makes it hard for them to progress in their careers. IA and Ixd is design. And as such, IA's and interaction designers get caught in the same trap. They say I *am* an IA rather than I practice IA, and it's more than linguistic shortcut, it's a statement of being.

This is particularly difficult if your name and reputation is intertwingled with that previous career. It's the equivalent of Todd English starting to love fixing old cars, repairing them and rebuilding their engines, and finally saying he has become a vehicular chef instead of admitting he'd become a mechanic. Nothing is wrong with cooking, but he had grown into a new shape. I have grown into a new shape.

As long as folks try to reshape their profession instead of relabeling themselves, they are going to feel constrained. And probably angry. My problem was I was trying to turn IA into a profession that included all the activities of entrepreneurship, instead of admitting I had changed careers. Once I realized I wasn't an IA anymore, life went on and I was much less angry that IA's didn't care about what I cared about. Of course they don't! Why should they?

So I suppose the question really is, what to think about IA. Honestly, I really do not understand why people attack it, and most of the attacks are bizarre and ill-informed. I just reread all the supporting material (including my own) and bah. I love you Josh, I love Shirky, but I don't see why you guys think IA is stagnant (more on that later.)

I had not read Unidenticle Twins, and now that I have, I deeply regret agreeing to respond to it. Too late now; I've lost the bulk of a Saturday morning writing this.

Response

I cannot believe an intelligent person has to cloak his ideas in inflammatory language. On top of it, GK, you have footnotes that go to nowhere! You make claims with no supporting material to prove your point! I'm upset and angry and disappointed and annoyed. And I haven't been an IA for years!

"This is a difficult story to tell in this format and one that is unlikely to appear on any of the Information Architecture-driven blogs."

Why do you say that? It speaks of prejudice not fact. As far as I can tell, IA blogs have done a great job of citing forebearers and embraced controversy, from Adam's posting of Not IA to Erin's Malone's design history work. I'll cite mine, if you cite yours.

"While the Information Architecture community of today is notorious for having a short, inwardly focused, airbrushed historical memory, it is well known that contemporary Information Architecture practice and the Information Architecture community began years before the dot-com era arrived (as did the Experience Design community)."

Again, offensive and inaccurate (not to mention self-contradicting). If you make claims like this, I really wish you would provide supporting information.

"Richard has written many books (70+), including the more widely known Information Architecture, published in 1996."

The book is actually called "Information Architects." It's now worth 70 bucks and up used on amazon, which I think is kinda cool in a world where many formerly critical works are now available for pennies. I had it on my canon on my site since I first had a booklist, and sometimes commenters would suggest it was outdated. But RSW's work and book is still useful as well as beautiful and his mantra "make the complex clear" is as true for Information Architects now is it was then. And complexity has not lessened.

However, it is a book on information design, not on strategy as you suggest later.

"That other unidentical twin moved in a radically different direction embracing all and more of the original intention of Wurman's Information Architecture. Since those early days, that unidentical twin, Strategic Information Architecture, continuously transformed itself and spawned many diverse children: Innovation Architecture, Innovation Acceleration, Strategic Design, Transformation By Design, Strategic Sensemaking, etc."

Perhaps as an insider, you knew of RSW's grand designs that would lead to such brilliant innovations as TED. The book doesn't make that case. It simply says that the world is complicated, and some people are gifted with skills to make it make sense, and thank goodness that's true.

"While absconding with Wurman's higher-order name but only a fraction of the original focus, content, intent and knowledge, Findability Information Architecture went on to create its own world that it conveniently, some would say presumptuously and inappropriately, depicted for many years as Information Architecture."

So my argument would be that Lou and Peter, not sitting at the knee of RSW, went on to expand that early vision into the newly born internet space, and grew it with the tools they had at hand: LIS (library science.) What you and others forget is someone else was making loose and easy with the IA name: Clement Mok. Designing Business (sadly for him, fortunately for the rest of us, available for 13 cents on Amazon.) is a lost IA historical text. In it, IA is defined more or less as the process of making site maps from strategy, and remarkable numbers of IA's still work like this. Far more, sadly, than those who actually know how to make a taxonomy. But reading it, you can see what resulted of taking RSW's work and turning it into a discipline. These folks became content strategists and strategy folks. Some learned about metadata and deepened their IA knowledge, some focused on usability, and some became interaction designers. Around 2001, some became waiters. I got a job at Yahoo working on search.

You may complain that IA's are unaware of strategic work, but I would argue that many strategic IA's are woefully unaware of the body of knowledge that resides in the information retrieval community. I recall working with a former employee/disciple of RSW's who suggested we add search to a consumer photo site. "What would we search," I asked? "The photos." "There is nothing to search," I replied. "No, you just search, you know, dog, and the dog photos come up." "No, nothing comes up." The infrastructure of search-- that it works by searching for words and words do not magically attach themselves to images-- was beyond this person. This self-proclaimed "IA" did not know the materials s/he worked with, moreover s/he didn't think it mattered. S/he was "strategic."

Those of us who were part of the IA community since the beginning have heard these arguments before: they were called "Big IA" and "Little IA." Big was strategic, Little was executional, Big thought it could be a "conductor" on web teams, and pull the disciplines together to execute strategy. Little know a lot about how the information world actually works, and how you could search photos, how you could make it possible for people to find things they were looking for, use the data they collected, create the things they dreamed of. Little in its little ways helped users in myriad ways do the things they dreamed of, and little IA's, like the biblical meek, inherited the world. Big IA's discovered that between Product Managers and Design Managers, the job they wanted was already taken. The smart Big IA's traded in their job titles. The others whined they could do it better if someone would just listen to them.

This attitude of arrogance coupled with ignorance seems prevalent in some "Big IA" practitioners still swaggering around consulting rounds. They seem disinterested in giving up their wireframes-and-a-sitemap solution they've been hawking since '99. Bullshit artists, too lazy to learn retrieval techniques, too caught up in their identity to study Mintzberg and Drucker, they are noisily spoiling the landscape for the new generation of IA's. But don't be fooled by these blowhards! IA is alive and well and in the hands of folks too busy adapting and inventing to whine about who invented what.

Nform's Gene Smith, for example, just published a fantastic article on social software and is about to write what will be the definitive book on tagging. Thomas Vanderwal's work with Infocloud is getting a ton of attention at senior levels. Emanuele Quintarelli is finding ways to merge folksonomies with taxonomies into more useful retrieval tools. Stacy Surla is working IA in Second Life, and Bill DeRouchey in smart furniture. Moreover, Mags Hanley has made metadata sexy for executives everywhere, because it actually *does* help achieve strategic goals. IA dead? Dead like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, maybe. IA is incorporating, adapting, expanding but still staying with its core value proposition. What is that value? I'd state it is the same as Google's -- "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." And like Google, IA is adapting to new technologies and behaviors to be more relevant than ever.

"Some folks writing on this thread really need to go and do some reading work. Get out there and go to some non Findability Information Architecture conferences. Go and learn some history."

Some folks writing about IA should go read some IA history, and understand the discipline before making calls based on occasional perusal of a blog. I've just come back from my sixth conference this year, and not one is as innovative, as strategic or as educational as the granddaddy of all "findability" Information Architecture conferences: The IA Summit.

Maybe you should go to the summit, and learn something about the creature you criticize. I've found your tone so incredibly offensive and dismissive, I can barely bring myself to say I agree with a single point you make. A few other disturbing moments:

"the iPod-driven huge wave of interest in "design thinking" that Findability Information Architecture leaders still seem to be struggling to react to, airbrush over, write themselves into and reorganize around."

Are you speaking about Victor Lombardi's blog, an early and well known IA who is now on the Business Week's favorite list for his posts on Design Thinking? He's hardly struggling to react to anything; he's actively and successfully defining it.

"this became known notoriously as the "drunken sailors containment strategy," also lovingly referred to as the "blue collar containment strategy."

What is this, where did it come from, can you please cite where you see IA's using this language or approach? You say it's a phrase from outside the IA community, but then manage to suggest IA's do it.

"Whether everyone likes it or not, the future of Strategic Design ... Information Architecture are all merging into the strategic space, evidently at different speeds."

I imagine the folks who like it least are those senior business strategists who have been practicing for many years, and see a bunch of arrogant and undereducated folks telling them what to do when they should be listening and bringing their skills to the table. Hopefully enough of those from the design professions will go humbly and thoughtfully and merge their insights and approaches with business strategy that new ways of practicing will occur. Hopefully there won't be so much infighting those who hold the reins won't simply dismiss "those darn creatives" from the table entirely.

GK, I'd like to challenge you to rewrite your article with citations and without insulting generalizations. Then, you might actually change the IA profession rather than be dismissed as a resentful designer, which is what happened on private lists.

~~~~~

And in response to something Josh said

~~~

I think we agree that once something is big, it's more big than it is IA (and big D design is design, and Big IxD would be design and so on... ) Occasionally IA is engineering, but most of the time it's design. Where Josh and I part company is on "little"'s health and well being. "Little" means specialist IAs whose subset of the world's design problems has to do with making the world's information accessible and useful. Taxonomies and so on are merely tools, and as new tools come along --such as folksonomies-- the good IA's pick them up and incorporate them into their practices.

When cars showed up, most blacksmiths stuck to horseshoes. A few applied their wheel straightening abilities to horseless carriages as well as the horsed ones, then branched out to stickshift making. Eventually very few horse shoes were made. What we don't know is if taxonomies or horseshoes or wheels; i.e. will they make it into the next generation of usage or get hung on the wall for luck.

I'd say it'd be unwise to retire them too early. If you know something about search and retrieval, you know there are things you can do only if you have lots and lots of data. Too many folks plug in the Googlebox and are surprised it doesn't work as well as the website. Well, you can't use pagerank algorithms as effectively in a closed system like an intranet, because you just don't have as rich a set of data to base relevance on. Perhaps the rising popularity of "enterprise" IA reflects that fact. Tags, search, dynamic linking etc work better in a large data-set, large -index world while handcrafted "best bets" and navigation systems are required in a smaller and more closed systems.

To return to the blacksmith metaphor, we notice there are very few blacksmiths around today. Eventually wheelmaking was standardized to the degree it could be mass produced. I think it's premature to say that information architecture is sufficiently solved that craftsmen are not required. It's possible that day will come, but new techniques keep popping up, so I'll go with "not yet."

And finally, regarding the IA "land grab" - the WORLD is becoming information rich. Why would the people who know how to make information palatable to humans stay in the internet, when even the internet isn't staying in the internet. Is itunes a application or a browser? How about songbird? Your phone and other devices are hollow shells holding information, and every street corner holds a kiosk providing a portal to the information world.

I'm actually somewhat upset that interaction design is a has made a comeback, because I'd like to see interaction designers and information architects merge (and I really really don't care whose title is used.) Like peanut butter and chocolate, they are two great things that taste great together. Unlike peanut butter and chocolate, they are growing increasingly more bland without each other. Finding information is lovely, but cooler yet is storing, sharing and remixing. And I challenge you to find one application on your desktop that doesn't have an information component. You can no longer have one without the other.

In my fantasy world the IAI and IxDI merge. Sadly, I don't think most folks egos and sense of identity would allow it.

Google Co-op - Custom Search Engine

thanks Peter!

Oz-IA 2006 - September 30th & October 1st

Squidoo : Introduction to Information Architecture good for those newbies looking for a place to start.

It's all good.
Informations-arkitektur - fra navigation til søgning
personally I have no idea what's going on....

I may be biased, as I am speaking, but I think this is quite an interesting line up, and registration is cheap right now!

~~~
The early registration deadline for the Information Architecture Institute's Leadership Seminar is January 28th. Sign up now to get a significant discount for this star-studded event.

The 1 ½ day Seminar “Advanced IA: Topics for 2005 and Beyond� will precede the 2005 Information Architecture Summit in Montreal, scheduled for March 3nd.

This highly interactive forum will connect leaders and provide an invaluable way to learn from others across a variety of disciplines. The sessions and speakers include:

"Managing Up: The Business Strategy of Information Architecture" – Christina Wodtke and Scott Hirsch

"The Enterprise IA Roadmap" -- Louis Rosenfeld

"Homeland Security and IA" -- Lee S. Strickland, JD

"Practical Application of the Semantic Web" -- Paul Ford

"The State of Global IA" -- Livia Labate, Peter Van Dijck, Jorge Arango

"Hands-On Scenario Planning: Looking to the Future to Shape Decisions Today" -- Jess McMullin

For more information about the seminar, please check the Institute's website at http://www.aifia.org/news/ or to register for both the Seminar and the IA Summit, go to http://www.iasummit.org

Posted by christina at
permalink

Thanks for your patience. The slides are back up. This is the latest version, with a bunch of notes I hope will help, so you probably want to download them so you can see the notes field. Enjoy, and I'll try to write an article from it, as I think many of the ideas deserve contemplation.

A particularly good JOHO this month, especially for the category inclined.

"Aristotle's answer is that those aren't separate questions. If you're going to exist, you have to exist as something — a table, a human, a piping hot souvlaki. That turns philosophy back from a bad course that it had embarked on, and to which it would return as the influence of Aristotle wore off after the Middle Ages: Thinking that the meaning of things (the table as a table) is separable from their existence (the table as a thing). That path leads to the trivialization of meaning. But not for Aristotle. For him, if you want to know what makes Socrates real, you have to see how Socrates is a human...which means understanding him within a category (animals) with differentiated sub-categories (the rational animals as opposed to the non-rational ones). Thus, taxonomy and existence are fused: To be is to be in a taxonomy of meaning."

Every once in a while it's nice to know that one is not just making products easier to find, or adding business value, but perhaps even making the world saner and more palatable.

That's not even the bulk of it; most of the JOHO is about the three orders of order. It's a very IA issue.

Nate has posted our natek: Web Visions Presentation, which makes a simple proposal to make wireframes more meaningful by at the minimum making them compatible with modern coding, at a maximum replacing them with xhtml.

We're working on an article to flesh this out further... stay tuned.

Trolling about, trying to see if anyone is using the term "faceted narrowing" which has recently become hip at Yahoo, and tripped over A Faceted Approach to Building Ontologies which is a very strong explanation of facet design.

A recent article on document design in the WSJ shakily raised the question:

Is a poorly designed memo at fault for not warning the president the nature of the terrorist threat.

In many ways it's a retread of the butterfly ballot controversy, and the Challenger controversy, but I think it's a controversy worth raising again and again until careless attention to design stops killing people.

Here is the article (PDF) (html). Here is the redesign of the memo.

Here's what wasn't printed from my interview (lightly edited for coherence):

Q: I'd like to talk about the PDB and the redesign - especially what wasn't working in the original

A: I can't blame the president for having a hard time with the memo: it's a mess. Everything is wrong with it: bad writing, bad design and no sense of hierarchy. Presidents of large companies can only give a few minutes to most issues brought before them; it must be far worse for the president of the united states. Bush has to be able to judge in a few seconds how much of his precious time needs to be devoted to an issue in a memo: this one wasn't helping him.

People scan newspapers for a number of reasons: too much daily information, difficult reading conditions such as subways and buses, etc. Journalist like yourself write using the inverse pyramid. This allows the reader to immediately understand what the article will cover and if it is relevant to their lives. It's the same with writing for executives; they are so deluged with information they have to scan as a survival trait.

Imagine if that first sentence was "Data from reliable internal and external sources indicate Bin Ladin planning a large scale attack on an US target." from there you can move on to bullets

1. Nature of threat
2. Likelihood
3. Timeline
4. Recommended action
5. Sources include
   1. name & relevant quote
   2. name & relevant quote
   3. name & relevant quote

This way the president can glance over the memo to understand the threat and then dig in to richer information that can help him decide how to act.

Adding color and graphs would improve both scanability and impact. Imagine if every memo had bargraphs displaying a scale of how severe the threat was, how urgent the issue was and how trustworthy the data sources were. Bush could then compare that memo to those on corn production and diplomat dinner schedules and know where to place his attention.

In a strange way it's like designing a comparison shopping site like Yahoo! Shopping-- you know when users are searching for a camera, they want to be able to look over a number of stores who are selling the camera and quickly see if it is a brand they know, what is the user rating, how much is the price... the president may need to know how severe is the issue, how much time does he have to respond, how trustworthy is the information.

And he has less free time than an average shopper.

(I'm not a presidential adviser, so hard for me to say what he needs to know, but let's use those factors as strawmen)

Q: "what is information architecture?"

A: A profession devoted to making the complex clear, via information design and content organization. It requires an understanding of human nature when faced with mountains of data.

Some good definitions here
http://www.aifia.org/pg/about_aifia.php
1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets,
online communities and software to support usability and findability.
3. An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of
design and architecture to the digital landscape.

Q: What is the growth of the info architecture field since you've been involved

A: When I first started, there were very few IAs out there. But the growth of data has resulted in information overload, and trouble means opportunity. There are hundreds of dedicated practicing IA's, and thousands of people who make IA a part of their work. Data is useless, knowledge is invaluable, someone has got to make one into the other.

Q: Have you ever heard of/seen a company that tries to apply usability principles to internal communications.

Yahoo! does. During a major Yahoo! property redesign, every single day the product manager sent out html email updates. Each item was a bullet point, and each item was color coded green, yellow or red depending on how much danger it was of slipping.

The Senior VP could take a look and in a second he knew where he needed to spend his time straightening matters out, and where he could relax. It was a very successful project, and those simple daily memos made everything run a bit more smoothly. I bet Bush would have enjoyed a similar design. After all, shouldn't a red flag be red?

Q: Do you know what the readership is like for "Boxes and Arrows"? Any sense of how many readers you've got, and whether it's grown during the two years it's been around?

A: In our first year, we had 1001117 page reqs, in 03 we had 2337704, and this year's numbers suggest we'll grown by another half. (aka half again each year.) our mailing list went form 2000 in year one to 6000 to year 2.

Q: What are big topics in IA circles right now?

A: IA is going in two directions right now. Many folks who are "hands on" IA's are becoming master craftsmen of taxonomy design and navigation systems. Others are going in a slightly tangential direction-- working on complete user experience strategies that encompass multichannel design based on business priorities. Both are thrilling: the hands-on IA's are embracing things like topicmaps and emergent classification tools like Wikis, while the big-picture IA's are becoming involved in organizational innovation and user experience strategy. Overall its an exciting field, with a lot of innovation and experimentation.

Q: What's going to be the challenge for the next few years?

A: The challenge in the next few years is two-fold; one is how do we push forward to the next generation of knowledge management. By that I mean how do we harness the vast amount of information that is out there-- every day physicians prescribe the wrong medicines because as humans they can't keep up with the massive amount of new knowledge flooding the field... sometimes this limitation results in a less than effective treatment, sometimes it actually result in death.

The information space is growing so rapidly its becoming harder and yet more crucial we keep it human-manageable. I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing search get so much attention-- its one potential solution to the problem.

The second challenge is exactly what you spoke of earlier... how are we making sure what we've learned is getting out there. That's one of the reasons I founded Boxes and Arrows-- it's critical that as advances are made, they are shared. That way we are standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, instead of reinventing the wheel....

Also see: every breath death defying: IA in the WSJ

Correction on the WSJ article: I am no longer President of AIfIA, that role is now Peter Morville's. I was AIfIA's first year president.

After Karl Fast's terrific talk, i will never doubt the potential of visualization.
Today i tripped over Visualisation Patterns which might help make that potential realizable.

Just in time delivery comes to knowledge management is a tight little article that I have referenced many times to show why KM & IA are important. I had no idea the entire text was online. Worth a read.

The Business of Understanding

"The ways of organizing information are finite. It can only be organized by location, alphabet, time, category, or hierarchy. "

thoughts on this thought? I was re-acquainted with ti recently, and category/hierarchy bothered me. i think i should prefer category/attributes....

U-M School of Information: SI students create Information Architecture Library
for Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture

"Two School of Information students have developed a digital library for the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA), a professional organization dedicated to furthering the information architecture profession. "

from AlterNet: Inside the Frame

"A frame is a conceptual structure of a certain form. Let me give you an example. Suppose I say the word "relief." The word "relief" has a conceptual frame associated with it. Here's the frame: In order to give someone relief, there has to be an affliction and an afflicted party – somebody who's harmed by this affliction – and a reliever, somebody who gives relief to the afflicted party or takes away the harm or pain. That reliever is a hero. And if someone tries to stop the person giving relief from doing so, they're a bad guy. They're a villain. They want to keep the affliction ongoing. So when you use only one word, "relief," all of that information is called up. That is a simple conceptual frame. "
-- George Lakoff

any one want to question the importance of selecting the right label now?

Reading The Oversimplification of Mark Hurst, I'm not sure Peter particularly disagreed with any of Mark's key points. And of course it's oversimplification, it's
a) a blog
b) a guru pronouncement
both notorious for going for the pithy over the compete.

Did mark actually cause any harm? I'd say unlikely, certainly not in that post. Navigation is important, but breadcrumbs in their traditional format rarely are seen or used. The recent study on how training user how to use breadcrumbs results in them using them begs the question: who has time to go to every user's house and teach them to use breadcrumbs?
(Okay, if you've got an intranet, this is a woohoo moment for you.)

C'mon now, breadcrumbs are one of the oldest web conventions (as seen in this 1996 Yahoo) so if people aren't using them now, what makes you think that that might change suddenly?

The breadcrumb is visually weaker than the rest of the page, and often easily overlooked. It also is often labeled "you are here" making it informational as opposed to a object for use. It also causes the user to do some mental gymnastics. The user must hold the site structure, however breifly, in their head to use the breadcrumb, which is probably more thinking than most users want to do mid-task.

The breadcrumb is indeed supplementary, and if real estate is precious, it probably can go, as long as it's key purpose-- widening a search among a large set of objects-- is preserved.

What about it's other theoretical purpose, going back? Trust me, users love their back button, and when in one site usability test session I tried to get them to use something other than the back button by saying "what if I took away your backbutton" they threatened to lynch me. Back is the one thing you can pretty much take off your table of worries, as long as you don't mess up the back button.

Alternatives to the breadcrumb include the BBCi solution of combining breadcrumbing into the navigation. "see all X" is another way to get users to widen their choices, and causes no mental strain. I'm sure there are many more.

Regarding goals-- peter is right about a multiplicity of goals on each page, and that is a conversation for another day. I do believe every page has a heirachy of goals, just as there is a hierachy of users and moreover each section of a page has its own goal-- this is the place for answers, this is the place to get more answers, if this answer didn't suit you, this is the place where you refine your search for answers.... I will have to save this for anotherr day.

it's about pushing the cognitive work off the user and onto the designer. we cannot rely on simple solutions.

Reading Good Experience - The Page Paradigm

"Users don't much care "where they are" in the website. So-called "breadcrumb links," which show the user the exact hierarchy of the website as they click further down, are a nice but mostly irrelevant technology. It's not that users don't understand the links; it's that they don't care.
Let me say it again, Max Bialystock-style:
USERS DON'T CARE WHERE THEY ARE IN THE WEBSITE. "

no, they really don't. They don't care at all. They care where they are going. They care to know if they are there yet. they care about where they wish to go next. where they are in the grand scheme of things is entirely a cause for concern of the people who know a bit too much. User researchers who ask in usability testing "do you know where you are" then report worriedly that the user doesn't are every bit as deluded as the design weenies who obsess over it. The user, meanwhile is unworried about where they are: they are sitting on a chair facing a computer, that offers a address bar to a search engine if at any point they can't think where to go next.

Breadcrumbs, if noticed, are mostly good for navigating to a wider selection of stuff. Knowing that, is the classic breadcrumb design really the most effective way to offer that functionality?

AIFIA | Workshop: IA Summit 2004

"What are the key concepts that underlie a successful content management effort? How can content management environments better serve the needs of their various audiences? What strategies and techniques can information architects use to effectively meet content management objectives?"

ARGH! AIfIA, take me awy! I must know all this and so much more!

past summits were so fun -- oh yeah, and informative -- I am getting very very excited about Austin...

from NBS: IA as Conversation

"In the past I've wondered about how taxonomies become navigation and did the taxonomy dance to match the bottom-up to the top-down, and now I wonder if this whole way of thinking about information architecture is flawed. "

Which is why Indi Young's Information Architecture from Mental Models is such a useful technique. It at least helps one see the gap betweenuser design and design.

Though very little is discussed about task based classification vs. topic based classification, and how they might interrelate (though if you've seen something, please post a link.) A navigation system is so much more than the inverted L... related links, shortcuts, contextual linking. And yet the inverted L, or whatever form it might take (stacked X&Y is a common variation) is still the safty net, the freeway for when you want to zoom somewhere, the way to get home when you are lost.

just a thoughtwander, maybe I'll see if I can get somewhere coherent later with this...

but yes, victor, keep pondering.

Interview with R.S. Wurman

While there were not a lot of surprises in this interview, if you have followed RSW at all, this sentence still resonated: "I am astonished that my doing what I want to do every day hasn't inspired more people to do the same. "

Why not? All indications are that if we follow our passion, we are more likely to be successful. The leaders are always those who follow their bliss. It's not a guarantee, but it does seem to be a prerequisite. And why not? We only get a handful of years on this earth, why waste them?

from ASTD  Linking People, Learning & Performance

"Knowledge is messy. Because knowledge is connected to everything else, you can't isolate the knowledge aspect of anything neatly. In the knowledge universe, you can't pay attention to just one factor. "

sweet little article deunking most of the mistakes people make when they try to fix their KM problems...

TC 510 Course Website David Farkas has an amazing collection of web-based articles supplementing his course that would make fine reading over the holidays-- the breadth and diversity of the reading would help round out any IA or ID thinking.

From Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

"It used to be that Web sites offered one or two things. Now it's common to find sites with thousands or millions of items. Wonderful, but that means that item listings are often very long and hard to use.
One of the main usability guidelines for category pages is to let users winnow items according to attributes of interest. To "winnow" a list basically means to filter out elements that don't meet specified criteria, leaving a shorter list that's easier to manage and understand. "

Sounds like a job for faceted classification! Dooo do do!

From Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales

"Information Architecture can be applied to resolve breakdowns in site design and navigation structure. The role of good Information Architecture is to make the Website work not in the technical sense, but from a functional, organized, conceptual perspective. "

I always thought Asilomar at 40 bucks was a fine deal-- cheaper than most magazine subscriptions. But this is not the case if you live in Chile or India, our membership has told us.

So I am very proud to say Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture has taken one more step to being a truly international organization. AIfIA Membership - pricing is now based on the world bank's country classification system.

Along with the translation project, AIfIA is taking steps to bring IA to the world-- and why not? the web is the world-wide web, neh?

You may think this is small potatoes, but I say if the devil is in the details, so are the angels.

Boxes and Arrows: The Devil's in the Wireframes came at the right time. I've been thinking about wireframes, and more and more I think they should not be used by people who work in0house, and perhaps not by consultants either. At all.

Sketches, paper prototypes, etc maybe.... but only maybe. Why would you design, but take away the tools that lend clarity to your message such as color and font? Why make the layout do all the work/ Why not leave layout to the one who will combine it with color, font and more: the visual/graphic/interface designer?

Is the wireframe an atrocity whose time has come to be booted out of the development cycle? I'm beginning to think yes.

from Setting the stage for success— Information architecture earns performance kudos from customers

"Information architecture is the process of organizing and structuring information so that it is logical in design and presentation. It establishes categories and relationships among different pieces of information. It defines metadata schemes, navigation and search interfaces. Good architecture not only helps users find information, but also facilitates updating content by having clear rules for adding new information. And its effects show up on the bottom line with surprising speed when users can get what they need in just a few clicks. "

I'll be giving a talk at UIE 8 in Boston this October.

And I've been given a chance to offer you, my faithful readers, a discount. Read on!

* Conference attendees will receive a special discount rate if they sign up for the
conference using this promotion code CW01.

If you sign up using this promo code, CW01, you will receive $60 off each single
day registration; $300 discount for all four days.
(Note: This offer cannot be combined with any other promotions offered.)

So come, save, enjoy!

I'm excited about this talk. Tom Wailes, a coworker here at Yahoo! will be assisting me with the talk. He has a background on content management and anthropology and brings a rich body of experience to the talk. If you've read the book, Tom alone brightens the mix. Plus I plan to dive a bit deeper into a couple section.

Anyhow, hope to see you there!

I'm getting deja-blog, but I'm going for it anyhow:

An Atlas of Cyberspaces - Web Site Maps

anthony morales is completely right. Netflix put lipstick on a pig.

I still love it though. Oh, Netflix, darling, hire an IA!

BTW, the submit sidebar addresses another Netflix annoyance.. because of button gravity I'm constantly hitting the update awaiting releases when i mean to hit update queue. sigh. not fixed in le redesign, btw.

AIfIA Translation Initiative

If I am proud of anything AIfIA has done this year, I think this is it (and I'm proud of many things we've done...). For mysterious reasons, EH has always gotten a lot of international visitors, and I know that IA is not USIA. And that folks in outer countries are going through the same issues, worries and problems that the US folks are. So to know someone out there is translating the articles that helped me struggle through the big IA questions brings me great joy.

It's a small collection right now, but if you are bilingual, take the time to translate an article that helped you make sense of it all... give back.

Speaking of teaching (see commenting son "fireside") I've agreed to do a one day tutorial at User Interface 8 East (seeUser Interface 7 West Conference for a flavor of the event).

What I'd like to know is, if you went to a one day seminar, what would you like to learn? What would you like to leave teknowing? And if you have read (or skimmed) my book, what from it would you like to to go over in depth, in a class situation?

I'm open to suggestions-- there is really so much I could talk about, I could do a semester... but I got to figure out how to cut it down to a day!

I just saw this mail, and having spent way too much time thinking about reccipes and since my husband is now caffeinated and barked at me to get going on our sunday advanture to Marin, I'm going to leave it with you dear readers for now:

"Hi Christina, I have an IA question I thought you, or you visitors might be able to help me with.

The background.

Last year I joined a small but very successful 3D software company and inherited responsibility for the website.

The site was a mess, the solution for everything was build another page and link it to as many related pages as possible. Side menus for product pages not only replicated the tab links on the top bar but also much of the content - albeit in completely different places.

To try and sort out the mess and make life easier (for myself more than anyone) I have centralized much of the content shared across different product pages and located them under the main tabs across the top of the site. For example there is now only one registration section accessible from the main tabs, in the past there were separate unrelated galleries for each product.

The question.

I've been told our website's is mainly for e-commerce sales, however based on the background below I'm unsure in a redesign if I should locate all menu options for a product such as register, download, buy etc

· Only on a product page
· Only on the top tab navigation bar
· Or try and create a combination by having them in both places - although I suspect this is why things got out of hand last time (we don't have a content management system).

To add to the mix the company is moving from a boxed software sales model to a much more expensive server based model and management want the site to look more and more like an IBM or EDS style site.

I know you must be busy but any thoughts you have would be great. You are welcome to tell me to rack off if I asking to much.

Much respect,

David R."

AIFIA | Information Architecture Leadership Seminar "Slides!

Information Architecture Leadership Seminar
Afterword: This seminar was a real success, generating great discussion and sparking quite a bit of networking. Thanks to everyone who participated! Please see below (Additional Resources) for the presentations and related documents."

woo hoo!

IA Summit 2003 Pictures for fun or blackmail.

I feel like a little kid in december. Is it christmas yet?

Is it ASIS-T IA Summit 2003 yet?????????

ASIS-T IA Summit 2003 online registration is working. If you are like me and hate to lick a stamp (ew) this is your moment.

First five people who say "I signed up after seeing your post on EH" to me in Portland will get a shot of tequilla on my dime.

Love Amazon? Check out Rashmi's post to better understand your loved one...

'... it is incorrect to think that Recommender Systems cannot have an agenda, or less of an agenda than categorization. Recommender Systems are explicitly designed to encourage people to buy. ... Apart from other things, they also classify YOU. And they classify you without any knowledge or choice on your part. "

InformIT.com : Articles > Blueprints for the Web: Organization for the Masses an excerpt/article on card sorting. Registration is required, but free.

At Challis's urging, I've reread UX Roles & Titles: Trend or Profession. Other than pain at reading such a tiny font (god I'm old. old old old. I'm old.) which may have lead to free-floating crankiness, I've pulled out a bunch of goodness-- in particular I'd like to point to:

"Web Designer may seem like an overgeneralization to those of us practicing in this space. However the same may be said of those practicing as doctors, lawyers and engineers. Each works within a profession, yet has an area of specialization and may fill different roles at different times. One example is as follows:
Doctor (pediatrics, oncology, internal medicine, orthopedics)
...."

Which is a great model for us to consider. Many folks say this *or* that, IA or ED, design or graphic design, with out considering the range of special and general skills one may need to do one's job.

The professions are not only not diametrically opposed, but's not even hierarchal. Design professions are intertwined, and variable, depending on medium and nature of the work (like doctors--small company vs large, small town generalist, big city specialist).

As for being a trend, hey, if we keep at all this IA business, maybe we can work up to a full fledged profession. After all, dentists used to let blood, right?

ASIS-T IA Summit 2003

yay!

OJR article: Understanding Information Architecture

"he is an Information Architect, a member of a discipline that has a reputation for being a preserve of the hipper-than-thou." or nerdier than thou, depending on who you talk to.

Jesse just happens to be one of the hip ones.

Challis Hodge notes IA's popularity as an UX profession.

Mapping Websites is a dang inspiring book. I'm sad to hear it's gone out of print (a rumor-- is it wrong, I hope? Amazon says so...) Anyhow, you can get the section we probably care most for Web Site Planning Diagrams online.

All of the first edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web seems to be online on some guys site.
A side note: don't judge the polar bear on this edition (which is darn good, don't get me wrong) It's just that the second edition blows the doors off the first.

After reading Consumer WebWatch: How Consumers and Experts Rate Credibility on the Web, it seems if you you want to be trusted, get design and IA right.

The best part of the end of december is the prognostications. madonnalisa tries to predict the future of ia-- my favorite is

"5. Search engines no longer exists as we know them today...they rebrand their identities as "Find It" or "Knowledge Repository" engines. Yes I know this sounds outrageous but I have this feeling..'k?"

Strangely I found this as I began to work on a predictions article for B&A-- what are your predictions for 2003?

AIFIA | AIfIA Finishes its First Month with 200 Members, International Flavor

"Recent additions to AIfIA's leadership council are similarly global, hailing from Australia, Belgium, Chile, Denmark, and the US."

I'm psyched to be part of an organization that is working on kicking its USA-centric habit-- it's a big world out there...

from Metacrap

"A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. "

The reasons why decent metadata is near-impossible to come by are funny and true--- and point toward why the semantic web is going to be a hard row to hoe.

from the riveting Nathan Shedroff: the v-2 interview (part one of two) and by the way, ED is short for experience design. Cozy little acronym, ain't it?
"Nathan Shedroff: Well, all of those cultural, psychological, physiological, technical, etc. theories support ED just as well - if not better, in fact - than they do IA/ID. I don't understand the need to acknowledge them for one and not for another. This is like those IAs who spend so much time splitting all of the responsibilities of information creation into two sets, the set of things they consider nicer, cooler, or more sophisticated, and those they consider basic, dull, or beneath them. Then they label the first IA and walk off laughing with their noses held high and the other set ID.

AG: Sounds to me like when you talk about "noses held high," you have one or more bad experiences in mind. And I'm not denying that can be important, but aren't you then simply doing what you accused me of earlier: damning the entire field for the blunders of one or two pompous jerks? Why would I assert that IA is somehow free of such, when anybody who's read SIGIA knows perfectly well that we have our due ration of bozos?

NS: It's just that I see it way more than "one or two jerks." It's an overall feeling I sense, more often than not, in writings, speeches, and conversations. If it were only a few people I'd just write them off (like certain usability folk). But, in my experience, it's pervasive.

Maybe I'm just being too sensitive, but things feel a lot different from ten years ago, and not in a good way. Some of the best IAs/IDs I know never participate in the IA/ID community because of the pervasive attitudes and the lack of anything new or interesting going on. I think that the IA/ID community is, mostly, spinning its wheels in terms of growth and development. It isn't innovating and it is turning more people off than on. Again, my opinion."

Wow, it's been a long time since I've seen anyone bag that hard on IA-- I wonder who has been poisoning his soup. Last I saw Mr. Shedroff, he was cheerfully breaking bread with Lou Rosenfeld... I personally have many reservations about the nascent field of ED but I have yet to take a public stick to the entire group of people who are trying to build it (though Adam's fearlessness in asking the hard questions is rather enticing... come on in... the water's bracing!)

Another oddity in the interview is Nathan's mixing of Information Design and Information Architecture. I really wish Adam had asked Nathan for his definition of IA, just to set a common vocabulary. I'm not sure if Nathan has expanded his definition beyond his former mentor Wurman's or not...

Finally I just don't get these particular arguments. Why argue over the same bit of carpet, when there is a whole world to design? IA designs information spaces, ED designing experiences, IA designs for findability, understandability and usability, ED designs for a positive user experience, thus moving beyond information spaces and interactive to include passive and visceral designed environments. There will be overlap. In the best of cases, the two will learn from each other.

For me, Ed is too big, too undefined to be juicy enough for me-- I like to stay more in the realm of the practical than the theoretical. I still do big IA, but it tends to be limited to information spaces-- interactive, digital, structural. When I hang with former Argonauts, I'm a generalist. When I chat with the ED crowd, I'm a specialist.

But for other designers, ED is the key and I like watching them go off on their philosophical tangents as they ponder the universe of designed experience like a sophomore art student on his third beer. There is joy there, and it's all good.

Ten taxonomy myths is such an pleasently written article, it brings taxonomies in reach.

"Myth #1: A taxonomy can only be expressed as a hierarchical list of topics.

The implication of our definition is that every company will use multiple, interacting organization schemes (taxonomies). Some will be very concrete and may even be "invisible" except to computer programs (e.g. product codes). Others will be abstract, designed primarily for use by human beings (e.g. a list of topics on a departmental Web site)."

This is an exellent observation. Often I've seen arguments over which classification scheme to use, as if there is one ideal that all users can understand and meets all needs. But often the better answer is use several schemes. A CD site can have music type, artist and chronological classification schemes all mixed and matched-- and often do. Why shouldn't other sites support different user needs and mental models with multiple interacting schemes?

Mark Bernstein thinks we are saying the web sucks. Er, well..

I love the web, and think it is wonderful. I can't imagine how I lived without it-- how did I figure out how to make tomato soup? Or figure out what the name of that guy In Green Mile and Charlie's Angel's was? Or keep track of my bank account? Or find new fiction?

But there are one heck of a lot of bad websites out there. When I was writing my book, I was looking for a good example of a ecommerce store that sold only music (I was looking for taxonomies of music). I went through a directory flipping through store after store, stunned at how ugly and unusable they were. I had gotten a bit complacent-- all the sites I use on a regular basis are great (IMBD), or pretty darn good (Wells Fargo Banking). But the grand mass of *professional* sites are lousy.

I'm not even including the sites built by hobbyists, families and diarists. These are small busines sites whose equivalent is a store in the mall, or on main street in a small town-- but they don't even meet that standard. You can't find anything on these sites, they are ugly as nobody's business and check out is often impossible to accomplish-- if you dare it after taking a look around. It's more like a old barn turned junk store you find on a lonely country road... you dig through spiderweb covered junk, and if you do find something that catches your eye, you pay in cash because the cross-eyed KKK-T-shirt wearing drooling kook at the register looks like he'd eat your credit card as likely as process it.

When you are a professional site, there is a baseline of quality you need to do business. While the web is delightful, I would say many denizens are far from reaching that baseline. This is a multipart problem, in which IA is not the solution, but a piece of the solution, which includes excellent design, copywriting, technology and more....

uxDesign says

"the "little ia theory" has gained so much traction over the past two years, any conversation of the "big ia" has lost it's validity backstage within the community. now ia has become a discrete entity, separated from interaction design, ui design and information design."

IA has moved from Wurman's original view of anyone who makes the complex clear to the structural designer's mélange of taking user research and turning it into organization and interaction systems (often also doing the research as well) to an information retrieval specialist.

So is big ia done? I hope not, I may have to turn in my aifia.org membership (and wouldn't that be awkward). I am now and have always been a big IA... strategy and interaction design and well as design of information retrieval systems have always been my bailiwick. When IA is limited to controlled vocabularies and labels, I'm done being an IA.

Personally, I think we've specialized too fast. Design in information spaces is very new-- we're still in the horseless carriage stage, as far as I can tell. it's one thing to identify key skills as JJG has done with his (in)famous elements, it's quite another to turn them into job descriptions. Conversely, if we generalize too broadly, we run the risk of being "master of none."

I guess I'm uncertain where these will lead. In the early stages of a new frontier, be it physical or technological it's hard to be certain what anything means. Let's wait and see...

from aperceptive

Okay, so I'm not so special. David Crow: Information Architecture Overload writes about the glut of IA/UX/UCD books hitting the shelves these days.

BTW, I guess this is as good a place as any to mention if you are an educator like David or a reviewer for a periodical, you can get a free evaluation copy of my book by sending your name, mailing address and phone number to me. christina at the domain you see in your browser (now that's low-tech spam evation!). Oh, and some sort of proof that you are a writer for a periodical or teacher.

We aren’t the first folks to realize that a lot of data doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t get the right data at the right time and know what it means. Watching “From the Earth to the Moon” last night on DVD, I was amazed at the sheer volume of raw data that had to be accessed and understood for each simple action taken by astronauts. A miscalculation in space is literally worth millions of dollars and maybe a human life.

The same is true for cyberspace. Data not found, data misread, data coming too late to the end user of a website means millions of dollars in lost profits or lost productivity. And if you think we have the luxury of not gambling with lives, well, this is the story they tell around Google. A man with severe heart burn searched on his symptoms. He realized it wasn’t heart burn—it was heart attack. He called 911 and his life was saved.

Finding is critical to our lives. Finding the right medicine on Drugstore.com, discovering a book revealing fast food malfeasance on Amazon.com, seeking the perfect interview shirt on gap.com… there are so many little tasks we as website designers think are benign, but mean a lot to some human being using our design. And a failure on our part to connect humans to their needs can mean a failure in their lives.

That’s why I am proud (and more than a bit relived) to say Information Architecture has arrived. Information Architecture is a skillset concerned with organizing information so it can be found. First coined by Richard Saul Wurman in 1997, Information Architecture has become how we find our way in information spaces. It provides shelter like a house, movement like a bridge, access like a library. It’s taken for granted like a road, but is just as annoying as five miles of potholes when it’s done wrong. Maybe in 1997 users surfed the web. Now it’s more likely they commute it, traveling from E! online to wellsfargo.com in their daily travels. And the route is determined by IA.

What’s led me to the conclusion IA has arrived? Articles on IA are seen in every publication that addresses the web, from engineering to design. A recent search turned up 188,000 results on “Information Architecture”. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web has gone to second edition, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web hit the best seller list on Amazon in its second week on the stands, and three more books on IA are scheduled to come out next year. Jobs for Information Architects are found on most job sites, but more importantly, information architecture is listed as a skill for designers and programmers alike. And finally, the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture launched Monday—the first organization dedicated to promoting and advancing Information Architecture. These are heady times for information professionals.

But it’s not done yet. Are websites easy to use? Not all, not yet, not by a long shot. And look at software: the other day I flipped from menu to menu in a graphic program trying to find the tool to reset inches to pixels. Not to mention stores with bad organization, airports that get you lost, and one of these days we’ll have to do something about they way that Dewey guy made the library so confusing.

I’d like to ask all of you to consider what you need to help you tackle these challenges in the upcoming century. And go to the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture and let them know. In fact, if you can, join up and help build these things. Do you wish you had a mentor? Do you wish there was one place to look up well written case studies? Do you want to know how to be better make your case to business? Do you want to understand the pitfalls of faceted classification, and when to use it successfully? What will help you as you try to improve your product’s usability, findability and understandability? And then help share that wisdom with others.

There are people depending on us.

participate in IA2003-- the deadline looms!

Boxes and Arrows: Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web

pretty cool!

Amazon.com: Books: Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web is finally available *and* the price is right. Back to 20 bucks.

and you can buy it with Jesse's!

see also the official site (kinda sparse still) Blueprints for the Web

if you know Seth, you know he is an IA to the bone. If you don't know him, reading Boxes and Arrows: Consolidated Assessment would tell you all you need to know

"Card sorting is so simple a 6 year old could do it. Actually, that's how old I was when I first started card sorting in the late 1970s. Not that I've been in the research field that long, card sorting just seemed a natural thing to do with my baseball card collection. On an almost weekly basis, I'd reorganize my cards. Usually I'd lay them out all over the floor and then get to work. Sometimes I'd sort by team (Go Orioles), or by position (all first basemen), or by year, or by card brand..."

Early explorations of faceted classification!

Read through The Best IA Tool You Never Heard Of and despite the joy i feel in my wee heart when I read this:

"Far from a trivial task. I'd argue information architecture (IA) is more important to the success of a site than design or programming. The two are (obviously!) vital. But if your customers can't find your products and information or can't access your services, you're better off not having a site in the first place."
(woo hoo!)

I still have no idea by the end of the article what IA task tinderbox would actually assist me in doing? Manage taxonomies to use in a CMS? Generate sitemaps? huh? All I've ever seen it used for is blogs, which is a fine use, and for personal note management.

Well, the book is off at the printers, and the Amazon.com buying info is finally correct.

It's a lot more pages than I thought it would be. Of course there are tons of screenshots, so maybe that isn't so shocking. It is due out October 16, just a week before my birthday, so that's a lovely present. And someone suggested reading Judy Blume instead of my book. (hi mike!)

Sorry if I'm am going on and on about this thing, but god, it's like having a baby. it's huge, time consuming and weirdly personal considering it's a "technical" book.

Well, it's almost done. Nothing left but live the screaming agony that it's print and I can't sneak in at 3 a.m. and change stuff....

from Boxes and Arrows: Understanding PowerPoint: Special Deliverable #5

"Inserting screenshots into Word is like popping pimples: it is messy and painful, and does not necessarily lead to satisfying results."

yuck. but hey, yeah, exactly. but yuck.

yes, I'm back.

from Boxes and Arrows: Building the Beast: Talking with Peter Morville

"B&A: So why a second edition?

Morville: Last April, after the agonizing process of closing Argus, I managed to escape into the wilderness of Yosemite National Park for a few days. I liked the romantic notion of figuring out what to do with the rest of my life while hiking alone in the Sierra Nevada mountains. So, armed with a bottle of water and some beef jerky, I headed for the snowy peaks in search of transcendental moments and healing visions.

When we wrote the first edition, we had relatively little experience. Most of our massive IA projects at Argus came afterwards.
Now, I'd like to tell you that when I arrived at the summit, a disembodied voice thundered "Thou Shalt Write the Second Edition" or that while walking through the valley, I glimpsed a polar bear flitting gracefully through the forest, but those things didn't actually happen.

However, I did come down from the mountain with a strong desire to write the second edition and a whole bunch of brilliant entrepreneurial ideas. I wrote them all down on a couple of airplane barf bags on the trip home. I've still got them. Really."

Very funny. Also don't miss Lou's interview from last week. It's a pleasure to compare their voices which blend so seemlessly in the book.

Peter Morville wrote a poetic forward for my book-- it's a pleasure to read. PDF of forward to Blueprints for the web.

Drop your 20 bucks here.

From a new Semantics column on Ambient Findability

"Having achieved this network nirvana, the question is inevitable: what's next? For an information architect with library roots, the answer is obvious: ambient findability.

I want to be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime."

Me too! I want to by lying in my hammock, gazing at the stars and be able to yell out, 'When were dogs first domesticated?" and have an answer.

Can you grab a minute and take this survey? Cheers!
IA Myths, Realities, and Promotions

Still a very busy little bee.. just got the first PDF's back from the publisher, and it's so exciting!

But Jeff can keep you entertained with The Age of Information Architecture
and David tackles the old chestnut Defining information architecture but from a non-IA perspective.

That'll keep you busy-- but if it doesn't, Dan graces us with another column on deliverabels in B&A and on top of it all Karl stops talking about writing and produces Recording Screen Activity During Usability Testing, which displays the rigorous thought we've all come to expect from him....

Whew! How can I write when there is all this good reading to be done??

Open Directory - Reference: Knowledge Management: Information Architecture the open directory decides what IA is really all about-- knowledge management. I don't think I'll argue.

Amazon.com: Books: Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web Since I'm biased, I'll let Don Norman do my talking for me. He recently wrote this blurb after reading a late draft:

"At last, a book about the technical topics of web architecture and usability that is fun to read, informative and authoritative. Wodtke's style is that of story telling which gives the book its friendly, easy to read manner, but the stories also make clear why the principles are so important. And don't let the word "Architecture" throw you. Yes, the book is about architecture, but it is a lot more. It is how to break through the creativity block, why paper and pencil can be superior to a computer, and even how to convince your fellow workers to give you an extra two weeks of time. Easy to read, good insights, practical advice: what else do you want?"

Don Norman,
Northwestern University and The Nielsen Norman Group
Author of "The Design of Everyday Things

You can also check out the book site and the book review.

The Importance of Information Architecture (pdf)

Mind your phraseology! Using controlled vocabularies to improve findability

IA spotted at Nasa: NASA WWW Best Practices, Chapter 1.1 - Structure and Site Organization.

Who desperately needs it, I might add.