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Starting my book on IA... I'd love to hear you all say what you'd like to see a book on IA address... especially folks who are not labeled IA's, or who are just learning about IA, or have to explain IA to others....
how may I serve you?
Looking forward to a book from you- i'm sure it'll be great!
Thanks for an incredibly useful site - and good luck with the book!
A section on the future of IA or where we should be focusing in the next few years would be very useful.
I've got file cabinets full of documents that I'd be happy to volunteer. It would help me out in getting the dang things to stay shut.
A recent book called something like "Web Redesign Process that Works" (one of the authors is Kelly Goto) is very good in this respect, and a great deal of what that book covers is IA.
I’m sure if I spent some more time out on the stoop thinking about this, there would be more chapters, but this is definitely the direction I would take. After all, I ended up in this field because I got the snot beat out of me while designing and re-designing Web sites and watching them crumble under their own architecture. I use to bruise easily but not anymore. In fact, I’ll go Tae-Bo on you if I’m cornered.
3) People *can* extrapolate approaches, process from case studies and I think that road maps and tools are what people are looking for more than solutions, anyway; good designers generally don't want pre-packaged solutions, they want to know how to create something unique in a better, more efficient, less painful way than it has been done before. My 2 cents...
oh, and good news-- they are assigning me a proof reader.
I'll stop now - I am starting to question my own previous design decisions, and it is too late for them :)
I'd also like to see a section on the type of tools used by IAs, what they're used for, what we'd like our tools to be, how we can/cannot work without them etc. Since I parted company with my employer I'm now free to use whatever tools I like so I'm experimenting a little...
A pet peeve (or "what not to write"): Every single Web design book in my library attempts to define Web design or IA at the beginning of the book. Your publisher or editor might cringe, but I would leave it out. Do what the other books don't do well: define IA by showing me what it is and how to do it well. Maybe the definition is at the conclusion of the book, if you must include it at all. The message to the reader: what is IA? You'll know it when you do it.
For example, in order to explain things like a content inventory I had to show how content chunks would be used in a CMS. Argus used to do this well: show the connection between library science techniques, the technical platform, and the user interface. I think a good explaination of IA has to do this.