note: this has been delivered. please only comment is something is horribly wrong. typos, etc will be cuaght be copy editors.
***SLUG: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE BLUEPRINT: THE COMMON SENSE GUIDE 0735712506 INTRODUCTION
***INTRODUCTION SHOULD ALWAYS BEGIN ON A RECTO***
***DEVELOPED BY LAURA LOVEALL
***TECH EDIT BY SAMANTHA BAILEY
***TECH EDIT BY ELAN FREYDANSON
(A)INTRODUCTION 1
(B)WHY BLUEPRINT A WEBSITE? 1
(c)About this book 2
(c)Yes, It’s a Short Book 3
(d)Companion Web Site at INSERT URL HERE 4
(c)Not going to go there 4
(c)Hey you, IA 5
(c)Why bother? 6
(a)Introduction
(b)Why Blueprint a website?
Once upon a time the Internet was composed of homepages. These one page sites introduced a company or a person, told a little about the subject, and offered a link to email the proprietor. It only took one person to write, design, and code this site, and it was easy.
***INSERT FIGURE 00IAB01 <CARTOON OF WEBMASTER FEELING GROOVY>
Flash forward five years and everything we can imagine is online: thousand page newspaper sites, online calendars, photo galleries, shopping malls.[el] Huge teams of people are building these sites with specialized designers, engineers, writers, and producers. With so many people devoted to producing so much information, you'd think that the result would be a nothing short of a masterpiece. So why are so many of these sites so difficult to use?
***INSERT FIGURE 00IAB02 <CARTOON OF HUGE WEB TEAM ON ONE END OF THE “LINE”, AND AT THE OTHER “END” A USER LOOKING CONFUSED. THE LINE MIGHT BE A CABLE CONNECTING TWO COMPUTERS>
When you build a building, you make a blueprint. When you build a toaster, you create a diagram of its workings. Yet websites whose complexity far exceeds a toaster’s are often thrown up hastily with barely a thought to how a human is supposed to use them.
A company wanting a website hires an engineer and graphic designer and says go to it.
It’s the equivalent of hiring an electrician, a plumber, and an interior decorator, and saying, “Build me a shopping mall.” That shopping mall desperately needs an architect, and today’s website needs an information architect (IA). An IA looks at the business’s needs, the end user’s needs, what technology has to offer, and creates a blueprint for how to organize the website so that it will meet all these needs.
***INSERT FIGURE 00IAB03 CARTOON OF AN ARCHITECT WITH BLUEPRINT UNDER ARM>
(c)About this book
All websites have Information Architecture, just as all houses have architecture. In the days of log cabins, houses did not have architects, and in the pioneer days of the web, sites haven’t had an architect either.
As a professional Information Architect, people often come to me in pain. If they had a small site, they’ve muddled through making architecture for their site. Most of the web was built this way.
But their sites got big, and eventually it became kind of overwhelming.
***INSERT FIGURE 00IAB04 <CARTOON CLIENT ARRIVING WITH HUGE STACK OF PAPERS “WE HAVE EIGHT THOUSAND PAGES, AND NO ONE CAN FIND WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR!”>
Which is usually where I come in.
***INSERT FIGURE 00IAB05 <CARTOON IA SITTING BURIED BY PAPERS “OKAY.”>
Thisis fun for me OK and for most information architects. We tend to like big messy nightmare problems that we can tidy up. So we make a nice living by taking a lot of disorganized information and making it useful for people.
***INSERT FIGURE 00IAB06 <CARTOON CRAZED IA WITH PAPERS FLYING AROUND BUILDING SITE MAP>
But the fact is, budgets are shrinking while websites are getting bigger and bigger, and sometimes there isn’t a way to hire a professional Information Architect. In fact, more than sometimes. Often. So now what?
***INSERT FIGURE 00IAB07 <CARTOON CLIENT SITTING BURIED BY PAPERS “HELP.”>
You are going to do it. You might be the project or product manager, or the designer or the engineer or the marketing guy. You not really sure why it landed on your desk; heck, you're OK looking around to see if there is another desk you could slide it onto. But as your OK hope for getting someone else to do it fades, OK you realize it has to be done. And this is the book I wrote for you.
(c)Yes, It’s a Short Book
Budgets aren't the only things shrinking, timelines are too. The web isn’t slowed by packaging and shipping the way software can be. Because you can get things on the web very quickly, everyone thinks you should put something up tomorrow. However, Information Architecture is actually a fairly hairy profession. There is a lot to learn, and the problems are complex. One IA I know likes to say, “It is rocket science.” So you’ve got hard problems, no time, OK and no money. Sounds OK like a normal web project to me.
My goal for this book is for you to OK “learn rocket science in a day without blowing anyone up.” I’m not going to tell you everything[md]what does md mean?there are a lot of good books if you decide that Information Architecture is your cup of tea and want to go farther. (I’ve put my recommendations for some of these books in the "Recommended Reading" appendix.) OK But I’ll try to give you enough information so you can make a better website without having to hold off the project until you’ve finished graduate school.
A wise man1[FTN#] once said, “The best is the enemy of the good.” Trying to be perfect will both make you crazy and make you miss your launch date. This book is full of stuff to make your website better.
***INSERT FOOTNOTE
1. Voltaire, who also said, “The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.”
***END FOOTNOTE
(d) I’ve also put up a website at http://www.eleganthack.com/blueprint, and I’ll be putting up additional resources there. If there is a neat new book, or a good article I’ll point you to it.
(c)Not going to go there
I have a few things I’m not going to do in this book:
[lb] I’m not going to give you simple rules.[md]Information Architecture takes thinking. If I wrote, “You should have five items on your homepage, and everything should be three clicks away.” I would be turning off your thinking. And lying to you as well. So you won’t find simple rules here.
[lb] I won’t give you a fixed methodology.[md]There was a crazy fashion in the late nineties in which all the big web consultancies had their own methodology. It was like a giant machine. You’d plug it in, put your project in one end, and a website would come out the other. Well, those of us who had mothers fond of Kmart will testify that one size does not fit all. And much like those children who trudged off to school in clothes that kept riding up (requiring endless tugging down) or hanging too low (requiring endless rolling up), many companies found out that the consultant’s methodology was either overkill or didn’t meet their needs. And the clients of the big consultancies spent the next six months (and a lot of money) after the methodology spat out a website either tugging the website down or pulling the website up so it actually fit their needs.
What do you do instead of rely on a methodology? A toolbox.[md]A toolbox is a collection of techniques and principles you can apply to a problem. Because problems are all different, you pick and choose your techniques the way a plumber chooses between a wrench and a screwdriver. (note: laura, it’s okay if I just kill it, no?)
So this whole book is a series of tools for your toolbox. Toward the end of the book I’ll look at a couple of potential combinations of these skills you can use to design a good website.
[lb] I’m not going to recommend any software to use.[md]There is no CD in the back of this book. To be quite honest, the software that’s out there wasn’t made for making blueprints for websites, and none of it is great. Visio is popular, but so is Omnigraffle, Concept Draw, Inspiration, Adobe Illustrator, and InDesign[el]ok the list goes on and on.
To be honest, the only required tool is paper and pen (or pencil, for those who get nerveous when there is no eraser ok around.) So the techniques I cover are software independent. Use the software you like best.
(c)Hey you, IA
If you are doing Information Architecture for a living, you probably picked this book up out of curiousity. I’m sorry, but most of it will probably be old hat. This book is for you as you were a few years back.
Then again, you never know, there might be a few new tricks in here somewhere. And if not, maybe you can finally figure out how to explain to your mom what you do for a living.
(c)Why bother?
In 1844 Sarah Winchester, convinced that the ghosts of all the people who had been killed by the Winchester rifle would come after her for revenge, asked a psychic for advice. The psychic told her the way to keep the ghosts at bay would be to build a house[md]that the sound of hammers must never stop. For 38 years, Sarah kept a team of workers building on to her house. She never made blueprints, though occasionally she would sketch out what she wanted on a random piece of paper or tablecloth. The resulting house is a rambling four acres of stairs that lead to the ceiling, doors that open to brick walls and windows in the floor: The Winchester Mystery House.
***INSERT FIGURE 00IAB08 <PHOTO OF WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE>
Flash forward to 1998. A CEO has heard about this Internet thing. Convinced his company will fail if he doesn’t deal with it, he asks a consultant for advice. The consultant tells him to keep his company afloat he must build a website. For all these years, until today, teams of people have been working on this site without a blueprint. Occasionally they have plans for one area or another drawn on a cocktail napkin by the east coast sales team and faxed to the design team on the west coast.2[FTN#]
***INSERT FOOTNOTE
2. True story, sad to say. Names withheld to protect the guilty.
***END FOOTNOTE
Now the website is huge, thousands of pages with links that lead nowhere, marketing speak that says nothing, and outdated facts: The Winchester Mystery Site!
While a Winchester Mystery Site may someday earn you big bucks as a tourist attraction, it is much more likely to cost big bucks in lost revenue and wasted time. Architecture is important. Even on the web.
***END OF CHAPTER