Information Architecture
If you understand how people will want to use information, you become
an information interpreter instead of a data warehouser. (Jared Spool)
What is it? (Louis
Rosenfeld)
Information architecture involves the design of organization, labeling,
navigation, and searching systems to help people find and manage information
more successfully.
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Organization systems are the ways content can be grouped.
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Labeling systems are essentially what you call those content groups.
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Navigation systems, like navigation bars and site maps, help you
move around and browse through the content.
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Searching systems help you formulate queries that can be matched
with relevant documents.
For each of these systems, there is much more than meets the eye. If this
wasn't the case, it would be a lot easier for users to find what they're
looking for in web sites (and it'd be easier to maintain those sites, to
boot).
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Louis Rosenfeld
and Peter Morville (O'Reilly, 1998)
Awarded Amazon.com's Best Computer Book of 1998, this is one of the
best web books available, particularly for librarians. Librarians
are familiar with IA core concepts of organization, navigation, labeling,
and searching. This book translates them into the context of the
web. If you already have some experience with web pages or a web
site, this book will be very useful in helping you understand WHY parts
of your site don’t work well, and what needs to be done to fix them.
The book doesn’t tell you how to design your site; there is no one "right"
way to do it. What it does do is explain WHY it isn’t working, and
allows you to find solutions unique to your site’s users, content, and
goals. It should be required reading for anyone creating library
web pages.
Interview with Louis
Rosenfeld by John S.Rhodes, WebWord.com Editor and Webmaster, May 24,
1999.