Name: Information architecture for the World Wide Web
ISBN: 9780596527341

Information architecture for the World Wide Web

The post-Ajaxian Web 2.0 world of wikis, folksonomies, and mashups makes well-planned information architecture even more essential. How do you present large volumes of information to people who need to find what they're looking for quickly? This classic primer shows information architects, designers, and web site developers how to build large-scale and maintainable web sites that are appealing and easy to navigate.

What Hacker News says

pragmaticApr 2011

> I'm not convinced that even developers are.. and I'm picking my words with trepidation here.. sophisticated enough to put together queries, filters or even collections of topics in the main.

I'm not convinced it's worth _anyone's_ time to do so.

1. Master the wonky interface of some search engine.

2. Be disappointed by results of aforementioned wonky search engine.

3. Instead find results through rapid iteration of search terms.

I've worked on an in house search engine for the last year. User have been conditioned by google to just keep trying search terms till you find what you want. No interface (that I've seen) can beat the rapid iteration of search terms with fast response times.

A good reference: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565922822

thread

adrianhowardSep 2012

Well - there's a lot more to IA than wireframes :-) Lou Rosenfeld's book "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" is still a nice, small read if a little dated now and more oriented to content-based sites.

Wireframes are just one possible deliverable - a way of communicating the results of some kinds of UX work that include IA.

There's a lot of UX folk who hate 'em to - and would much rather spend their time working with the developers rather than waste a stack of time producing pointless documents.

See Jeff Gothelf's article on getting out of the deliverables business http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/07/lean-ux-gett... for example, or Google the stuff coming out of the Lean UX community.

thread

arkitaipMay 2011

IMHO you first need to understand design, its various sub fields (i.e. typography, colors, layout), user experience design/interaction design/usability, and finally how all of this applies to the web. You can learn the basics by reading books but the only way to truly understand and master is by study this things in the world and by practicing them. Start thinking about design, analyze it in your daily life, do your own makeovers of sites you use, design a blog theme, etc, etc.

As for web typography, you want to check of the latest generation of font embedding because that's where the real magic's at. The most known web font solutions are: CSS3 (font-face), typeface.js, cufon, flir, sifr, Google Font API, Typekit.

Here's a list of quality books on design and typography:

    A History of Graphic Design
    Before & After Page Design
    Designing Brand Identity
    Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
    Graphic Design Solutions
    How Designers Think
    Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
    Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop 
    The Complete Manual of Typography
    The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations
    The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type
    The Elements of Typographic Style
    The New Typography
    The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
    Thinking with Type: A Primer for Designers
    Typography Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Type in Graphic Design

Books on web design:

    About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
    Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become  
    Bulletproof Web Design
    Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
    Designing Web Usability
    Designing With Web Standards
    Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
    Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction
    Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
    Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
    Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
    Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web  
    Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
    Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
    The Essential Guide to User Interface Design
    The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
    Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology
    Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

thread

pragmaticApr 2011

Do users actually need to enter this syntax:

The QueryParser syntax is term~ or term~N?

After considering Lucene, I built my in house search engine. I wanted it to work a lot more like google than a "Full-text" library like search engine.

Very few users will go beyond the basics. How many users will actually used Google advanced search? Even programmers? Very few. Users don't use advanced search features.

Why? It's not their fault. They tried. They tried at the library - didn't work. They tried on the early search engines - didn't work. They tried on your Intranet app powered by database full text search - it doesn't work.

We trained them. We showed them that (most) advanced searching isn't worth their time.

Why is? Revisioning + speed. Make it easy to try different combos of search terms really fast. Correct spelling, suggest searches, add the ability to filter information.

See: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web p. 185.

Also available on Safari Books.