Entries from Kelake tagged with 'Information Architecture'
Explaining Information Architecture
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Does information need architects?
More on the "species": "... it was surprisingly hard to find someone willing to call herself an information architect. "I don't like to call myself that because ... " was a common phrase used as people introduced themselves. Similarly, the...
The Information Architect Species
A lighter look at what disciplines those who practice IA might have practiced before or in addition to becoming IA's. "Given that IA as a profession is really only about 10yrs old (or at least, that’s the figure I hear...
Four Modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them
Information-seeking behavior varies from situation to situation. Donna Mauer explores different ways in which users look for information and offers tactics for accommodating them. Four Modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them - Boxes and Arrows...
(Garret IA) 描述信息结构和交互设计的图示词汇表
I don't think I have linked to the Chinese version of JJ Garrett's Visual Vocabulary in the past. Though not set in Big 5 this could use some promotion as more Taiwanese designers start to understand and utilize the fundamental...
Information Architecture Out of Fashion?
Before I took an all too brief detour into sound and tangible interfaces I was really quite interested in information architecture - I spoke allot about the topic here in the hinterlands of Taiwan and tried to put into practice...
Shirky: Ontology is Overrated
"I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies. I also want...
Explain "Information Architecture" in 10 words or less
Jason Fried of 37signals is making an interesting point, there is no common concise answer to what the terms means. Three years ago I threw together this definition from various sources: Information architecture (IA) is primarily about cognition - how...
Tagging for Fun and Finding
"We all grew up knowing about tags. We had tags in our clothes, we had them on our holiday presents, we played a game called tag, and some even used spray cans to tag their turf. All of these uses...
The Death of Hierarchical Folders
This is a must read for anyone interested in information architecture. "Hierarchical Folders have dominated info organization since they first appeared over 40 years ago. But in industry after industry, a strange thing is happening: hierarchy is under severe attack,...
IA as a competitive advantage
"America’s entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe’s biggest broadcasters – the BBC – is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it." "The BBC is indeed quietly getting way ahead of most...
A Primer on Faceted Navigation and Guided Navigation
"What is faceted navigation? It's a way to browse information, or to refine long lists of search results, along multiple dimensions, aka facets. These are orthogonal lenses through which to view the world. For example, I might search for an...
Mapping an Information Space (ba)
"To successfully communicate the characteristics of an information space, I needed an approach for creating easily understood diagrams. To be useful to my audience, the diagrams must communicate the "big picture"? of the website to stakeholders, while providing enough detail...
Information Architecture Heuristics (Rosenfeld)
“Just finished a brief heuristic evaluation of a client site, basing part of my feedback on a set of questions that I find quite useful for just about every IA-related project. Every information architect should always have a set of...
Card Sorting: How Many Users to Test (Jacob Neilson)
From Jakob Nielsen's - Alertbox comes: "Testing ever-more users in card sorting has diminishing returns, but you should still use three times more participants than you would in traditional usability tests." Courtesy InfoDesign: Understanding by Design Read article....
A definitive guide to cart sorting
"Card sorting is a technique that many information architects (and related professionals.) use as an input to the structure of a site or product. With so many of us using the technique, why would we need to write an...
Six Steps to Better Interviews and Simplified Task Analysis (Adaptive Path article)
From Adaptive Path comes another fine article "Six Steps to Better Interviews and Simplified Task Analysis". "I spend a lot of time helping clients conduct task analysis to form mental-model diagrams. When teams first start analyzing the interview transcripts theyve...
How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web
via IASlash "This paper will attempt to bridge the gap by giving procedures and advice on all the steps involved in making a faceted classification and putting it on the web. Web people will benefit by having a rigorous seven-step...
A Simplified Model for Facet Analysis
"The purpose of this study is to propose a simplified model for facet analysis that incorporates the principles of facet analysis proposed by both Ranganathan and the CRG. The purpose of this simplified model is to act primarily as a...
Faceted Classification
A faceted classification uses clearly defined, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive aspects, properties, or characteristics (a.k.a. facets) of a class or specific subject (Taylor, 2000). The idea for a faceted classification really began with the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) in...
Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites
A great article on personas by Alison J. Head [via IA Slash via InfoDesign (Peter J. Bogaards)]. Fairly thorough with pointers and brief case study using BBCi supplied supplied by Black Belt Jones. Read: Personas: Setting the Stage for Building...
IA Tools
Below you will find document templates, process map posters and other tools to help you in your practice. The documents, which have been donated by various people in the organization, have been found to be useful at one time or...
Origin of the Phrase, "Information Architecture"
"The phrase "information architecture" appears to have been coined, or at least brought to wide attention, by Richard Saul Wurman, a man trained as an architect but who has become also a skilled graphic designer and the author, editor, and/or...
Pandora's Portal
"It begins with a seductive whisper into the ear of an IT manager. Wouldn't you like to control the chaos that is your intranet? Haven't you dreamed of providing unified access to all corporate knowledge? Come with me. I have...
Metadata Glossary
"In an attempt to summarize the relationship among various metadata formats and how they relate to building Internet systems I wrote a glossary. I then ordered and tied the terms together with a bit of narrative to explain the relationships...
Escaping Flatland: Towards Better Documentation for Information Architects
One of the hottest topics these days in Information Architecture circles is documentation. This is probably partly because the IA's role is so ill defined. This presentation is representative of my first attempts on the use of visualization to communicate...
Topic Maps
"Topic maps are a standard for storing metadata (similar to thesauri, or RDF). They can be used to generate navigation for a website, and lots of other metadata tasks. Topic maps are a new standard (since + 2000) and are...
Getting Creative With Specs: Usable Software Specifications
Boxes and Arrows has really been hitting it for me lately. By abandoning the traditional idea of a spec in favor of a usable spec, you can deliver something that's fun to show off, easy to understand, and confidence-inspiring. Boxes...
Three Lessons From Tufte
Information itself cannot inherently be misleading or difficult to understand, but its visual representation or interpretation can be. "Because his books focus primarily on producing graphics for paper and on the representation of information, not the structuring of information, many...
Tools of the Trade in Comic Book Form
"What I need are highly condensed overviews, I thought, like those comic books that convert great literary works into a few illustrated pages. They condense Moby Dick down to 12 pages and provide a version of Great Expectations that can...
Towards a General Relation Browser
"The paper presents the case of ongoing efforts to develop and test generalizable user interfaces that provide interactive overviews for large-scale Web sites, portals, and other partitions of Web space. The interfaces are called Relation Browsers (RB) because they help...
Dimensional Deliverables: Exploring the Realm Between Paper and Screen
"The evolution of the Information Architect's project deliverables has, out of necessity, become a process focused on flat representational site maps a controlled jumble lines and squares on paper or on a screen. If web sites are dimensional information...
Differences between Information Architecture and Information Design
I believe I gleaned this originally from Jesse James Garrett some time ago and have found it a useful explanation for both myself and others. Between the two names we have different concerns. Information architecture (IA) is primarily about cognition...
You Do It, You Just Don't Know It
"This article has so far explored how technical communicators can incorporate the skills and thought processes of information architects to greatly improve the user's experience of Web-based and information products. But for technical communicators who wish to make a career...
Grounded Classification: Grounded Theory and Faceted Classification
"This paper compares the qualitative method of grounded theory with the construction of faceted classifications in library and information science. Both struggle with a core problem: the representation of vernacular words and processes, empirically discovered, which will, although ethnographically faithful,...
A Taxonomy Primer
"Taxonomiesthesauriclassification systemssynonym rings. Weve heard all of these terms in the context of the Web. As Web sites expand, the task of organizing them has become increasingly problematic and complex. All of the terms mentioned above are controlled vocabularies. That...
Information Theory
"Information Theory regards information as only those symbols that are uncertain to the receiver. For years, people have sent telegraph messages, leaving out non-essential words such as "a" and "the." In the same vein, predictable symbols can be left out,...
25 Thesis - Mainfesto for AIfIA
The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA) is a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. My favourite quote: "The emergence of Information Architecture (IA) as a formal discipline has gathered key areas of expertise together to...
Faceted classification of information
Given the significant difficulties in categorizing books, papers, and articles using traditional library classification techniques, it would seem next to impossible for humans to classify the small chunks of rapidly changing information that characterize information-intensive business environments. But its not....
Faucet Facets
Jeffery Veen of Adaptive Path has written a great introduction, with examples, into the benefits of using fauceted classification . "So often we assume that Web sites should be hierarchically organized. We talk about a "home page" that offers "top-level...
Using Wireframes
Nam-ho Park an information architect in Virginia has a great article on using wireframes."Wireframes serve a central function in communicating the content and layout of each web page for internal discussion and client review as well as a blueprint from...
Unraveling the mysteries of metadata and taxonomies
Christina Wodtke of Boxes and Arrows interviews Samantha Bailey (former Argonaut and current lead IA for Wachovia Corporation's Wachovia.com website) about Information Architecture, her dream process and the mysteries of metadata and taxonomies. View the article ... I like these...
IA & the Tube
Information Architecture & the London Underground: A metaphor for explaining IA."For some time now I have been searching for a good description of what information architecture is. Mostly I have found sites dedicated to ia that offer resource material but...
IA = Sexual Pleasure?
I just finished a long meeting and I notice that my face is all flushed like it might be if I had a good session of sex ... except I am at work and it certainly wasn't that kind of...
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