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Information architecture

Information architecture is the categorization of information into a coherent structure, preferably one that most people can understand quickly, if not inherently. (source: Wikipedia)

Podcasts from the IA Summit 2010: Day 3

Added on 30 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“This year marks the 11th annual Information Architecture Summit. Our theme is meant to inspire everyone in the community—even those who aren’t presenting or volunteering—to bring their best ideas to the table. As busy practitioners, we rarely have the chance to step back and think about the future of our field—we’re too busy resolving day-to-day issues. By gathering and sharing practical solutions for everyday challenges, we can create more breathing room to plan for what’s to come.” (Jeff Parks – Boxes and Arrows)

Navimation: Exploring Time, Space & Motion in the Design of Screen-based Interfaces

Added on 30 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Screen-based user interfaces now include dynamic and moving elements that transform the screen space and relations of mediated content. These changes place new demands on design as well as on our reading and use of such multimodal texts. Assuming a socio-cultural perspective on design, we discuss in this article the use of animation and visual motion in interface navigation as navimation. After presenting our Communication Design framework, we refer to relevant literature on navigation and motion. Three core concepts are introduced for the purpose of analysing selected interface examples using multimodal textual analysis informed by social semiotics. The analysis draws on concepts from multiple fields, including animation studies, ‘new’ media, interaction design, and human-computer interaction. Relations between time, space and motion are discussed and linked to wider debates concerning interface design.” (Jon Olav H. Eikenes and Andrew Morrison ~ IJDesign Volume 4 No. 1, 2010)

Search Patterns is Customer Behavior and Business Insights

Added on 27 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
Interview with Peter Morville about his new book Search Patterns – “(…) I’m a skeptic when it comes to grand visions of The Semantic Web. In narrow domains such as medicine, we can develop thesauri (or ‘ontologies’) that define terms precisely and map hierarchical, equivalent, and associative relationships. But these approaches simply don’t scale, and they can’t keep up with the rapid evolution of language and knowledge.” (Bridgeline Digital)

Podcasts from the IA Summit 2010: Day 2

Added on 26 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“This year marks the 11th annual Information Architecture Summit. Our theme is meant to inspire everyone in the community—even those who aren’t presenting or volunteering—to bring their best ideas to the table. As busy practitioners, we rarely have the chance to step back and think about the future of our field—we’re too busy resolving day-to-day issues. By gathering and sharing practical solutions for everyday challenges, we can create more breathing room to plan for what’s to come.” (Jeff Parks – Boxes and Arrows)

Podcasts from the IA Summit 2010: Day 1

Added on 23 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“This year marks the 11th annual Information Architecture Summit. Our theme is meant to inspire everyone in the community—even those who aren’t presenting or volunteering—to bring their best ideas to the table. As busy practitioners, we rarely have the chance to step back and think about the future of our field—we’re too busy resolving day-to-day issues. By gathering and sharing practical solutions for everyday challenges, we can create more breathing room to plan for what’s to come.” (Jeff Parks – Boxes and Arrows)

Design Patterns: Faceted Navigation

Added on 20 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Faceted navigation may be the most significant search innovation of the past decade. It features an integrated, incremental search and browse experience that lets users begin with a classic keyword search and then scan a list of results. It also serves up a custom map that provides insights into the content and its organization and offers a variety of useful next steps. In keeping with the principles of progressive disclosure and incremental construction, it lets users formulate the equivalent of a sophisticated Boolean query by taking a series of small, simple steps. Learn how it works, why it has become ubiquitous in e-commerce, and why it’s not for every site.” (Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender ~ A List Apart)

IA Summit 10: Whitney Hess Keynote

Added on 16 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In her keynote closing the 2010 IA Summit, Whitney asks if our work is just our job or our passion. To really make the difference we seek, our practice needs to be our calling. The UX community is united because of a common mission: We empower people to become self-reliant and more resourceful, organized, social, and relaxed. We don’t do it for them, they do it for themselves.” (Jeff Parks – Boxes and Arrows)

IA Summit 10: Dan Roam Keynote

Added on 12 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In his day one keynote from the 2010 IA Summit, Dan Roam—founder of Digital Roam Inc and author of the best-selling Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures – shares his unique visual-thinking approach with a receptive crowd in Phoenix. Transcending language barriers, his approach helps solve complex problems through visual thinking, and has helped resolve challenges at many businesses: Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and eBay to name a few.” (Jeff Parks – Boxes and Arrows)

IA Summit 10: Richard Saul Wurman Keynote

Added on 12 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“With the majority of the earth’s population now living in cities, Richard Saul Wurman realized there was a yawning information gap about the urban super centers that are increasingly driving modern culture. In this keynote presentation from the 2010 IA Summit, Mr. Wurman discusses his 19.20.21 initiative: an attempt to standardize a methodology to understand comparative data on 19 cities that will have 20 million or more inhabitants in the 21st century. He encourages the design community to take initiative and solve big problems rather than make small changes incrementally.” (Jeff Parks – Boxes and Arrows)

Leonard Cohen versus Jesse James Garrett

Added on 26 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“I think we should be called information architects and that it’s easier to talk about IA with people outside our field in terms of A than to talk with them about UXD in terms of X or D. Mr. Garrett thinks we are now and have always been user experience designers, that UXD is easier for muggles to understand, and that those of us who specialize in and choose the titles of IA or IxD are either fools or liars.” (Dan Klyn – Wildly Appropriate)

What am I?

Added on 26 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“My interests and skills in the universe that is Design tack heavily toward using information to create structured systems for human experience. I’m obsessed with the design challenges that come from linking things that couldn’t be linked before the Internet — creating habitats out of digital raw material. That, to me, is the heart of information architecture.” (Andrew Hinton)

Content: Not Always King

Added on 22 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The strategy you adopt when tackling a project needs to take this continuum in mind. If your product is about content consumption, content is king and you should do due diligence and start from a content strategy perspective. Users of those products are coming to be informed or entertained and need the content to be front-and-center; the product is in service to displaying the content in as appropriate a manner as possible. The meaning of the content matters; you wouldn’t display a cartoon the same way you’d display an analysis of the stock market. At least, not usually.” (Dan Saffer – Kicker Studio) – Goes back to the old web app (code) versus doc (data) distinction.

There Is No Such Thing As Jesse James Garrett

Added on 21 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The president of a firm that’s synonymous with User Experience and who literally ‘wrote the book’ on the elements of User Experience making an impassioned call for everybody who’s called information architect or interaction designer to change their business cards to omit mention of these competing paradigms, and then insisting that the way your firm does its work is different than every other kind of design approach that’s come before it? It’s a sell job, if not a sales pitch. I think he doth protest too much.” (Dan Klyn – Wildly Appropriate)

Starting Out Organized: Website Content Planning The Right Way

Added on 17 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“So many articles explain how to design interfaces, design graphics and deal with clients. But one step in the Web development process is often skipped over or forgotten altogether: content planning. Sometimes called information architecture, or IA planning, this step doesn’t find a home easily in many people’s workflow. But rushing on to programming and pushing pixels makes for content that looks shoehorned rather than fully integrated and will only require late-game revisions.” (Kristin Wemmer – Smashing Magazine)