Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, by Peter Morville, Louis Rosenfeld

In a world where the information at our fingertips can cause infoglut, it is important to structure information in such a manner that people don't lose more IQ points than marijuana users. In other words, people have to be able to find what they want quickly so they can react to it quickly. Over the centuries, various methods of dealing with this have happened. In books, we have indices. In libraries, we have the Dewey Decimal System. We have Scientific classification, Stellar classification and medical classification - plus the little attachment for your keys so you can find them under the scattered results of your last search.

Then came the internet. Terra bytes of information all over the internet in various guises made search engines a good business to get into. Emails pound servers with reckless abandon, RSS feeds stream information to subscribers - and the world, as messy as it is, is at our fingertips. And for those of us putting information onto the internet, for whatever reason, some understanding of information architecture is required for the information to be useful.

As Jakob Nielsen wrote in the foreword of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web:

...Critics may say that users don't care about information architecture. They don't want to learn how a web site is structured, they just want to get in, get their task done, and get out. Users focus on tasks, not on structure. But it's because users don't care about the structure of a web site that it is so important to get the information architecture right in design. If users did bother to study our websites, the could surely learn how an obscure or illogical structure works and utilize that knowledge to improve their task performance...

Technologies and paradigms have littered the internet landscape, suffering their own lack of architecture in presentation for amateurs and professionals alike; there are so many manners of handling information now that choosing the right ways for the right uses is important. Enter the third edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web - 486 pages (526 pages total) and 21 chapters of information which are supposed to help the professional and the amateur make information itself more usable. The chapters cover:

• Defining what information architecture is through definitions and analogies, relating it to different fields.
• Guidelines on qualities and skills for the professional information architect.
• How people interact with information.
• The nuts and bolts of information architecture.
• Organization systems that are useful for meeting business and user needs.
• Labeling - how to create effective (consistent and descriptive) labels for a website.
• Navigation Systems for users - getting users where they really want to be on a website.
• Search Systems - how they work, how they index information, and how to design better result interfaces.
• Vocabulary control for connecting systems and improving a user's experience.
• Researching the discovery process necessary to create a solid foundation of understanding.
• Strategy through framework and methodology.
• Introduction to the deliverables and processes required to bring an information architecture to life.
• How to enter the field of information architecture and continue learning.
• Ethics of information architecture.
• Building an information architecture team.
• Information architecture tools and software.
• Making the case for information architecture to clients.
• Business strategy similarities and dependencies as related to information architecture.
• Information architecture for the enterprise - how to build a persistent information architecture for an organization.
• Case studies of MSWeb and evolt.org.

Coupled with an Appendix of Essential Resources, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web covers a lot of ground from the basics to more advanced topics, and the authors have been eating their own dog food - the book is well structured for the amount of information within it.

There are an abundance of real world examples - from Digg to Yahoo, theory is mapped to practice throughout the book as well as explanation of combined methods in use at various websites which have distinguished themselves over time.

Personally, I enjoyed this book - it is clearly written with examples around every corner and has a lot of very useful information behind the polar bear on the cover. While the book is likely to become dated within the next 2 years, the question that the would-be reader should be asking is how far behind they will be in 2 years. Anyone who deals with information would benefit from reading this book, but those who would see the most benefit would be organizations who disseminate or collect information on the internet and the web designers who enable them. A KnowProSE.com 9 out of 10 for Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.

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