Week 2: Information Architecture
Introduction to Information Architecture
View the decks: Habaneros • Jalapeños
Additional Resources
Books
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld
- Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories by Donna Spencer
Articles
- Winchester Mystery House
- Top 10 Information Architecture (IA) Mistakes by Jakob Nielsen
Presentations
- Understanding Information Architecture by Peter Morville
Key Terms & Concepts
- Winchester Mystery House
A confusing mansion resulting from continuous construction without any planning. It is a good metaphor of what can happen to a website without any information architecture. See website and Wikipedia
- Mental Model
A representation of the real world as held in an individual’s thoughts. People perceive the world in different ways, and therefore model it differently in their heads and thoughts.
- Abby the IA
Abby Covert, a New York-based Information Architect and creator of one of the most popular sets of IA Heuristics. Instructor at GA and SVA.
- UX Honeycomb
A popular set of UX heuristics created by Peter Morville.
- Organization Schemes
Ways of organizing information.
- Exact Schemes
Organization schemes that divide information into mutually-exclusive and easily-defined categories.
- Ambiguous Schemes
Organization schemes that divide information in ways that are not exact but rather context-specific.
- Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the study and practice of classification as well as a particular classification.
- Card Sort
A card sort is a common user research method to designed to uncover participants’ mental models, particularly with respect to how they classify information. It can also be used to validate a particular organization scheme.