Friday, 15 November 2002

Book review: Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web. Title: Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web Author: Christina Wodtke Publisher: New Riders Publishing Published: 2002 Pages: 348 Illustrations: Monochrome CD-ROM: No ISBN: 0735712506 Rating: 5 When a client looks at a web site, they only see the visible 10%—the interface. The 90% of the site that makes the thing work is invisible.       When a client comes to you believing all you need to do is come up with a terrific user interface design, the situation is not unlike that of the Titanic and the iceberg.       To avoid that fate, far too common in web projects still, you must somehow convince them that there is an unseen 90% that must be done before pixel hits screen. Even more importantly, you must persuade them to pay for it.       How often though have you begun talking about strategy, scope, structure and that terribly misunderstood thing called content, only to be interrupted with the words that one of their people will take care of all that stuff? Then when it comes to the crunch, and nothing has been done by their people, the client comes by and dumps a stack of company brochures or product catalogs on your desk and tells you to just get on with it?       All this research, thinking and planning that is needed before opening your copy of Photoshop or Dreamweaver has found a name—Information Architecture (IA). The job has been given a title—Information Architect (also IA). The profession is now fighting for recognition, and the books are being published, at an accelerating pace.       Christina Wodtke founded Information Architecture web site Boxes and Arrows and is a partner at a San Francisco user experience agency. As she admits in her inside cover note, she really loves the web and really hates bad web sites.       A conversation about those issues with Jeffrey Veen resulted in this book. And now we have another tool in the arsenal both for learning from, and to use in teaching our clients. This is the second recent book on Information Architecture I have encountered—the first was Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience—and both are general introductions rather than in-depth reference books for practicing IAs.       Both books are well suited as recommended reading for insightful clients. Both are also good reads for IAs to remind themselves of how to do it better. But Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (IABW) contains more of the how-tos and examples that are still in short supply elsewhere. This is the kind of material I learn best from—things other people have done, good and bad.       Christina Wodtke’s aim is for her readers to learn rocket science in a day without being blown up. She does that, with enough real life examples to get you started, without imposing a method or setting strict procedures. The perfect in-depth IA book still does not exist yet, but IABW is a damned good beginning. I read it in a day, and dip into it again and again when thinking.       I am still hungry for more, but Wodtke has given me enough in her book to think about for the time being. I have taken to carrying Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web around in my backpack, along with The Elements of User Experience, and that is not something I do with every book I take a liking to. 12:46:03 PM    Add a comment.

My Fountain Pens. I use fountain pens to write with. I know, it is not necessarily the kind of thing to share in public.       After all, nobody uses fountain pens any more, I am often told. And I am also often told that nobody makes them any more. When you go into a stationery store to buy nibs or ink for one, you might well be told that fountain pens have been discontinued. Or the assistant may well tell you that this is not a shop for old-style things, so you had better try finding an antique dealership that sells them.       I have owned a large number of fountain pens over the years, many brands, cheap to expensive, although I have never tried a Mont Blanc. I have few of them left, because they have vanished mysteriously, or they have proven inadequate for the job.       The fountain pens I use now are probably the cheapest I have ever bought, but they have turned out to be the best. Their nibs are good, and are my preferred type—fine italic. They have never dried out, and the ink flow is consistent. They have never leaked. In New South Wales and Victoria, you can walk into any stationery store or newsagent and buy the pens, nibs, bottled ink, cartridges and even big boxed gift sets of them. These fountain pens are set as required writing tools by the school authorities in those states.       My fountain pens are Sheaffer calligraphy pens. There is only one store in Perth where you can buy them now, apparently. Many other places you enquire, the assistants love to spin vast webs of fantasy about fountain pens. I took notes, with my fountain pen. 10:26:44 AM    Add a comment.

As Long As They Don't Take Away My Fountain Pens. From Head Set on the Two Months Off single by Underworld. “I met a man who told me that the baillifs could come and take away his house, as long as they left his fountain pens. He would live in a cardboard box, so long as he still had his fountain pens.” 10:11:38 AM    Add a comment.

Content is What? Content is King! Content? I don’t need no feelthy steenking content.       Seriously though, there is an ongoing problem with communicating what content in the digital media and especially web sites actually is. Is it the graphics, the systems, the elements, the products and services that may or may not be for sale or for sharing?       Or is content the stories that are told, the narrative, the stuff that people read, about the company, the individual, the organization, the products, the services, the successes, the case studies? If so, who is responsible for it? Or better yet, who should be responsible for it?       More work for the Information Architecture profession to do in its striving for better education and clearer definition of the process, I think. 9:52:53 AM    Add a comment.

Death by Zebra Crossing. Many local drivers are amongst the worst in the world. There is a zebra crossing on the main road near where I live. It has big signs and is brightly lit at night. There is an island refuge made of concrete in the middle of it, halfway across the road.       Motorists are supposed to stop for you when it is obvious you are standing on the edge of the zebra crossing and want to cross. They are supposed to stop when someone is walking across the zebra crossing. But, at this zebra crossing they do not. They never stop. I cannot remember the last time a driver actually stopped there when I was trying to cross.       There have been times when I have been halfway across one lane and a driver screaming along well beyond the speed limit misses by inches. I look at the eyes of the drivers of these cars, and they are staring rigidly ahead, into the far distance, or if not then their eyes are glazed over. 9:48:30 AM    Add a comment.