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 
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