Information Architecture

I love my Subaru. I've driven it with no issues for about seven years. (BRB - going to knock on wood.) Despite my love, there are two design flaws that have driven me nuts throughout the duration of those seven years. (Disclaimer: I drive a 2004 Subaru. These features may have been updated on newer models.)

Joshua Porter's Designing for the Social Web

I attended the Information Architecture Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, back in April 2010.

In a session entitled "Tabula Rasa - Methods for jumping into UI Design" at the recently held User Experience Camp in Washington (#uxcampdc), Brian Talbot lead us in a discussion on starting with a blank slate. A number of great ideas came out of that discussion.

On November 5, a group of web executives around the DC area joined us to hear 4 speakers share their stories and strategies to get return visitors. And boy did we learn a lot! 
 

Keith LaFerriere published an interesting article today on A List Apart about communicating the value of Information Architecture (IA) to clients, and outlining deliverables by phases.

Keith does a thorough job of outlining the various deliverables that are produced in sequence, and incorporates a brief description of each one. This is a particularly useful overview of artifacts for someone who is unfamiliar with what an information architect produces.

A co-worker recently attended a conference and noted that several speakers talked about the importance of sitemaps to SEO. He also said that a few of these speakers also recommended "fat footers" that contain a partial site map at the bottom of each page.

I just received this same advice from Whitney Hess via Twitter who was relaying advice from Smart Experience's Web Navigation Design presented by James Kalbach:

Recently, a client came to us and asked us to design a multilingual gateway to several language specific sub-domains. We immediately thought of several solutions to this problem that included: