A Practical Guide to Information Architecture
If you're a website designer, intranet manager or someone without much Information Architecture experience, this book answers all those questions you were afraid to ask.
Drawing on her many years experience of practising and teaching Information Architecture, Donna Spencer guides you through some simple steps to better IA and leaves you feeling empowered and able to run your own IA projects. Whether it's organising content, providing clear descriptions or ways for people to get to them, this book is armed with practical advice and examples.
Buy this book
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Who should read this book?
If you need to know how to structure content on a website, then you need to know some basics of how to design an IA. So, that includes people like Project Managers, Copywriters, Developers, Designers, eMarketing people, Product Owners, Web App owners and editorial assistants.
Look Inside
Each Five Simple Steps book is individually, and beautifully, designed around the content. A Practical Guide to Information Architecture is no different. Spanning over 300 pages, the book features supporting case studies, illustrations and examples.
Reviews
"Donna’s book was an engaging and educational read. It should be a staple for any UX Bookshelf, and required reading for junior information architects. It’s filled with bit of humor, and contains many real world examples to back up the lessons she is providing."
~ Jonny Holland Magazine
"The book assumes no previous knowledge other than knowing what a website is. It’s a very gentle introduction to a hard topic. The writing style is relaxed and definitely not heavy going... I recommend this as an excellent starting place for your IA learning or even to pick up some new tricks if your already a practitioner."
~ Codewax
Topics include:
Part 1: About information architecture
What is information architecture? Who does it? and what do they do? What does IA look like in a project? All these questions will be answered in Part One.
Part 2: Understanding people
Learn about your users and how they look for, and think about, information. Learn how to effectively analyse and conduct user research.
Part 3: Understanding content
Content is at the heart of IA. This part looks at how to establish what you have, what you need and how to group the content into ways that make sense to people.
Part 4: Designing an information architecture
Down to brass tacks. How do you create an information architecture now that you know what content you have, you've asked your users. Now it's time to design it.
Part 5: Designing navigation
Creating an information structure is only one aspect of good IA design. Throughout this part you will learn how to create navigation systems to help people get to what they want within your new IA.