Peter Morville

Polar Bear book – o’reilly book on info architecture (this field grew out of library sciences)

Info architecture is not limited to the web.

Info architecture

- combination of organization, labeling and navigation

- intuitive access to content

- art and science of helping ppl manage info

- increasing movement of ppl using architecture and design into the digital landscape

Most ppl doing info architecture have never even heard the term.

Importance of providing multiple paths to the same information.

Stanford university website homepage has lots of access paths.

Consumerreports.org – user testing shows the importance of words. Bubble up info from underlying content to homepage to give a better idea of where they’re going. What words are ppl using when they search? We can bubble sub-content up to the homepage.

Search is a system

Semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/search.html

- make easy and accessible

- make it clear WHAT is searchable

- remove ROT (redundant, out of date, trivial)

- look for exact ways to allow the user to restrict their results

- search results page is a big place that can be improved on many sites. This is the 2nd most visited page. – put most relevant up top, presentation of title, description, meta data, give options for filtering and sorting results

user experience: useful, useable, desirable, valuable, findable, accessible, credible

Case study: cancer.gov

- wanted to improve how ppl find content from homepage, most ppl are recently diagnosed and friends/family

- had to see how ppl were finding the site. How do they search for you? – findability

Any architect (digital or real world) needs one foot in past and one in future.

Findability – the quality of being locatable or navigable. The degree to which an object is easy to discover or locate. The degree to which a system or environment supports wayfinding, navigation, and retrieval.

Ambient – surrounding, encircling, enveloping

Ambient Findablity – the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. Not necessarily a goal (privacy issues) and it’s not 100% possible.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” – Herbert Simon, Nobel Laurete Economist

Marketers will focus on ways to break through. Flashing and blinking. We need to focus on enabling people to find what they need when they need it. Before we worry about pushing, need to make sure they can pull what they want.

David Rose ambientdevices.com

Discussed future of information and findability related to new devices, etc.

Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make me Think

Revenge of the Librarians

- card catalogues had metadata

- internet turns everyone into a librarian

- metadata is sexy – free tagging.

- The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together. – David Weinberger. Leaves rot and become food for trees. – categories are starting to emerge on flickr they come from the free tagging.

- Podzinger.com – turns podcasts into text. Can click a word and play the podcast from there. Future – all video/audio will be searchable on the web. About to add another category of content to the searchable web.

- “SEARCH has become the new interface of commerce” – John Battelle

- Keywords are a great start for searching. But there is more than that.

- Amazon – competitive advantage in their info architecture – constantly innovating the search/findability

- Wikipedia – very traditional inverted L navigation then give users the ability to do what they want within that.

Open Source Intelligence

- CIA uses this title to mean “useful info gleaned from public sources.”

- Really need to be thinking about open source like software. Working with community to build more info.

- Chicagocrime.org – google mashup with police dept data

- Google mash up in NY during transit strike