Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

Preface

Those things that hurt, instruct.

—Ben Franklin

In late 1999, when this book had been out for a year and a half, our editor told us to get cracking on the second edition. The folks at O’Reilly are fully aware that it takes eighteen months for authors to forget the pain of writing, not to mention our vows to never do it again. Suitably forgetful, we agreed. Now it’s summer of 2002, and we’re just finishing. Why did it take us two and a half years?

Well, a lot happened in that intervening period. Remember, we were all running on Internet time. Investors were throwing money at all things Web. Companies were building web sites at a frenetic pace. “Information architect” suddenly became a hot job title, and demand for information architecture expertise soared.

New people brought fresh perspectives to the field. Information architects began to connect with one another. A host of web sites, discussion lists, professional conferences, local cocktail hours, and other trappings of a healthy new community emerged.

In those heady times, we were actively growing our information architecture consulting company, Argus Associates. When we wrote the first edition, there were five Argonauts, all librarians by training. By late 2000, Argus was a professionally managed firm with a staff of forty. We had built an interdisciplinary information architecture practice, hiring specialists with expertise in usability engineering, thesaurus design, ethnography, information retrieval, and technology evaluation. But we weren’t about to slow down. We had ambitious plans, one of which was to write the second edition.

But as many Greek and Roman tragedies forewarn, mortals plan and the gods laugh. In other words, the Web bubble burst, corporate spending took a dive, and it became difficult to justify investments in consulting, especially in new and intangible services like information architecture. Suddenly Argus was out of business. And for many new entrants to the field, getting a job as an information architect became nearly impossible. Things were bad all over.

Life rarely works according to plan, but often there’s a silver lining. For us, the demise of Argus granted the time, perspective, and motivation to finally write the second edition. After all, failure can be a better teacher than success. We’ve had our share of both, and we’ve tempered our enthusiasm for information architecture with an appreciation for the realities of the marketplace.

We’ve tried to address these realities in this book by explaining how to make the case for information architecture in unsupportive environments, and how to deal with political and cultural issues while trying to get your work done. We also describe a richer, more mature methodology that draws from many disciplines.

We are tremendously excited by the diversity, creativity, compassion, and resilience of the information architecture community. In the grand scheme of things, we are small in number. But as architects, designers, and teachers in these formative years of cyberspace, we have the opportunity to make a big impact. Let’s get cracking!

What’s New in the Second Edition

As you can tell by this book’s length—more than double that of the first edition—much has changed. In fact, we’ve almost written an entirely new book.

We’ve updated the chapters on organization, labeling, navigation, and searching, and illustrated the interconnectedness of these systems in a new chapter on thesauri, controlled vocabularies, and metadata. And we’ve expanded the methodology chapters to include a more interdisciplinary collection of tools and techniques. We’ve complemented the top-down strategies of the first edition with bottom-up approaches that enable distributed, emergent solutions.

A whole new section addresses the opportunities and challenges of practicing information architecture, while another section discusses how that work impacts and is influenced by the broader organizational context. New case studies provide models for creating enterprise intranet portals and online communities. Finally, we’ve referenced a wealth of essential information architecture resources, many of which did not exist a few years ago.