Customer Reviews

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites, 2nd Edition

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

With the second edition, Morville and Rosenfeld have met a pretty significant challenge: surpassing their first book. The new edition is chock full of great new chapters on topics both technical and creative.

By covering subjects like thesauri, CVs, and metadata, while at the same time tackling headfirst "big picture" ideas of information architecture, the two authors are to be commended for writing a book that is at once instructive to advanced practioners yet still recommendable to strategists, designers, programmers, and others who might have only a vague notion of information architecture. And the chapter on business strategy is as good an introduction as I've read in any business book.

This book is the closest anyone has come to a single book addressing all of the complexity and challenges of organizing, structuring, and managing large scale Web sites, and does so with clear, easy-to-read prose eshewing jargon and consultant-speak. Quite an accomplishment, indeed!

This is a great book to introduce business people to information architecture, for architects to reinforce their skills, and for web designers to principles to apply to site design. The second edition has more information and is more in depth than the first, and is well worth purchasing.

The first three chapters of the book explore what information architecture is and what it is needed. Chapters 4 - 9, the "Basic Principles of Information Architecture" have the most substance. Several chapters bear reading several times, including:

Chapter 5: Organization Systems, Chapter 7: Navigation Systems, Chapter 8: Search Systems and Chapter 9: Thesauri, Controlled Vocabularies, and Metadata

The sections on Process and Methodologyactice, and Organizational fit are all good for people learning about IA, but may be too basic for anyone that does a lot of work or reading in the field. The Education Chapter is already out of date, which is to be expected.

IA for the World Wide Web is a great book, worth reading and worth hanging onto for reference or to use to explain the IA to others.

I'm the kind of reader that enjoys straight to the point books. As interesting as this book was, I found it rambled and went too deep into how to sell IA to administration, or learn about IA in schools, or what steps should one take to become an information architect, etc. I found it presented ideas, often left the reader at the end of each section with "it depends" or "you'll see what works best for you". Which is fine, but isn't really helpful.

About 100 pages too long, this book should have been boiled down significantly, and cut out all the chapters about promotion of the IA field. The title of the book is "Designing large-scale web sites" not convincing your boss to invest in IA.

Ok, but not worth the money.

There are more advanced books for explaining information architecture to someone looking to actually design information systems for the web, but there are few better books for explaining to a manager the value of IA for an organization. The first half of the book seeks to explain the difference good and bad design can have on a user's experience in finding information. Although the examples are at times more cerebral (compared to Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability, who picks websites and suggests how navigation and organization could be changed for a better user experience) the book's value comes from effectively communicating the design vocabulary necessary for an information designer to communicate his or her vision to management.

This is a classic book to have on the importance of planning, and the art of researching towards easier implementation. It gives excellent review on the various tasks a large-scale project should work through.
This book is mostly targetted for IA wanna-be. Web developers and project managers will benefit only from 7-8 chapters.

I think the authors had focused too much on why IA is important, rather then how to implement it correctly. A large percentage of the ink was wasted on what is IA and how you should sell it. I would love to see another case study or two.

All in all, this is a nice book to have. The chapters I liked most was on the labels, grouping, controlled vocabularies and case studies.

If I were to teach a class in Information Architecture on a remote pacific island, and I could only bring one book - this would be THE BOOK.
This is the book which brings students of IA further than any other single book. It is the book that covers the most ground. It is the book You would have killed for when You started as an IA. But it is not really a "how-to" book. It is much more of an "understand the business" book.

The second edition is different from the first edition. It has improved in so many ways. We're talking solid 460 pages packed with practical advice, knowledge supported by experience, and great examples. The Library and Information Science bias that made the first edition a little single sided is not present in this second edition which encompasses the entire field and deals with most aspects of Information Architecture - from presenting search results to making elevator pitches in the world of business strategy.

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web is not one of those books that are backed by a lot of scientific evidence. The advice given in this book is backed by the authority and experience of two of the most widely recognized people in the field. If that counts for You, then this book is for You.

The cover says "designing large scale web sites". This is true. It is not a book about building community sites, and it is not about small e-business sites. This is a book about the big picture on the big projects, but it actually has a lot of relevant input for the building of smaller sites as well.

I read "Ambient Findability" first, and then bought this book. Both are excellent. This one is more focused on carefully orchestrating an approach to an enterprise architecture that makes content usable to end-users in context.

As the world gets ready to move toward exobyte scales of information sharing, at machine speed, this book becomes very relevant. While the authors are careful to point out the fallacies in cost calculations for informaiton access design flaws, I for one find the factors compelling--the cost of finding information, of not finding information, the value of rapid access, visualization and integration, the value of ease of use. I find the rough figure of $100 per employee per year to be a conservative estimate of opportunity costs--I think it is close to $1000 and in some instances $10,000.

Over-all I found this to be a superb reference for self-study, one that breaks down complex issues like different kinds of navigation systems, and one that also shows the value of offering end-users multiple means of access, both search and browsing.

Chapter 19 was especially valuable to me, since I am not even close to being a technical person or even a librarian--the itemization of the functions associated with information architecture and implementation, and why they might benefit from centralization, was a very helpful vehicle for getting a sense of the challenge when thinking of the scale of say Google, where thousands of hits are returned and thousands of relevant documents are NOT found. Google is great, but in this context, Google is in the second or third grade, at best.

I like this book, which does not claim to make anyone an information architect, because it helped me see, in a logical easy to read manner, just how *much* is involved in making tons of information accessible and usaable in time lapses and at costs that both people and organizations can afford.

This book is now in it's second edition, and the update is well worth the $20 investment. The authors give the best all around introduction to the subject that I have seen. What I like about their approach is that they don't claim to have all the answers and they seem to understand that this is a field that is in evolotion. What's great about the book is that it's in plain English and is aimed at programmers and graphic designers who don't have a degree in library science. What I enjoyed most about the book is that there is quite a bit of good common sense. Not only would I recommend this book to someone starting in the field, but I would also say that if you are an old timer it's a worthwhile read to get a better taste of what best industry practices are these days. While the book has some illustrated examples, it manages not to be a pretty picture book which tells you what you already know.

This is an excellent book about how to organize the tremendous amounts of information that organizations have on the web. Whether you are creating a large dot com site, or a small intranet with multiple departments, this book will be extremely useful.

Naturally, every web site is different. And if you do not understand the business model and goals of the organization, the web site design will suffer. Designing a web site (or a series of web sites) is a difficult task, and you need to ask a lot of people some difficult questions about their web strategy.

This book does a good job of guiding people through this process, and the inevitable political pitfalls... From convincing the web group that the current design does not server their audience well, to what kinds of questions to ask the stakeholders and decision makers, to getting feedback from the end users.

It also gives a pretty good overview of search engines, taxonomies, thesauri, navigation, proper language and labels, metadata, content management, and other tools that help you keep a web site organized and current.

I have two main complaints. First, it didn't spend enough time on usability, so you will need another book along those lines (like Don't Make Me Think).

Second, it didn't cover the dangers that a rigid thesaurus has on Google rank, and general Search Engine Optimization. So you'll need another book on that. Unfortunately, I've never read a on SEO that was any good, so I cannot recommend one.

The title of this book is a bit misleading, I thought it should be the caption at the top of the front cover, "Designing Large Scale Web Sites." While the authors do a good job at covering a large amount of material, I was disappointed that most of the material was a cross between design information and usability. A lot of the information is available in other places, but if you haven't done much reading on various design or usability aspects, this book does a good job of bringing together basic information from a number of different disciplines into one place.
The organization of the material was well thought out, topics were divided into logical sections, and built upon previous chapters when appropriate.
If you haven't done any work on a large scale project before, or aren't familiar with usability, or have some areas that you need to know more about, this is an excellent book to look at. Otherwise, you may find a large portion of this book covering familiar territory, and that much of what is talked about is already company policy or common sense.