Alex around the World

Quoted from Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morvile’s book entitled “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” (O’Reilly, 2nd edition, 2002):

[...]be aware of the challenges of organizing information on the Web. Language is ambiguous, content is heterogeneous, people have different perspectives, and politics can rearits ugly head.

(Chapter 5: Organization Systems, p. 74)

Of all these challenges, politics is certainly the most complex and exhausting one…

I was reading Christina Wodtke’s book titled “Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web” and caught the following excerpt:

[...] thoughtful planning and well-designed Information Architecture improves

• Findability - Allowing customers to easily access those items they need, be they spatulas or term papers.
• Usability - Allwowing customers to wend their way to those items and accomplish the tasks the most want to accomplish, and ultimately
• Understandability - A good architecture provides infrastructure needed to help people make knowledge out of information.

Wodtke’s book was written back in 2003 but it’s worth reading it.

This is a smart way to understand what this web 2.0 trend is all about.

Credits go to Information Architects Inc., Japan.

… but do people know that?

I remember when I was building my first websites. I did everything from A to Z, from the graphic elements to the HTML coding. Usually, these sites had a very easy structure: one “home page”, one “contacts” page, one “about us” page and several content pages.

But web design has evolved and new disciplines are involved. A client used to hire a generalist, someone who would do everything, from design to implementation, including server configuration. Now, your needs are more important. In an ideal world, you would have a whole team of specialists designing your websites: User experience specialists, Interface designers, coders, IT/Server specialists, graphic designers, CSS experts, etc.

This will certainly require web developers to spend some time in explaining what they do, what their specialty is (e.g. “What does an Information Architect or an Interface Designer do, and more importantly, what does he NOT do?”).

Adaptive Path’s article shows that it will take time until the general public (and most important, the clients) understands what web design / web development is all about.

But we’re getting there…