Information Architecture News & Articles

The team was happy to be together. Forty-six folks from eight different offices, traveling from all over the world, had come together for their annual meeting.

They were excited to be there. It was good to see faces of people who were often just an email address or voice on a conference call. It was nice to reflect on all the great things they'd accomplished.

Over the past 3 years, the team worked diligently on server reliability, eliminating dead links, and consistent navigation and branding across all 200 of the sub-sites. They'd installed a new enterprise-wide content management system, a better process for editorial work, and new application tools to help their franchise owners sell more high-margin products. By all measures, the web site had become a critical element in their multi-national business.

Yet, there was still an unsettled tone amongst the group. Given all the progress they'd made, they felt they still had a long way to go. They weren't sure what the next step was.

Jakob Nielsen says that "websites are definitely easier to use now than they used to be." That's because in his recent survey of 24 websites, which analyzed users' task outcomes and compared it to data collected from the same sites five years earlier, results showed that web usability has improved.

As designers, we rely on communicating detail to our teammates and collaborators. Sometimes a picture is a thousand words, but often, we need more words and explanation to make those diagrams effective.

We had a chance to sit down with Dan Brown, the co-Founder and co-Principal of EightShapes, to talk about his experience with creating successful annotations. Here's what he shared.

I have been working with Visio for many years now for making mock-ups and wireframes, but a few weeks ago I bought Balsamiq Mockups. It’s a tool that lets you make simple mock-ups that look simple. Here's a quick review.

It's been more than six months since we published our popular list of the Top 5 Wireframing Tools. Since then various readers have been eager to share with us their experience with the tools they have used for wireframing, information architecture and interaction design. We hear you!

Therefore, herewith we are are expanding the list, adding details and tying-in updates on the latest releases.

Tis the season for breaking resolutions, so it strikes us as fitting that it's also that time for the Information Architecture Institute's (IAI) annual salary survey results.

If you recall, last year's survey revealed a minimal decrease in the pay gap between men and women and a slight increase of female info architects in the biz.

The annual survey collects data about salary as well as age, gender, educational level, job title, annual increase, hours worked, job tasks, vacation, holidays and benefits, attrition, size of company, and geographic area.

Many of us may grumble from time to time about our jobs and may even boast about how we deserve to be paid so much more than we are. But when was the last time we really investigated how much we, the designer, developer or information architect are worth?

The need for wireframes is ever present in our dear business of web design. Being able to effectively diagram a site’s information and navigation proves helpful in the beginning concept stages, especially when presenting to people outside the domain of UI, IA and design. But selecting the wireframe tool that’s right for you can be challenging.

The first step in creating a genuinely useful intranet is to ban the intranet team from using the word “information”.

On a whole, the art of Web design has begun to be better understood as a necessity in the world of ecommerce and content management. After all, content is only as good as its design and vice versa. Once viewed as something that made your site look pretty but had little significance to the bottom line, web design is now considered an integral part of a site’s success.

It’s that time of year again. No, not the holidays; end-of-the-year salary surveys, of course. Like clock work, the Information Architecture Institute released their 2007 IAI Salary Survey and it looks like the gender pay gap is narrowing, if ever so slightly.

This is the first year the IAI chose to include a question on gender, which they say “provided the most interesting result coming out of our salary survey to date.”

Calling all information architects!

Being the planners and navigators that you are, I’m sure you already have April 12 -14 penciled into your Moleskine planners.

Those are the dates for the 2008 Information Architecture Summit in Miami, Florida. This year’s summit is dedicated to “Experiencing Information,” addressing in particular the experiences in which a user is doing something.

The Information Architecture Institute, an organization that works to improve information architecture across networks of organizations through education, research and advocacy, has an amazing idea!

Well, they have lots of great ideas, but in a transparent attempt to be clever, I’m referring to their upcoming IDEA Conference 2007.

Functionality and usefulness are far more important to the success of your website than how nice and elegant it looks.

In the design of physical products, the use of words is often seen as a sign of a flaw of the design. On the contrary, in web design, without words, there is no design.