Linknote — — 192 words

Information architecture

A plea for the lost practice of information architecture — Vicky Teinaki

A pile of well-known information architecture books: How to Make Sense of Any Mess, Information Architecture (x 2), Design By Definition, Information Ecology, with a toy dinosaur

I was sad to learn earlier that Vicky Teinaki has died. Vicky had been a designer for a few different government departments and public sector organisations.

I didn’t know her well. But I have read her blog posts for years, and I was delighted to encounter her in meetings about structured information since I joined the civil service a few months ago. I was struck by how she demonstrated both fresh thinking and wisdom.

Just a few days after I started in my information architecture role at the Scottish Government, she published this excellent article about the discipline.

It serves multiple purposes expertly. It is a comprehensive but concise history of information architecture, tracking its major milestones over the past 20 years.

Vicky argued that information architecture had become diminished when it got absorbed into user experience, and then got forgotten entirely when it suddenly became easy to churn out high-fidelity visual prototypes without tackling underlying structural decisions.

The post is also an incredible bibliography of key information architecture resources. I have turned to this blog post numerous times over the past six months, and I know I will continue to do so.

Linknote — — 62 words

Information architecture — User experience — User research

Work:

First click tests — building up the elements of user experience for Learn Foundations — Website and Communications Blog

First click heatmap

> We had developed an information architecture and tree tests as part of our programme of user research for Learn Foundations. The next step was to use first click tests to pit the new template against existing courses.

The latest post in my series for the Website and Communications blog about our user research work around the University of Edinburgh’s virtual learning environment.

Linknote — — 66 words

Information architecture — User experience

Work:

Card sorting has informed a new information architecture for Learn courses — Website and Communications Blog

Results of the card sorting study

How we used card sorting to help us devise a consistent information architecture for Learn VLE courses at the University of Edinburgh.

775 students participated in the study — and no two students submitted the same card sort. This highlights the great challenge faced by the Learn Foundations project in attempting to create a more standardised template that meets the wide variety of needs across the University.

Linknote — — 51 words

Information architecture — Media — Technology — User experience

Surveying search across British online newspapers — Martin Belam — currybetdotnet

Currybet has a series of posts reviewing the search features of newspapers’ websites. This post summarises the results. He rates The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Mail most highly. I would agree with the latter two, although the last time I tried to search TimesOnline it was a complete nightmare.

Article — — 305 words

Information architecture — Technology

There is an interesting post at canspice.org about tagging (not to be confused with the tagging that you get with memes). Tagging already has a couple of well-known problems. One of the major ones is the confusion over whether you should use singular or plural. Flickr cleverly bypassed the other problem — words such as […]