Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond

Description of the article « Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond »

Anything an organization publishes, from a website to an app, only helps people if they can find it and make sense of it. Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond, the fourth edition of the book known as the polar bear book, treats information architecture as a practice for structuring that information so it stays coherent across the web, phones and other channels.

What you'll learn

The book opens with the problems information architecture solves and how to define it. It then takes apart the systems most information environments share: organization, labeling, navigation and search, along with the less visible layer of thesauri, controlled vocabularies and metadata. The last part moves from concepts to practice, covering the research, strategy, design and documentation that take an architecture from first questions to implementation.

Who it's for

It's written for anyone who decides how an interactive product is organized: UX designers, product managers, content strategists and developers. You don't need the job title of information architect to use it, and the early chapters give newcomers a grounding before the detail starts.

This edition dates from 2015, so some examples and tools feel older, and at nearly 500 pages it works better as a reference to return to than a quick read.