“What I need are highly condensed overviews,” I thought, “like those comic books that convert great literary works into a few illustrated pages. They condense Moby Dick down to 12 pages and provide a version of Great Expectations that can be read in 15 minutes.”
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Card-Based Classification Evaluation
We hear and talk a lot about card sorting in various forms, and how it can be used as input on a hierarchy or classification system (or a taxonomy, if you like more technical words). We hear that we should test our hierarchies, but we don’t talk about how.
Continue readingCreating a Controlled Vocabulary
You have probably heard IAs discussing the benefits of their latest taxonomy project and how you should be implementing one. But how, you might wonder, can you get started? In the next installment about Controlled Vocabularies, our authors go into detail about one methodology.
Continue readingWriting Smart Annotations
Now that you’ve figured out the navigation, placed the content, and figured out page flows, it’s time to explain just what exactly that collection of “Lorum ipsum” greeking, HTML widgets, and X-ed out boxes are, how they work, and how they meet the site goals.
Continue readingProgramming for Information Architects
Both programming and IA are oriented towards abstraction. They both want to find patterns and rules that describe and predict. They both are concerned with handling structured content and metadata. But more often than not, IAs don’t know what’s going on with code. In this article, Andrew Otwell introduces IAs to the basic building blocks of programming.
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