There are many books available in Amazon.com that tackles information architecture, but my personal favorites are Steve Krug's Law of Usability and Jesse James Garrett's Elements of User Experience. They're pretty straightforward and fun to read. Both, of course, start off with "User Needs."

Garrett's Elements are made up of five planes:

1. Strategy - Site Objectives & User Needs


2. Scope - Functional Specifications & Content Requirements


3. Structure - Interaction Design & Information Architecture


4. Skeleton - Interface Design, Navigation Design & Information Design


5. Surface - Visual Design

I believe that the first plane is very important because it lays out the foundation for a highly effective website. Before you can even study your user behavior, you should also be able to set what kind of information you want to glean from the users. This is done by defining your site goals, which would snowball into strategies, ideas and eventually results.

Basically, the Strategy Plane asks two questions:
- What do we want to get out of this site? (Site Objectives)
- What do our users want to get out of it? (User Needs)

Site objectives cover business goals, brand identity and site metrics. User Needs Analysis would involve studies in user segmentation (demographic and psychographic), usability and user research (market research methods, contextual inquiries and task analysis, user testing, card sorting), and team role processing.


Krug's rule, on the other hand, is pretty simple. His basic law: Don't make me think. If you think about it, this really makes sense. While we can't exactly make everything self-evident, we can take the burden off our users if we organized our content.

How do we really use the web? Krug's summary:

1. We don't read pages. We scan them.


2. We don't make optimal choices. We satisfice.


3. We don't figure out how things work. We muddle through.

There are so many things about Krug's book that I'd like to delve into, specifically about organizing content and navigation, as well as hitting goals by getting messages across, but that'd take an entire session to cover.

In any case, O'Reilly's Polar Bear book seems to contain nearly the same line of thought. James Kalbach's article on the subject, on the other hand, covers additional scenarios. There's just that bit off difference when it comes to users who are really hell-bent on looking for information despite awful navigability (Kalbach's target) and your regular joe (Krug's).

The History of Information Architecture (by Alan Gilchrist and Barry Mahon) reading given for STORAG seems quite interesting as well. I think I've mentioned before that I only realized I was an IA last year and it was only because I was doing the exact same things written on IA books.

Related Blog Entries:
MIMNGT - The Tangible Intangibles

From the recent publishings that I've read, I've come to believe that IA is a fairly new field. So you can imagine how surprised I was to find out that, according to the article, Information Architecture was coined by Richard Saul Wurman in 1975. I wasn't even born yet! Of course, what he defined as IA then is not exactly what IAs are now. It was fun reading history like that. It puts a perspective on familiar things.

For me the issue is not so much as the influx of information that's coming in, but more of the way you compartmentalize and use them. In my line of work, it's pretty much easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of information I need to process. Amidst projects and my masteral class, I have to rotate the programming languages I teach daily. (I actually learned my lesson here: Do not teach multiple NEW subjects in one term.) It has even come to a point that I tell my students to remind me if I'm going on and on about a different programming language than the one scheduled for them. So now I actually take extra time for preparations than I normally used to. (Translation: activiting and retrieving in my head only the knowledge that I need and concentrating on that for the day.)

Applying this scenario to online projects...I remember a certain period of time when none of my web statistics reporting tools seem to work for me anymore. I had used a particularly good one back in 2001, Web Trends Live, but I had to take that off after they started charging for it. Before that, the greatest thing since Swiss Cheese was Xtreme Tracking, since it recorded pageviews, unique visitors, geographical locations, browsers, and referrers. That was a far cry from the website counters of the 90s, which only indicated the number of hits and couldn't tell the difference between a reload and a real hit. Then I came upon Web Trends Live and I was completely floored by the reports this tracker could give! It told you the regular stuff found in Xtreme, plus how many visitors came in, came out, repeatedly visited, which days/weeks/months are busiest, and which parts of your site are most in demand. Sure, there wasn't much you could glean from the figures, but if you know how to play your cards right, you'd be able to find more about your visitors' behavior or surfing patterns. With this, you could tailor your network's capabilities in such a way that would accomodate both your site objectives and your visitors' needs.

With Web Trends Live gone, I had searched for anything that came close, but the search was in vain. Because people pass through thousands of information everyday, it's not any wonder how online behavioral patterns will change as time progresses. In my case, I needed new information that wasn't available to me before. Thank goodness, Google mastered the art of managing information and knowing what details people need because they came up with -- among other very useful tools -- Google Analytics. While it can't process the capacity of information that Web Trends Live can, it came up with even more useful stats that I have never seen on the former. It has two major categories (and each category has a list of subcategories): Marketing Optimization and Content Optimization. The most important thing here is not the fact that it has tons of data to provide, but how they seemlessly integrated this data with the rest of Google's services while retaining its usability value.

This is the kind of information overload that I'd gladly welcome, because you only draw upon the info when you need it. I'm sure not everyone uses the same kind of statistical tools the way I do. But I'm sure Google Analytics is definitely organized enough to provide users with their basic needs without drowning them with stuff they don't.