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Information Architecture Tutorial
Overview
by John Shiple |
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John Shiple is the leader of Squishy Designs, an Internet consulting company in Venice, California, specializing in information architecture, collaborative system strategies, and advanced user interfaces for Internet-based content. He
also helped found Bigstep.com.
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Information architecture is the science of figuring out what
you want your site to do and then constructing a blueprint
before you dive in and put the thing together. It's more
important than you might think, and John Shiple, aka
Squishy, tells you why.
Squishy first looks at how to define your site's goals, shedding light on the all-important art of collecting clients' or co-workers' opinions and assembling them in a coherent, weighted order of importance. He also shares his scheme for documenting everything so that all parties can keep up.
The next step is figuring out who the heck your audiences are going to be. Once that's out of the way, you can start organizing your future site into pages of content and functions that the site will need to have.
Next, Squishy gets into creativityland, where you start to build the beast: form a skeleton, pick your metaphors, map out your navigation. Then it's time to break out the graphics program, come up with layout grids, design sketches, and mock-ups, and get ready to build!
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