this is totally gonna work…

Peter Morville & Louis Rosenfeld

504 pages
2006 O’Reilly Press

I’ve recently become fascinated with some of the “softer” edges of my profession such as user interaction, visual design and information architecture. These are difficult topics to write about because their abstract nature makes it hard to provide useful, tangible information while not treating the subject as a simple set of boiled-down “how-tos”. A couple of weeks ago I picked up this book as a way to delve into more formalized information structure and theory. By and large this book did a good job of rounding-out those areas of knowledge for me.

This book is in its third edition and I couldn’t help feeling at times like the authors were trying to justify that. While the table of contents lists six “parts”, I really felt the book was broken up into three major sections: the first is essentially a multi-chapter treatise on what IA is and why it’s important. The second section is some of the nuts-and-bolts theory, and the third section is about implementing IA with a couple of case studies. Of the three sections, the middle one was the most useful to me and, in my opinion, carried the others.

I understand why the authors would feel compelled to write the first section—the intended audience is no doubt large and would certainly contain a number of skeptics. However I found the voice of these chapters to be a little too earnest and tried to hard to justify the profession. At times I wondered if the authors really had confidence in what they were talking about because they spent so much time justifying their statements. I was a bit surprised at the defensive posture of the opening chapters and can’t help but wonder if other readers won’t start wondering what kind of uphill battle am I in for?

Part two is where I felt like I learned the most—this is the real selling value of the book. Most of the information in this part of the book wasn’t new to me, but this section clearly articulated concepts I had previously only understood in abstract, internal terms. Concepts such as the inverse relation between relevance and recall, labeling, taxonomies, different relation types and thesauri were helpful to learn about in concrete terms. If nothing else, I feel like I’ve become more conversant in these topics.

Part three, by comparison, felt like a bit of a letdown. It was dedicated mostly to strategy and tactics around implementing IA within an organization. I won’t argue that the information covered isn’t worthwhile, but it didn’t seem particularly exclusive to information architecture and therefore, in my opinion, was given far too much ink relative to the content-packed middle section. I also felt like the two case studies given at the end of the book lacked the clarity and energy of the middle section of the book. These did not feel like a particularly satisfying, put-it-all-together summary of the concepts covered.

In all, the core information specific to IA was very enlightening and I can imagine that I’ll be thumbing through those chapters again. Also, I’m not sure I’ve read a professional trade paperback with quite so many cross-references (hint: that’s a good thing). Kudos to the authors for giving the reader lots of pointers to related materials. I just wish I could buy a version that only contained the 120 or so pages that I found most useful.

3 out of 5 stars.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Book review, Web stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.