The document is a presentation by Peter Morville on information architecture (IA). It discusses how IA is evolving from organizing websites and intranets to also include shaping digital experiences and finding information from anywhere at any time. It emphasizes that information that is hard to find will remain hardly found.
1. morville@semanticstudios.com
Information Architecture 3.0
Information that’s hard to find will
remain information that’s hardly found.
Peter Morville, IA Summit Redux in Second Life 1
2. morville@semanticstudios.com
in•for•ma•tion ar•chi•tec•ture n.
• The structural design of shared
information environments.
• The combination of organization,
labeling, search, and navigation
systems in web sites and intranets.
• The art and science of shaping
information products and experiences
to support usability and findability.
• An emerging discipline and
community of practice focused on
bringing principles of design and
architecture to the digital landscape.
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7. morville@semanticstudios.com
Findability Facts
• For every search on cancer.gov,
there are over 100 cancer-related
searches on public search engines.
• Of these searches, 70% are on
specific types of cancer. 7
9. morville@semanticstudios.com
find·a·bil·i·ty n
The quality of being locatable or
navigable.
The degree to which an object is
easy to discover or locate.
The degree to which a system or
environment supports wayfinding,
navigation, and retrieval.
am·bi·ent adj
Surrounding; encircling;
enveloping (e.g., ambient air)
the ability to find anyone or anything
from anywhere at anytime 9
10. morville@semanticstudios.com
Chained Libraries
In the Middle Ages there
were few books, and those
that did exist were usually
kept locked in chests or
cupboards, or chained to
desks in a church.
“This book belongs to the monastery of St. Mary
of Robert's Bridge, whosoever shall steal it, sell
it or in any way alienate it from this house, or
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mutilate it, let him be forever cursed.”
16. morville@semanticstudios.com
Automatic Locates
Schedule an quot;automatic locatequot; to see where your child is at a given time.
Breadcrumbing Feature
This feature is great for identifying a specific route or series of destinations.
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19. morville@semanticstudios.com
Cisco Wireless
Location Appliance
“A quick glance at the
screen shows exactly where
the tagged wheelchairs are
located...Patients wait no
more than a few minutes
for a wheelchair, and we
save $28,000 a month
by eliminating searches.”
21. morville@semanticstudios.com
Reciprocal Transparency
“In the information age to come,
cameras and databases will sprout
like poppies – or weeds – whether
we like it or not. Over the long haul,
we as a people must decide the
following questions:
Can we stand living exposed to
scrutiny, our secrets laid open, if in
return we get flashlights of our own
that we can shine on anyone who
might do us harm – even the
arrogant and strong?
Or is an illusion of privacy worth any
price, even the cost of surrendering
our own right to pierce the schemes
of the powerful?”
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33. morville@semanticstudios.com
Getting Real foregoes functional specs and other
transitory documentation in favor of building real
screens. A functional spec is make-believe, an illusion
of agreement, while an actual web page is reality.
We'll never hire someone who's an information
architect. It's just too overly specific. With a small
team like ours, it doesn't make sense to hire people
with such a narrowly defined skill-set.
37signals
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34. morville@semanticstudios.com
This is something the 'well-designed
metadata' crowd has never understood
-- just because it's better to have well-
designed metadata along one axis
does not mean that it is better along all
axes, and the axis of cost, in particular,
will trump any other advantage as it grows larger.
And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is
crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata
in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of
users suddenly deciding to become disciples of
information architecture.
Clay Shirky 34
35. Yes, indeed. IA as it has lived morville@semanticstudios.com
will soon die. Not because it
wasn’t valuable, not because
IA’s didn’t do great work, but
because the Web is moving on.
The problem is that IA models
information, not relationships.
Many of the artifacts that IAs
create: site maps, navigation
systems, taxonomies, are
information models built on the
assumption that a single way to
organize things can suit all
users…one IA to rule them all,
so to speak.
Joshua Porter 35
36. morville@semanticstudios.com
If
you
There’s a whole
fear
lot of IA in Web 2.0.
change,
leave
“Findability leads
it
to fundability.”
here.
Change is good for IA.
There’s a whole
lot of IA outside Web 2.0
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41. morville@semanticstudios.com
Faceted Classification
Scoped Search
Sort by Rating, Price, Sales
Search Inside the Book
See More by Manufacturer
Discover Similar Items
Customers Also Bought
View Accessories
Editorial & Customer Reviews
Rate the Reviews
Top Reviewers
User-Created Guides
Favorite People List
Purchase Circles
Recently Viewed
The Page You Made
Previously Placed Orders
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See Also: Ubiquitous Findable Objects by Peter Morville
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/11/17/ubiquitous-findable-objects.html
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IA Therefore I Am
Peter Morville
morville@semanticstudios.com
Semantic Studios
http://semanticstudios.com/
Ambient Findability
http://findability.org/
IA Institute
http://iainstitute.org/
This Presentation
http://semanticstudios.com/ia3sl.pdf 50