Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond

The fourth edition of the polar bear book, rewritten so the ideas apply to any information environment rather than only to websites. The core sections cover the anatomy of an information architecture, then the organisation, labelling, navigation and search systems that make one up, then the research, strategy and design process that produces them. Later chapters deal with thesauri and controlled vocabularies, with metadata, and with the governance needed to stop a structure decaying after launch. Case studies show the method applied at different scales, and there is new material on cross channel and device independent design. This is the standard reference for how people find things and why they fail to.