Information Architecture for the World Wide Web 3rd Edition Review

O’Reilly’s book, “Information Architecture for the World Wide web” written by Peter Morville & Louis Rosenfeld, is aimed at anyone involved in the design of large-scale websites.  The third edition, published in December 2006 introduces tagging and advanced findability concepts.

O’Reilly’s books have a great reputation in the industry.  They are in the text book style, although you’d find few university courses where these books would be mandatory study material. 

I grabbed my copy on e-Bay about a month ago, hoping to learn some new tricks.

The book gives some great insight into the fundamentals of information architecture, with plenty of great visual models and illustrations.  However experienced IA professionals may feel short changed, as the book does linger in the basics. 

The latest version tries to introduce Web 2.0 concepts and claims to have been thoroughly updated, however there are sections of the book in which outdated concepts still appear.  It is hard to tell whether their inclusion was or wasn’t intentional.  There is certainly a bit of nostalgia between the pages.  The new material, when it makes an appearance, does seem to have been written with sufficient insight to be of some value. 

While other books promise to increase website traffic or drive new sales, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web  focuses a lot on what goes on behind the scenes, areas where there are really no measures of success.  Instead, much time is spent justifying the discipline and establishing the scientific and artistic aspects, which are still areas of ongoing research and debate in the Internet community.

Nevertheless, I didn’t feel totally ripped off.  It is never a bad idea to return to the grass roots to see how the industry has evolved and how these new concepts fit into the broader scheme of things.

While it is certainly no “IA for Dummies”, it does assume some knowledge of the web.  I would still recommend it to people like our customers.  It could be useful to people who have a website but don’t know all of the concepts behind what makes a good website navigation and content structure.  For those who may want to read more up about it themselves, this book would be a great resource.  While it is really for the consultants and intellectuals, public relations and IT managers may also find this book useful, much moreso than marketing and sales people.