Information Architecture (IA) and Web Design
ICS 616 - CRN 87289 (Spring 2012)
Course Description
ICS 616 - CRN 87289 (Spring 2012)
Information Architecture is a field dealing with the human centered design of web sites.
As architects and engineers prepare blueprints of the building they construct, information
architects build a sketch of a website based on users requirements and combine functionality,
aesthetic, findability and usability elements.
Although there is no consensus about the scope and boundary of the information architect's job, it is considered that the information architect "clarifies the mission and vision of the site, balancing the needs of its sponsoring organization and the needs of its audience; determines what content and functionality the site will contain; specifies how users will find information in the site by defining its organization, navigation, labeling, and searching systems; maps out how the site will accommodate change and growth over time". (Rosenfeld Loius & Peter Morville, IA for the WWW, O'Reilly, 1st edition 1998, chapter 2).
Intended Audience
Although there is no consensus about the scope and boundary of the information architect's job, it is considered that the information architect "clarifies the mission and vision of the site, balancing the needs of its sponsoring organization and the needs of its audience; determines what content and functionality the site will contain; specifies how users will find information in the site by defining its organization, navigation, labeling, and searching systems; maps out how the site will accommodate change and growth over time". (Rosenfeld Loius & Peter Morville, IA for the WWW, O'Reilly, 1st edition 1998, chapter 2).
Information architects work in interdisciplinary groups whose members have a background in areas
such as information organization, database systems, web development, interactive interfaces, design of searching
and browsing systems, indexing and abstracting, development of taxonomies and classification
schemes, system analysis, marketing, editorial and technical writing, and graphical design.
The different skills of these team members are combined for the production of effective websites.
Course Structure
In this course you will learn about the main job of an information architect, the contributions
and roles of different disciplines and professionals in web site development, the skills and
techniques they have to develop in order to create organizational and navigational structures
that help people to find pertinent information in a timely manner.
Textbooks:
- Rosenfeld, Louis and Peter Morville. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. 3rd edition. Cambridge, MA: O’Reilly, c2006.
- Krug, Steve (2006). Don't make me think. A common approach to web usability. Berkeley, 2nd. edition. California: New Riders.
Both books are available as e-books from the Safari serie, through the electronic resource services of UH libraries http://library.manoa.hawaii.edu/
- system analysis and planning (e.g. understanding mission, goal, audience, tasks and content of the website);
- conceptual design tasks and tools (e.g. building high-level architecture blue-prints, wireframes, mockups and prototypes);
- organization schemes, structures and systems (e.g. topical, task oriented, hierarchical, relational, databases; tagging, folksonomies, social classification);
- navigation systems and tools (e.g. global or local systems; bar, frames, menus, tables of contents, taxonomies, maps, thesauri; personalization, visualization, tags clouds, collaborative filtering and social navigation);
- labeling systems (e.g. headings, controlled vocabulary);
- searching and indexing techniques and tools (e.g. web metadata, ontologies, thesauri, search engines);
- web standards and the work of the W3C consortium (XHTML, XML, CSS, ontologies and web accessability);
- designing the search interface (e.g. visual meaning, explanations, interaction);
- usability tests, tools and techniques (e.g. prototyping, experiments, usage tracking);
- tools for Information Architects (selected according to the interest and skills of students registered in the class, e.g. web publishing, modeling, digital assets / content management, search engines, classification engines).
Main component of the course is a project (e.g. building a prototype of the website required by an
institution, working on personal home pages, conducting research on a topic related to IA).
Note that the course will not focus on web programming but on website planning, conceptual design, management, prototyping and evaluation.
Prerequisites
Note that the course will not focus on web programming but on website planning, conceptual design, management, prototyping and evaluation.
Prerequisites: none. LIS students might find useful to take this course after or concurrently with
LIS 670 Introduction to Information Science & Technology and LIS 605 Introduction to Cataloguing & Classification.
Basic knowledge of database system helps.
For more information, go to http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lquiroga/courses/ics616/ics616.htm
For more information, go to http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lquiroga/courses/ics616/ics616.htm