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SIGIA-L Mail Archives: SIGIA-L: Required reading -- Summary

SIGIA-L: Required reading -- Summary

From: Blake Carver (btcarver_at_lisnews.com)
Date: Wed Oct 18 2000 - 18:38:09 EDT

Thanks to everyone for the amazing responses. I was totally swamped with
ideas for required reading for a class on IA. Here's the summary of what I
received. if you have any other ideas, please let me know so I can add them
to my list.

I'd also like to extend the question a little and also ask where ya'll get
your IA news, where you keep up to date on all the latest Happenings in the
world of IA stuff.
-Blake

Several books got recommended more than once, including:
Jakob Neilson's Designing Web Usability
 Tufte's Envisioning Information
 The Design of Everyday Things

WEB SITES:

webword.com, asktog.com, usableweb.com and useit.com.

"Technical Communication as Symbolic-Analytic Work"
http://tempest.english.purdue.edu/tc.symbol/tc.symbol.start.html

"Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional Communication"
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.1/4b.html

http://www.eleganthack.com/reading/index.html

http://www.ala.org/acrl/resoct00.htmlAssn. of College & Research Libraries

http://www.jjg.net/ia/ Information Architecture Resources

http://www.webreview.com

http://www.argus-acia.com has to be on the list

http://www.argus-inc.com/features/webarch.shtml

http://xplane.com/xblog

http://www.xplane.com/xblog/informationarchitecture.shtml

<http://www.cast.org/bobby> [Center for Applies Special Technology]

<http://www.w3.org/WAI/> [Web Accessibility Initiative]

http://www.useit.com

Shiple, John (2000) Information architecture tutorial at:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/design/site_buidling/tutorials/tutorial1
.html

BOOKS:

Information Anxiety, by Richard Saul Wurman. It's out of print, but his
office rumors that he's working on a new release. It's what got me into
the field before it was a field.

"Mapping Hypertext" is definitely an oldie-but-goodie. It's out of print but
definitely worth tracking down. The book itself was an attempt to be
hypertext itself -- back in the early 80s.

Also worth checking out is "Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for
"Readers" by Karen A. Schriver (ISBN: 0471306363).

Ben Shneiderman's "Designing the User Interface" is one of the best books
out there. This is one of the few books that turn interface design into a
science. Norman's books, for example, are great but they all take the common
sense approach--which is difficult if not impossible to teach. Tufte's are
great too, but they can be arcane and difficult to apply to your everyday
work.

Mapping Hypertext: Analysis, Linkage, and Display of Knowledge for
the Next Generation of On-Line Text and Graphics, Robert E. Horn

Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, Robert
E. Horn

Jakob Neilson's Designing Web Usability is excellent. As well as Edward
Tufte's Envisioning Information is very good.

And while this is a little off IA, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics
provides great information on basic design principles.

Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. Currency, 1988.

Reich, Robert B. The Work of Nations. Vintage, 1992.

Jacobson, Robert. Information Design. MIT Press. 2000.

Rosenfeld and Morville. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.
O'Reilly. 1998.

One that I've enjoyed immensely is Alan Cooper's latest, "The Inmates are
Running the Asylum", which makes some very common sense points about the
design process and why many designs don't work. It was a real "doh!"
experience for me.

Don Norman's "The Psychology of Everyday Things" (also published as "the
Design of Everyday Things").

Any good basic html book (helpful for reference purposes). I like HTML 4 for
the world wide web, by Elizabeth Castro

Definitely the Tufte books - especially "Envisioning Information"

Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics"

Alan Cooper "About Face"

Richard Saul Wurman's "Information Design" or "Information Anxiety"

Donald Norman "The Design of Everyday Things"

Clement Mok's "Designing Business" (new edition to be released soon)

Jacob Neilson's "Designing Web Usability"

Jennifer Fleming's "Web Navigation, Designing the User Experience"

Fleming, Jennifer (1998) Web navigation: designing the user experience

Head, Alison (1999) Design wise; a guide for evaluating the interface design
of information resources

Neilsen, Jakob (2000) Designing web usability: the practice of simplicity

Spool, Jared (1999) Web site usability: a designer's guide

Wells, Amy Tracy; Calcari, Susan; Koplow, Travis (1999) The amazing Internet
challenge: how leading projects use library skills to organize the Web.

 I also like the Tufte series, "The Visual Display of Quantative
INformation," "Envisioning Information," and "Visual Explanations

Practical Information Architecture: a hands-on approach to structuring
successful websites.

A class touching on IA work isn't complete without something from Edward
Tufte- either Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quanititative
Information (a cool one), or Visual Explanantions.

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