Resources

Course Specific Resources

Research:

• Creative Brief Questions & sample Creative Brief  by Cotler & Goto
• Using the Creative Brief by Sanger & Eby Design
• Request for Proposal   by Jeffrey Zeldman
• How To Write A Creative Brief by Steven Lorin McNamara

Site Inventory:

• Bringing Real World Context into the Focus Group Settingby Peter Coughlan and Aaron Sklar
• The Experience Evolution: Developments In Design Practiceby Jane Fulton Suri
• Information Architecture Institute's Tools project
• Sample Content Inventory by Sarah Rice
• Information Architecture Deliverables and Diagrams:  Examples of Wireframes, Site Maps, Story boards, Use Cases, Paper Prototypes by Glen Doss
• Doing a Content Inventory (Or, A Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey Through Your Web Site) by Jeffrey Veen
• Automating Diagrams with Visio by Michael Angeles
• Let Visio Map Your Web Site for You by Laurie Rowell
• Visio 2007 Essential Training with: David Rivers
• Visio Site Diagram stencils

Personas

• Templates & Examples from usability.gov
• Ad-Hoc Personas & Empathetic Focus by Don Norman
• Adaptive Path: Tools
• 3 persona examples by razorfish (2001)
• Personas Creation/Usage Toolkit (18 page description) by George Olsen
• Articles on Personas on Alan Cooper’s site
• USA Today demographics and Claritas demographics
• Example: brief ad hoc personas by Serena Fenton

Photo resources:

• Wikipedia:Public domain image resources
• Flickr’s Creative Commons Pool
• Open Photo

Organization and Navigation:

• Mind your phraseology! by Christina Wodtke
• Quality Criteria for Indexes, Website Navigation and Search by Fred Brown
• A-Z Website Indexes Explained by Heather Hedden
• Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines - Chapter 7: Navigation

Page layout and design

• Grid Layout Template by Christian Watson.
• Lorem Ipsum generator
• Grid Layout Resource Collection
• Designing Patterns by Jennifer Tidwell - Chapter 4: Organizing the Page: Layout of Page Elements
• Adobe Web Tech Curriculum - Site Design
• Visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction designby Jesse James Garrett
• Web Design patterns – Navigation by Martijn van Welie
• Yahoo Design Pattern Library and Yahoo! User Interface Library
• grid layout below by Bob Parsons
• 

Grid Examples:

• UX Magazine
• Williams Sonoma
• Harley Davidson
• New York Magazine
• AIGA LA

Labels, taxonomies and Web 2.0

Digital Ethnography by Mike Wesch of Kansas State University

• Introduction to Dewey Decimal Classification system from OCLC
• BISAC Subject Headings; 2006 Edition - September 2006
• Everything is Miscellaneous blogby David Weinberger
• What are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology, and a meta-model? by Woody Pidcock
• Building a Synonymous Search Indexby Peter Morville
• Creating a Controlled Vocabularyby Leise, Fast and  Steckel
• Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabulari Z39.50 Standard Document (pdf) from NISO
• A Simplified Model for Facet Analysisby Dr. Louise Spiteri
• Faceted Classification of Information
• Folksonomies Tidying up Tags? by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin

These are all listed on the Information Architecture Institute's Tools project page, along with many, many other tools and resources. Below, I have copied the links to the tools which will be useful for our course and this project.

Deliverables

Christina Wodtke produced this set of deliverables--personas, conceptual model, site map and wireframes (3.3 MB)

Visio Tutorial and Templates

• Visio - the interaction designer's nail gun (3rd edition) by Hnerik Olsen
  Note: paper size is A4, (Euorpean size); change to letter before proceeding!)

Wireframe Templates

Templates used in creating wireframes are available for your use.

• LombardiWireframe.vst (177 kb, for Visio) 
• LombardiWireframe.vdx (754 kb, for importing into Omnigraffle) 
  

Wireframe Stencils (These can be imported and used with your own drawings)

• GarrettDimon_IA_Stencil_2003.vss (Visio 2003, 276 kb)
• GarrettDimon_IA_Stencil_2002.vss (Visio 2002, 252 kb)

Page Description Diagram (PDD)

• Article on creating PDDs by Dan Brown
• Example PDD

Scent of Information; Information Foraging

• Web Application Solutions: A Designer’s Guideby Luke Wroblewski
• Welcome to the New, Agile FastCompany.comby Ed Sussman
• Scent, Search, and the Pursuit of User Happinessby Jared Spool
• Designing for Information Foragers: A Behavioral Model for Information Seeking on the World Wide Web by James Kalbach

Patterns

Local Groups

• Triangle Usability Professionals Association
  http://www.triupa.org/
  Student memberships are free!

Associations, Organizations

• ACM/SIGCHI (ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction)
• ASIST-SIG: Information Architecture (American Society for Information Science and Technology;  Special Interest Group:
  Information Architecture)
• Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture
  A non-profit, volunteer group which fosters and promotes Information Architecture
• Human Factors International
• Interaction Design Association
  Offers an incredible Resource library:  http://resources.ixda.org/
• Usability Professionals' Association
• Web Accessibility Initiative

• American Society for Information Science and Technology
  Special Interest Group: Information Architecture
  http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/
• Interaction Design Association (IxDA)
  http://www.ixda.org/en/join_us/ixd_discussion_list/index.shtml

• Krug, Steve (2000). Don't make me think: A common sense approach to web usability.
• Nielsen, Jakob (2000). Designing web usability.
• Norman, Donald (2002)   The Design of Everyday Things
• Tidwell, Jenifer (2005)  Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
• Tufte, Edward R.  Envisioning Information
• Wodtke, Christina (2004). Information architecture: Blueprints for the web
• Wurman, Richard Saul Information Anxiety

A List Apart Magazine (ISSN: 1534-0295)
http://www.alistapart.com/

Boxes and Arrows
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/
Information Architecture articles; regularly updated

Core77 Design Blog
http://www.core77.com/
blog, articles, interviews and podcasts

Elegant Hack Blog:  Christina Wodtke
http://www.eleganthack.com/
Articles, commentary and a blog on IA and Experience Design

Findability
http://findability.org/

IASlash
http://iaslash.org/ 
Particularly noteworthy is:  IA Research Page.

Information Architecture Library
http://aifia.org/library/

Information Design News
http://www.informationdesign.org/

Kottke.org: Jason Kottke’s blog
http://www.kottke.org/

Louis Rosenfeld
http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/
and his blog, which has good information & less self-promotion the earlier years: http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/

Veen.com:  Jeffrey Veen’s blog
http://veen.com/jeff/

Peterme.com; Peter Merholz
http://www.peterme.com/

Semantic Studios
http://semanticstudios.com/
Articles, mostly materials by Peter Morville.

Signal vs. Noise
http://www.37signals.com/svn/
a blog by 37signals about entrepreneurship, design, experience, simplicity, constraints, pop culture, our products, products we like, and more.

usability.gov
http://www.usability.gov/
Well organized collection of usability resources from U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

Usability Body of Knowledge
http://www.usabilitybok.org/
An in-progress reference wiki on usability

Useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design
http://www.useit.com/

Zeldman.com: Jeffrey Zeldman
http://www.zeldman.com