Information Architecture, 4th Edition

Preface

The town may be changed, But the well cannot be changed. It neither decreases nor increases. They come and go and draw from the well.

I Ching

The first edition of this book—then titled Information Architecture for the World Wide Web—was published in 1998. This was a full 9 years before the iPhone changed the way we share pictures of our kids with our family and friends, 6 years before Facebook reintroduced long-forgotten high school friends into our lives, 6 years before the term “folksonomy” was coined (and 10 years before its currency devalued), and 12 or so years before many of us first heard the term “Internet of Things.” There was no “Web 2.0” back then; we were still trying to figure out Web 1.0!

Those of us who have been structuring and designing websites since the “early days” have experienced astonishing changes in our industry. We’ve seen the underlying technologies of the medium—including HTML itself, along with JavaScript—evolve from what were at first primitive content-delivery mechanisms into full-featured interactive application stacks. We’ve seen device form factors evolve from indirect experiences where we controlled an abstract pointer with a mouse, to the direct, intimate experience of manipulating information by touching elegant slabs of glass with our fingers. We’ve seen Internet access go from being a slow, discreet activity that we engaged in ...