Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

Preface

Those things that hurt, instruct.

—Ben Franklin

In late 1999, when this book had been out for a year and a half, our editor told us to get cracking on the second edition. The folks at O’Reilly are fully aware that it takes eighteen months for authors to forget the pain of writing, not to mention our vows to never do it again. Suitably forgetful, we agreed. Now it’s summer of 2002, and we’re just finishing. Why did it take us two and a half years?

Well, a lot happened in that intervening period. Remember, we were all running on Internet time. Investors were throwing money at all things Web. Companies were building web sites at a frenetic pace. “Information architect” suddenly became a hot job title, and demand for information architecture expertise soared.

New people brought fresh perspectives to the field. Information architects began to connect with one another. A host of web sites, discussion lists, professional conferences, local cocktail hours, and other trappings of a healthy new community emerged.

In those heady times, we were actively growing our information architecture consulting company, Argus Associates. When we wrote the first edition, there were five Argonauts, all librarians by training. By late 2000, Argus was a professionally managed firm with a staff of forty. We had built an interdisciplinary information architecture practice, hiring specialists with expertise in usability engineering, thesaurus design, ethnography, information retrieval, and technology evaluation. ...