Findability Rears Its Head

A month or so ago I spent a few hours helping a local non-profit  develop some prototypes in preparation for the redesign of its website.  I thought this would be a good chance to expand my embryonic knowledge of information architecture, see how IA decisions are made within an organization, and help out some nice peeps at the same time.  I ended up being pretty frustrated with my research and didn’t have a lot of solid advice to offer the folks I was working with.

Fast forward to today.  I’m at the copier, snatching somebody else’s copies by mistake, when I notice that I am holding a comprehensive bibliography of web design resources.  Turns out, two of the librarians at work are planning a redesign of our portal page and found this great resource from the University of Minnesota Duluth.  Why could I not have stumbled across it six weeks ago?  Because (1) knowing little about IA, my initial search strategy was flawed; and (2) the serendipity gods smiled on me six weeks too late.

One of the items on the bibliography is Peter Morville’s blog called findability.org.  For anyone interested in taxonomy, controlled vobabularies, folksonomies or IA, I would highly recommend checking it out.  In fact, I’m off to read one of Morville’s posts about folksonomy innovations at Buzzillions right now. I’ll let you know what I think.