User Experience & Information Architecture Links for Beginners

The problem with Information Architecture and User Experience is, that most people tend to only have a very vague picture of what those two areas mean in terms of what professionals are doing every day in their jobs.

Actually, most people don’t even know that IA & UX even exist. This makes it very hard for young emerging information architects or user experience designers to find out more about those professions. Luckily there are some really great websites out there, where one can find tons of information, written by some of the brightest minds in the industry. I have written down a very short list of websites I visit on a daily basis to give beginners an easy start to find more information about the profession they are interested in. So here we go:

Basics

Lets start with one article you should read if you have never heared IA/UX before: A Complete Beginners Guide to Information Architecture

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How to use sitemaps to plan your design project

Sitemaps are one of the more basic deliverables one can use to organize a design project. In fact, they are so basic, that most of us don’t use them, especially when a project becomes more complex and doesn’t follow the basic tree structure. I still find sitemaps useful though to not only visualize connections between pages ( you will never be able to put all connections onto paper when a site gets more complex though) but it also helps to plan the whole design process.

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Interesting people to follow on twitter

When you join the twitter community for the first time, it’s hard to know who to follow and how things work.

To make a first entry easier, a lot of helpful people out there have compiled lists on who to follow if you are interested in a certain topic. I will try to compile a list of those posts to collect them in one place. Feel free to add additional posts in the comment section.

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Google Redesign – Grids for Google Search Results

Vladimir Carrer, a webdesigner and SEO specialist based in Verona, Italy wrote an interesting post on his blog about why Google should implement a grid-based search result layout. Though he noted that a grid layout should only be implemented as an optional layout, it sparked some discussion. Since I’m a fan of grid based layouts it made me thinking about the various uses of grid layouts in regards of information architecture.

Google Search Results as a Grid Layout

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Why I’ve come to love twitter

I’ve just stumbled over an article on Traffikd about why the author has come to like Twitter. I will use this to write down my own experience with Twitter so far, since I have a slightly different approach.

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A holistic approach – why designers should know about coding

Lukas Mathis over at IgnoreTheCode.net wrote a great article in which he pointed out some really good arguments which stand against the sentiment that webdesigners should know how to write code. His basic statement is that knowing what is possible in a certain programming language will restrain your creativity when it comes to developing the best possible solution for a design.

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A fresh start – again!

Okay I have to admit that I have been pretty lazy over the last 2 month when it comes to this blog. Although I have been pretty busy in my job, I should have taken more time to write something here.

Why so lazy?

Well, thats the question, isn’t it? What I know is, that a few things have changed over the last weeks, the most important being that I think I finally found an area of expertise I want to focus on. This was clearly not the case when I left university over 2 years ago with a diploma in information management. I started out doing some marketing & pr stuff, some IT, but nothing really focused on one area.

The funny thing is, that I think I have found my home in Information Architecture and User Experience. So basically I have ended up pretty close to where I started in the first place, but now with a lot more pratical background.

So what now?

Being more of a generalist, I have focused on web related stuff in general on this blog. I am about to change that to more IA/UX focused articles in the future, since I would like to share some experiences I have made during my work. My current project should allow this kind of focus and we will see what the future holds in this regard.

Furthermore I will try to write this blog in English from now on. Firstly because I don’t want to focus on Germany only (I just know IA/UX guys from other countries but none from Germany…thats weird, isn’t it?). Secondly this offers me the chance to practice my written english skills, and that’s always a good thing.

Looking good!

If you have visited my blog before, you will realize that I have changed the design (again). Yes, I know, I should stick to one design, and hopefuly I will stick to this one. I’m just easily faszinated and there are so many great designs and styles out there to get inspiration from - as a designer I am sure you know what I’m talking about.

As I said I will stick to this new, minimalistic layout but will try to improve it a bit over the next few days. There are still a lot of bugs with this one and I appologize for that! I know I should set up a test environment but I just don’t have the time to do that right now, so the live machine has to do. At this point, there aren’t many who are reading this anyway :)

So, that’s it. I hope I can produce some interesting content for you in the future and I’m looking forward to getting more involved in the IA/UX community form now on.

Cheers,

Sebastian