http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_whatisinfoarch/index.html
After reading about information architecture, I immediately identified it with usability (only to find out they are not the same???). As an employee of W.W. Grainger, Inc, we strive on Hundred Billion dollar revenue goals each year. Such a goal would not be possible if our site was poorly structured. Yet, we have designed the site best suitable for consumers to find products by several searches...Manufacturer, Product Name, Product category... It is amazing to see that a printed catalog that offers millions of products is equally matched through a website. How does it all flow together? How is our website able to provide "realtime" stock availability to match whats in the actual SAP ordering system? The www.grainger.com website deserves a visit, and you will see that there are more than several ways to retrieve information about a particular product. The ordering system is also user-friendly when sorting items and managing the online accounts.
Even our intranet is structured carefully to provide company resource searches and links in the simplest way. From this reading I have definitely gained a stronger analysis from a technical perspective as to how the success of Grainger is supported by great information architecture.
I was also attracted to the terminology of "DIGITAL LANDSCAPE, CONTENT INVENTORY." This forced me to think of a website as a garden or floral structure and how it should be organized to the simplicity of the gardener, to make his life easier for present and future maintaining. It seems that some structure needs to be in place for a site or system, just for the sake of the people operating them.
From now on, I will also identify the "site map" as the info arch.
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