I just finished Peter Morville's excellent Ambient Findability today and became aware that I haven't consulted his and Louis Rosenfeld's Polar Bear Book - Information Architecture for the World Wide Web - for a while. And not even featured here once ... What a neglect! It has been the basis for our strategy and concept work as well as our lectures since it was first published in 1998.
From Chapter 1: "Some web sites provide logical structures that help us find answers and complete tasks.
Others lack any intelligible organization and frustrate our attempts to navigate through them. We can't find the product we need; we can't locate the report we found last week; we're lost inside an online shopping cart. These we sites may remind us of buildings that fail: houses with flat roofs that leak, kitchens with no counter space, office towers with windows you can't open, and maze-like airports with misleading signs."
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I once heard that 'Not Knowing' is the worst thing that can happen. When I'm traveling and I 'Don't Know' where to go, I'm lost and I don't like it. When I'm in a meeting and I 'Don't Know' what the heck others are talking about, I don't feel comfortable. And, when I'm shopping and I 'Don't Know' where to find the items I'm looking for, I might get upset. Therefore, I 'Want To Know' and to 'Know' I need to find the information in the easiest possible kind of way.