Section A.3. Books and Journals

A.3. Books and Journals

A.3.1. Online Journals and Magazines

There are a growing number of online journals, and even a few print magazines, that cover information architecture and user experience. A few of the ones we enjoy are:

A List Apart (http://alistapart.com)

An online magazine covering web design development as well as information architecture and user experience topics.

BASIS&T, the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (http://www.asis.org/bulletin.html)

ASIS&T's bimonthly bulletin; it includes a regular column on information architecture.

Boxes and Arrows (http://www.boxesandarrows.com)

The field's "peer-written journal dedicated to discussing, improving and promoting the work of this community, through the sharing of exemplary technique, innovation and informed opinion."

Digital Web (http://www.digital-web.com)

An online magazine covering a broad range of web development, design and information architecture topics.

GUUUI (http://www.guuui.com)

Billed as "The Interaction Designer's Coffee Break," this journal offers well-written articles on a range of interaction design topics.

Interactions (http://www.acm.org/interactions)

A publication of ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery. It has covered humancomputer interaction topics since 1994. The magazine is a print publication, but its contents are also available online to subscribers.

OK/Cancel (http://www.ok-cancel.com)

OK/Cancel publishes less frequently, but it deserves a visit for introducing us to the World's First HCI Rap, "We Got It," and for its frequently updated usability and user interface-related comics.

User Experience (http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/user_experience)

This print publication is published by the Usability Professionals' Association and covers usability and user experience topics in depth.

UXmatters (http://uxmatters.com)

An online magazine started in late 2005 that covers user experience and the design of user interfaces for digital products.

A.3.2. Books

There are also precious few books dedicated to information architecture. But thousands of titles are relevant to the field, and perhaps hundreds merit reading. We can't hope to narrow that list down to four or five, so we'll instead rely on a survey conducted to determine which books IA educators use to teach their classes.^[*]

^[*] http://iainstitute.org/documents/research/results/polar_bear_survey_4.html

A.3.2.1. Responses to the question "What books or other teaching materials do you use in your courses?"

About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design by Alan Cooper (Wiley)

Ambient Findability by Peter Morville (O'Reilly)

Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen (Peachpit Press)

Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman (New Riders)

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug (New Riders)

GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers by Jeff Johnson (Morgan Kaufmann)

Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests by Jeffrey Rubin (Wiley)

How to Build a Digital Library by Ian H. Witten and David Bainbridge (Morgan Kaufmann)

HumanComputer Interaction in the New Millennium by John M. Carroll (Addison-Wesley)

HumanComputer Interaction: Concepts And Design by J. Preece et al. (Addison-Wesley)

Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Saul Wurman, David Sume, and Loring Leifer (Que)

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (O'Reilly)

Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web by Christina Wodtke (New Riders)

Metadata Solutions: Using Metamodels, Repositories, XML, and Enterprise Portals to Generate Information on Demand by Adrienne Tannenbaum (Addison-Wesley)

Modern Information Retrieval by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (Addison-Wesley)

Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research by Mike Kuniavsky (Morgan Kaufmann)

Organizing Knowledge: An Introduction to Managing Access to Information by J. E. Rowley and John Farrow (Gower)

Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces by Carolyn Snyder (Morgan Kaufmann)

Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do by B.J. Fogg (Morgan Kaufmann)

Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design by Karen Holtzblatt, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, and Shelley Wood (Morgan Kaufmann)

Task-Centered User Interface Design by Clayton Lewis and John Rieman (Lewis and Rieman)

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman (Basic Books)

The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jef Raskin (Addison-Wesley)

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper (Sams)

The Organization of Information by Arlene G. Taylor (Libraries Unlimited)

The Practical Guide to Information Design by Ronnie Lipton (Wiley)

The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design by Deborah J. Mayhew (Morgan Kaufmann)

Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work by Tom Brinck, Darren Gergle, and Scott D. Wood (Morgan Kaufmann)

Usability Inspection Methods by Jakob Nielsen and Robert L. Mack (Wiley)

Visual Revelations: Graphical Tales of Fate and Deception From Napoleon Bonaparte To Ross Perot by Howard Wainer (LEA, Inc.)

A.3.2.2. Additional Resources

In addition to subscribing to discussion lists, other good places to find out what books IAs read are the IAWiki Canon (http://www.iawiki.net/IACanon), Boxes and Arrows Staff Recommendations (http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/our_favorite_books_recommendations_from_the_staff_of_boxes_and_arrows), and the IA Institute's list of information architecture books (http://iainstitute.org/pg/books.php).