Information Architecture From The Bottom Up [TC Dojo Open Session]
The advent of electronic media and particularly the Web has profoundly changed how people seek and use information. Information seeking today is dominated by search, and not by search of individual works, but search of the whole: whole sites, whole doc sets, and, in particular, the whole Web. With search, and with hypertext systems, you don’t start at the top and work down, you dive to the bottom and work your way up or sideways. Despite these changes, much tech comm content is still organized top down and written to be read top down. But content organized top down does not work well for readers navigating from the bottom up. To serve them well, we need a bottom-up information architecture.We have thousands of years of civilization based on organizing information top-down. It is ingrained in our education and our culture, and in our processes and the way we create and manage content. Moving to a bottom-up information architecture is no trivial task, therefore. This first session in the
