Help me find IA and UXD educational resources.

May 30, 2008 7:57 AM

Please recommend resources for learning more about and staying current on user experience design and information architecture.

I am particularly keen to hear about books, periodicals, and educational web sites on the subject, but live training is a possibility too. Cheap is good, but I don't mind paying. I have some technical knowledge, but not advanced technical skills, so technical jargon is OK, but I prefer to learn more about current concepts and theories in IA and UXD, as I supervise the design and development of sites.

posted by Mister_A to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is excellent.
posted by Nelsormensch at 8:08 AM on May 30, 2008

Best answer: Boxes and Arrows is the granddaddy of them all.

Also, my del.icio.us links:

IA
UX
posted by gsh at 8:17 AM on May 30, 2008

Infosthetics is more on the theoretical side of information science, but is chock full of fascinating stuff.
posted by greenie2600 at 8:38 AM on May 30, 2008

Signal vs. Noise, the 37 Signals blog often has interesting posts that spark good discussions.
http://www.37signals.com/svn/
posted by hitopshelf at 8:42 AM on May 30, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. I would like to hear about resources that have personally been useful to you, the answerer. MeMail me or post here, as you see fit. Nice list so far though.
posted by Mister_A at 8:45 AM on May 30, 2008

Best answer: I have over ten years experience working as a human factors professional. Here are my "best of" recommendations:

Organizations:
- ACM SIGGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction)
- UPA (Usability Professional's Association)

Books:
- Usability Engineering, J.Nielsen
- The Design of Everyday Things, Norman
- The Usability Engineering Lifecycle, D. Mayhew
- Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design, D.Mayhew
- The Handbook of Usability Testing, J.Rubin

Tools:
- Visio (to create rapid prototypes)

Websites:
- Useit.com
- Boxesandarrows.com
- Yale Web Style Guide
posted by xammerboy at 9:59 AM on May 30, 2008

Best answer: I haven't seen these listed yet, which have all been very useful to me:

Books:
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd ed.), P. Morville and L. Rosenfeld
- Designing Web Navigation, J. Kalbach
- Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, C. Wodtke (good for beginners)
- Web Redesign 2.0: Workflow that Works, K. Goto (ignore the "Re" in the title)
- Designing for Interaction, D. Saffer
- About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, A. Cooper

Web sites:
- Findability, Peter Morville's site
- Blog by danah boyd, Berkeley PhD student in social computing/networking research and frequent speaker/consultant on theories of same
- UI Patterns
- Welie
- Livia Labate's blog (also had lots of links to other good IA/UX blogs)
- Jared Spool's Brain Sparks blog
- Andrew Hinton's site
- Adaptive Path blog
posted by ImproviseOrDie at 10:26 AM on May 30, 2008

I subscribe to the newsletter of UIE (User Interface Engineering), and the articles are usually pretty interesting.
posted by amtho at 10:43 AM on May 30, 2008

I'd add Good Experience, in particular the list of Good Experience Resources (for customer experience practitioners): http://goodexperience.com/resources
posted by mark7570 at 12:21 PM on May 30, 2008 [1 favorite]