Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Information Architecture
Founded in 2002, The Information Architecture Institute has more than
1000 members in 60 countries. It defines information architecture as:
The structural design of shared information environments
The art and science of organizing and labeling Web sites, intranets,
online communities, and software to support usability and find-
ability
An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles
of design and architecture to the digital landscape
Basically, information architecture is the set of ideas about how to
philosophically treat all information in a given context, and, in a general
way, how to organize it.
System Design
There used to be a time when most software applications were modeled
on existing manual systems. It was much easier to visualize the system
and decompose it into functional modules, components, and classes. GUIs
(graphical user interfaces) were made to look similar to paper forms, and
most processing was an automation of the manual environment. Things
are rapidly changing in the software industry. Most software built today
is an advancement over an existing automated system — in an effort to
make it more powerful, usable, freely accessible, interconnected, respon-
sive, etc. These advancements are a result of the changing technology
landscape, with new inventions and discoveries such as faster CPUs, larger
on-board RAM, the Internet, wireless, RFIDs, and the like. For example,
when Amazon (.com) was initially conceived, it could have been viewed
as an automation of a warehouse, an inventory management, supplier
relationships, and front-end sales for topics. However, over the years,
Amazon has graduated into a large resource pool of all kinds of artifacts,
including topics, reviews, sales and marketing tools, ratings — like a
barometer of buyers' interests. These changes are making the work of a
designer even more difficult.
Design Document
Like the architecture document, this section discusses three important
elements of a
— the absolute “musts.” Once again,
they are generic enough that they can be used in any design approach.
design specification
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