Peter Morville

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Peter Morville
Peter Morville.jpg
Morville in 2015
Alma mater Tufts University (B.A.)
University of Michigan (MLIS)
OccupationInformation Architect
Known for Information Architecture, User Experience Design
Notable work
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Board member of
Awards
Website semanticstudios.com

Peter Morville is president of Semantic Studios, an information architecture and findability consulting firm. He may be best known as an influential figure and "founding father" of information architecture, having coauthored the best-selling book in the discipline, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. [5] For over a decade, he has advised such clients as AT&T, Dow Chemical, Ford, the IMF, the Library of Congress, and Microsoft. [6] Morville was a co-founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute, [7] and has served on their advisory board. [5] He delivers keynotes and seminars at international events, and his work has been featured in major publications, including Business Week, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal. [8]

Contents

Biography

Peter Morville was born in Manchester, England. He holds a graduate degree in Library and Information Science, having graduated from the University of Michigan School of Information in 1993. He has since served on their faculty and received an Alumni Achievement Award for his work in information science. [8]

In the 1990s, together with Louis Rosenfeld, he headed Argus Associates, the consulting firm which supported one of the precursors of the Information Architecture Institute, the Argus Center for Information Architecture. [7] The company began in January 1994 as a full-solution web design business, but Morville and Rosenfeld decided to specialize by applying principles of library science to solve issues of grouping and labeling on the early Web. [9] The two dubbed their work "information architecture," although they did not mean it in the sense of Richard Saul Wurman's use of the term, who according to Morville, "focused on the presentation and layout of information on a two-dimensional page. We focused on the structure and organization of sites." [9] Argus worked with clients such as AT&T, Borders Books and Music, and Microsoft. [10]

In 1998, Morville and Rosenfeld co-authored Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, which was published by O'Reilly Media in 1998. This book, known as the "Polar Bear book" because of the Polar Bear on its cover, [11] became a bestseller [10] and was awarded Amazon.com's "best computer book of 1998." [9] It has been described as the "seminal" [12] book on information architecture. The book sparked enough of a growth in interest in information architecture that two years later, the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) helped organize the first annual Information Architecture Summit. [13]

Along with Christina Wodtke, Rosenfeld, and a number of other information architects, Morville co-founded the Information Architecture Institute in 2002 [14] and subsequently served as its president. He has been an independent consultant since 2001 through his company Semantic Studios, which focuses on information architecture and user experience for a wide range of clients. [15]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.

Information architecture (IA) is the structural design of shared information environments; the art and science of organizing and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability; and an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design, architecture and information science to the digital landscape. Typically, it involves a model or concept of information that is used and applied to activities which require explicit details of complex information systems. These activities include library systems and database development.

O'Reilly Media is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books, produces tech conferences, and provides an online learning platform. Its distinctive brand features a woodcut of an animal on many of its book covers.

Intertwingularity is a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge.

Representational state transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that was created to guide the design and development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system, such as the Web, should behave. The REST architectural style emphasises the scalability of interactions between components, uniform interfaces, independent deployment of components, and the creation of a layered architecture to facilitate caching components to reduce user-perceived latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems.

Findability is the ease with which information contained on a website can be found, both from outside the website and by users already on the website. Although findability has relevance outside the World Wide Web, the term is usually used in that context. Most relevant websites do not come up in the top results because designers and engineers do not cater to the way ranking algorithms work currently. Its importance can be determined from the first law of e-commerce, which states "If the user can’t find the product, the user can’t buy the product." As of December 2014, out of 10.3 billion monthly Google searches by Internet users in the United States, an estimated 78% are made to research products and services online.

Louis B. Rosenfeld is an American information architect, consultant, author and publisher, known as co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web has become a major delivery platform for a variety of complex and sophisticated enterprise applications in several domains. In addition to their inherent multifaceted functionality, these Web applications exhibit complex behaviour and place some unique demands on their usability, performance, security, and ability to grow and evolve. However, a vast majority of these applications continue to be developed in an ad hoc way, contributing to problems of usability, maintainability, quality and reliability. While Web development can benefit from established practices from other related disciplines, it has certain distinguishing characteristics that demand special considerations. In recent years, there have been developments towards addressing these considerations.

Jesse James Garrett

Jesse James Garrett is a User Experience Designer based in San Francisco, California and co-founder of Adaptive Path strategy and design consulting firm. His diagram titled The Elements of User Experience launched his popularity in the web design community in early 2000, which was later published as a book. In a 2005 paper, Garrett coined the term Ajax to describe the asynchronous technology behind emerging services like Google Maps and Google Suggest, as well as the resulting user experience which made it possible to browse without interruption by eliminating the reloading of the whole page.

Thoughtworks is a publicly owned, global technology company with 48 offices in 17 countries. It provides software design and delivery, and tools and consulting services. The company is closely associated with the movement for agile software development, and has contributed to a content of open source products. Thoughtworks' business includes Digital Product Development Services, Digital Experience and Distributed Agile software development.

Web content Content encountered as part of the user experience on websites

Web content is the text, visual or audio content that is made available online and user encountered as part of the online usage and experience on websites. It may include text, images, sounds and audio, online videos, among other items placed within web pages.

The Information Architecture Institute was a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. The organization, originally known as the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, was incorporated in November 2002, and was a 501(c)(6) organization. It grew to become one of the world's largest professional groups for web specialists, with over 1200 members in 60 countries, It was dissolved in September 2019 and is no longer a professional board of trade.

Labelling or using a label is describing someone or something in a word or short phrase. For example, the label "criminal" may be used to describe someone who has broken a law. Labelling theory is a theory in sociology which ascribes labelling of people to control and identification of deviant behaviour. It has been argued that labelling is necessary for communication. However, the use of the term is often intended to highlight the fact that the label is a description applied from the outside, rather than something intrinsic to the labelled thing. This can be done for several reasons:

David McGoveran is an American computer scientist and physicist, software industry analyst, and inventor. In computer science, he is recognized as one of the pioneers of relational database theory.

User experience design is the process of creating evidence-based, interaction designs between human users and products or websites. Design decisions in UX design are driven by research, data analysis, and test results rather than aesthetic preferences and opinions. Unlike user interface design, which focuses solely on the design of a computer interface, UX design encompasses all aspects of a user's perceived experience with a product or website, such as its usability, usefulness, desirability, brand perception, and overall performance. UX design is also an element of the customer experience (CX), which encompasses all aspects and stages of a customer's experience and interaction with a company.

The concept of the Social Semantic Web subsumes developments in which social interactions on the Web lead to the creation of explicit and semantically rich knowledge representations. The Social Semantic Web can be seen as a Web of collective knowledge systems, which are able to provide useful information based on human contributions and which get better as more people participate. The Social Semantic Web combines technologies, strategies and methodologies from the Semantic Web, social software and the Web 2.0.

Mooers's law is an empirical observation of behavior made by American computer scientist Calvin Mooers in 1959. The observation is made in relation to information retrieval and the interpretation of the observation is used commonly throughout the information profession both within and outside its original context.

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.

Brian Solis

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References

  1. "Peter Morville". The Understanding Group.
  2. "Historical List of Honorary Fellows". Society for Technical Communication. Retrieved 8 April 2020.
  3. "Roger Summit Award Lecture". Association of Independent Information Professionals. Retrieved 8 April 2020.
  4. "The Webby Awards Gallery + Archive". The Webby Awards. Retrieved 8 April 2020.
  5. 1 2 "Peter Morville". O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  6. "Consulting". Semantic Studios. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  7. 1 2 "AIfIA Annual Report, 2002–2003". Information Architecture Institute. Retrieved 13 April 2014.
  8. 1 2 "Peter Morville's Biography". Semantic Studios. Retrieved 15 April 2013.
  9. 1 2 3 Hill, Scott (1 January 2000). "News -- An Interview with Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville". O'Reilly. Archived from the original on 18 July 2006.
  10. 1 2 "UX Strategy and Planning: An Interview with Peter Morville". UX Matters.
  11. Morville, Peter (1 December 2015). "The Age of Information Architecture". IA Institute.
  12. Jaeger, Timothy (6 May 2014). "The Present and Future of Information Architecture".
  13. Crawford, Stephanie. "The Information Architecture Culture". How Stuff Works.
  14. "Our Founders". IA Institute.
  15. Bryan, Paul. "UX STRAT Interview: Peter Morville, Semantic Studios". UX STRAT.