Originally published April 18, 2022
This is the 78th article in the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. Peter Morville is a pioneer in the fields of information architecture and user experience, and he also specializes in organizational strategy and planning. He has been helping people to plan since 1994. Peter wrote or co-wrote the books Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond (also known as the “Bible of IA” and the “Polar Bear book”), Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become, Search Patterns: Design for Discovery, Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything, and Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals.
I first became aware of Peter’s work when I read the report that he and Fred Leise of Louis Rosenfeld, LLC prepared for the Hewlett-Packard intranet (@hp) in 2001. I thought the recommendations were brilliant. I met Peter several times when he lived in Ann Arbor, and he presented on the February 2022 SIKM Leaders Community call. He now lives on a farm in Virginia.
Background
Peter was born in Manchester, England. 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. 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. 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.”
In 1998, Morville 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, became a bestseller and was awarded Amazon’s best computer book of 1998. It has been described as the seminal 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.
Education
- University of Michigan — School of Information: Masters, Library and Information Science, 1992–1993
- Tufts University, BA, English Literature, 1987–1991
Profiles
Content
- LinkedIn Posts
- Writing
- Blog: Intertwingled
- Old Blog: Findability.org
- Information Architecture Consulting — Semantic Studios
Strange Connections — Information Architecture
- Software for Information Architects (February 19, 2001)
- An Information Architect’s Manifesto (January 30, 2001)
- Lessons Learned from the Dot.Com Crash (January 12, 2001)
- Ethics of Information Architecture (November 29, 2000)
- Information Architecture 2000 (November 6, 2000)
- IA and Business Strategy (August 30, 2000)
- Educating the Information Architect (August 15, 2000)
- Big Architect, Little Architect (July 27, 2000)
- Little Blue Folders (July 10, 2000)
- Information Architecture and Ulcers (June 21, 2000)
- Defining Information Architecture (June 1, 2000)
Articles
- A New Recipe for VirtualGourmet.com
- Worst Web Faux Pas: Three Site-Structure Sins and How to Avoid Them
- Web Design & Development Trip Report
- Building Subject Specific Guides to Internet Resources with Susan Wickhorst
- Semantic Scholar
- A brief history of information architecture
- (Not) Everything is Miscellaneous
- Information Architecture 3.0
- Planning for Everything
Farming Information Architecture
In an employee intranet project for HP in the early noughties, the IT group we worked with was insular. This was a problem endemic to the culture, famously captured in the aphorism “if only HP knew what HP knows.” So, in concert with IA, we helped with KM. We pitched cross-pollination via interdepartmental brown bag lunches and championed unsanctioned initiatives such as an annotated site index created by the administrative assistants of HP Labs, because often the path to a good information architecture is better knowledge management.
@hp Information Architecture Strategy & Recommendations Report with Fred Leise
- Portal Strategy Recommendations
- Define portal scope
- Balance top-down & bottom-up approaches to content access
- Recognize IA as infrastructure
- Manage conflicting influences
- Manage transitions
- Information Architecture Design Recommendations
- Use several classification schemes
- Provide multiple finding tools
- Leverage CMS (distributed metadata)
- Improve search (interface, results, thesaurus)
- Provide robust navigation
Articles by Others
- Tagsonomy interview by Gene Smith
- Ambient Findability — Boxes and Arrows by Liz Danzico
- Bobulate — Findability is Ambient by Liz Danzico
- Building the Beast by Marla Olsen
- Digital Web (with Lou Rosenfeld) by Meryl Evans
- Interview with Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville by Scott Hill
- Planning for Everything in Times of COVID-19 by Matt Finch
- On Planning and Design by Hans Kao
- UX Strategy and Planning by Paul Bryan
- UX STRAT by Paul Bryan
- UX Pioneers by Tamara Adlin
- Futureheads Five Stories
- Connecting by Nicky Bleiel
- Tomorrow’s Architects: Designing the Future of Libraries by ProQuest
- Connecting Knowledge Management and Discovery by Synaptica
- Authority by Euan Semple (commentary on Authority)
- Creating bigger needles by Dave Snowden
- International information architecture by Jack Vinson
- Authority and bias by Jack Vinson (commentary on Tagsonomy interview)
- Are leaves mulch? by David Weinberger
- User Experience Honeycomb by Dane Wesolko
- User Experience Basics — Usability.gov
Quotes
- Findability precedes usability. In the alphabet and on the Web. You can’t use what you can’t find.
- The design of good houses requires an understanding of both the construction materials and the behavior of real humans.
- When technology precedes requirements and user needs, the UX suffers — it leads to solutions in search of problems.
- The future is faceted.
- Information architecture is a means to create learning and relationship-building opportunities. When we create unusual relationships between people or products or ideas, we create a tension that invites learning.
- Before working to design the thing right, we must first be sure we’re designing the right thing.
- What we find changes who we become.
- We must go from boxes to arrows. Tomorrow belongs to those who connect.
- The journey transforms the destination.
- To build strength and flexibility, we should open our minds to people and ideas we don’t like and pick fights with those we do.
- Learning how to learn (and unlearn) is central to success. Instead of hiding from change, let’s embrace it. Each time we try something new, we get better at getting better. Experience builds competence and confidence, so we’re ready for the big changes, like re-thinking what we do.
- Between perfect vision and total blindness lies all the truth we know.
- We measure success and reward performance without knowing how governance and culture impact individuals and teams.
- Information architectures become ecosystems. When different media and different contexts are tightly intertwined, no artifact can stand as a single isolated entity. Every single artifact becomes an element in a larger ecosystem.
- Each way of organizing has strengths and weaknesses. Taxonomy affords a view from the top, facets help us muddle through the middle, and tags build bridges at the bottom.
- The planning process includes at least the following six functions: forming a representation of the problem, choosing a goal, deciding to plan, formulating a plan, executing and monitoring the plan, and learning from the plan.
Photos
Presentations
SIKM Leaders Community
KMWorld
- 2008
Taxonomy Boot Camp
- 2018 Planning for Taxonomy
- 2015 Opening Keynote: The Architecture of Understanding
- 2008 Connecting Knowledge Management
Podcasts
- Peter’s Podcast
- Emancipating Information Architecture — The Informed Life Podcast
- Farming & the Future of Information Architecture — Part 1 — Surfacing Podcast
- Farming & the Future of Information Architecture — Part 2 — Surfacing Podcast
- A Planning Masterclass with Peter Morville — Target Internet
- Planning, User Research and Mindfulness — Aurelius Podcast
- UX Discovery Session — Gerard Dolan
Videos
YouTube
Vimeo
Books
- Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond with Louis Rosenfeld and Jorge Arango
- Information Architecture: Design for Understanding
- Review by Tom Wilson
- Search Patterns: Design for Discovery with Jeffery Callender
- Search Patterns Site
- Review by Tom Wilson
- Review by Tom Johnson
- Review by Dave Fernig
- Creating a Cultural Fit
- Chapter 3: Connections
- Review by D. Ben Woods
- Review by Jim McGee
- Review by Robert Bogue
- Chapter 2: Framing
- Review by Martin White
- Review by Getaneh Alemu
- Review by Jim McGee
- The Internet Searcher’s Handbook: Locating Information, People, & Software with Louis Rosenfeld and Joseph Janes
Book Chapter
- Bottom-up Information Architecture: Leveraging Metadata with Kat Hagedorn in Content Management: Putting Knowledge to Work