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The federal government's focus on clear and understandable writing is supported by www.plainlanguage.gov. The purposes and directives for the site have evolved since its origin, necessitating revision of the site structure. Teams of students and professionals worked through a five-phase framework to organize and manage the change process. Their strategy started with gathering data on stakeholders' priorities and what worked and didn't work on the existing site structure. The redesign team developed several personas representing various types of anticipated site users and their specific needs. They evaluated the collected data from these perspectives and identified real users' top tasks. To organize content semantically, the team developed a taxonomy with four primary facets and built out the taxonomy following standard principles of vocabulary control. Two taxonomy versions emerged, providing site navigational labels and metadata to mediate retrieval. The teams developed, tested and revised mock-ups until the final stage of the effort produced a new site design having an arrangement of text, labels, links and relationships that better supports the site's new mission as the design continues to evolve. INSET: Personified Clusters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an interview with the author, Eric Reiss discusses his contributions to information architecture, including his recent book, which explores usability from two angles. He breaks down the topic into "ease of use," focusing on physical interaction, and "elegance and clarity," addressing psychological aspects, each with five simple subtopics. The analysis lends itself to client presentations and to teaching students. Reiss prompts all to look at how well any product functions and at any website to consider its success on aspects including function, ergonomics, convenience, logic and predictability. Contemplating the foundations of his work, he traces his interest in usability back to redesigning a rocking horse as a three-year-old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Thom Haller, an icy spinout in a new truck and frustration with a user manual raised the issue of perceptual affordance, design based on the perceived needs of a user. An object's design ideally serves its user, being visible and clearcut to avoid error, yet design snafus abound. The vehicle manuels's verbal references to four-wheel drive were circuitous and uncertain, and the illustration was no more helpful. Both failed to provide a direct answer to the user's's question about how to enable four-wheel drive or meet reasonable expectations for guidance. For informationarchitects, usability is primary,delivered through sensible and logical placement of information and understandable terminology.Our job is to make the complex clear, and the need is everywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]