Book Report: The Elements of User Experience

This is a book with a great premise and then problems in the details. The story behind the book is this: Jesse James Garrett made a great diagram about how to organize... let's say it's about how to organize a web site. Or a web app. Or pretty much anything that presents a user with information and allows the user to interact with that information. This is a great diagram because it takes this big gnarly problem and shows how you can break it down into layers. First you figure out what you're trying to do. Then you figure out what kind of information you need to convey. Then you think about how to organize that information. Then you think of how to help users navigate that information. Then you think about UI for individual screens/pages/whatevers. And folks saw that great diagram and said "You should write a book about this." And there's a lot of true stuff in the book, but I'm not sure how much it would help anyone to deal with problems that they hadn't dealt with before.

The diagram and the book have a web page. Give the diagram a look. Maybe read the book, too. It's not bad; it's an excuse to think about information-architecture problems and that's always fun.