Marci Ikeler

Interesting thinking from Dan Brown on eight principles of successful IA (and, I would argue, UX in general). They are:

1. The principle of objects – Treat content as a living, breathing thing, with a lifecycle, behaviors and attributes. 
2. The principle of choices – Create pages that offer meaningful choices to users, keeping the range of choices available focused on a particular task. 
3. The principle of disclosure – Show only enough information to help people understand what kinds of information they’ll find as they dig deeper. 
4. The principle of exemplars – Describe the contents of categories by showing examples of the contents. 
5. The principle of front doors – Assume at least half of the website’s visitors will come through some page other than the home page. 
6. The principle of multiple classification – Offer users several different classification schemes to browse the site’s content. 
7. The principle of focused navigation – Don’t mix apples and oranges in your navigation scheme. 
8. The principle of growth – Assume the content you have today is a small fraction of the content you will have tomorrow.