How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody

One of the challenges that User Experience and Information Architecture professionals face - is themselves. Often the incredible information they have to share is lost in complexity and academic obfuscation. The world needs what these folks have, but the meaning and message is lost... Abby Covert and "How to Make Sense of Any Mess" bucks this trend and sets a shining example of how to teach the world about Information Architecture - by making it simple and approachable. But don't confuse simple and approachable with being watered-down. Everything that Abby teaches in the book can be put into solid, practical use. And she leaves openings for anyone to dive deep and explore. I personally learned a lot about Information Architecture from this book and was able to dump many of the misconceptions I had and misinformation too! I am recommending this as required reading for all of my teams and I think that you will feel the same after you read this book. As a bonus, Abby has links to download incredibly useful worksheets and templates that directly help in your efforts to "Make Sense of Any Mess!" Finally, I want to commend Abby for taking the time to tweak her Kindle edition to provide the best reading experience. Her attention to detail really shows. I've had too many Kindle versions that were just an afterthought by the publishers and authors, so it is refreshing! This is indeed a book for everybody: Business, Technical, Creative... you name it!

If you’re wondering where you should start your journey in IA this book can provide a clear path while at the same time point the difficulties you may faced. It is not a “How-to” book there are no detail case studies about how you could implement the teachings. It is as I said in the title a clear starting point to help you make sense of any mess.

This book will help you do two things: 1. Understand how to break a big hairy problem into smaller steps so that you can approach solving it. 2. Understand some approaches to solving it. It will give you examples of various activities, tools (i.e. worksheets) and things to understand about problems. It'll do this one page at a time, which is to say each of the 150ish pages covers exactly one topic, and covers it well enough that you'll know how to move forward to the next topic. It also gives references and resources to places that you can learn more, because let's face it, 150 topics is a few too many for anyone to cover in depth in one book. Many of the topics in this book are topics of their own. But that's really the point of this book beyond all the others: it's the book to help you find the path through the mess you're dealing with, and help you identify what you need to know more about. It's the solution to the "I don't know what I don't know" problem, at the highest level. It's immediately on my recommendation list for all new Information Architects, User Experience Designers, and a good number of others that are both inside the Information Technology field and outside of it. This book is well-written enough that I feel like I could hand it to someone in a totally different industry and say "Hey, here's where to start" or "Hey, if you've ever wondered what I do for a living..." I'm glad it's a tool I can now use to make my own work better.

I was so excited to read this book because I think Abby is a great communicator and very knowledgeable. I started taking notes and doing the exercises she was proposing. After a while, a relialized I was not getting what I wanted. My purpose of reading the book was to get more insights about how to improve the IA of my client's websites. I couldn't find the answer in her book. This book has a lot of content but it's more for beginners who might no understand how things have to be organized, I guess. I didn't learn much from it... I expected more

I loved this book. It’s concise, logical and smart. It teaches you how to organize messy information of all kinds, without using jargon like “information architecture” or “user experience” or “archetype” or anything else that you might not understand if you haven't studied this niche in detail. Each page has a sentence-long headline that makes a decisive point. I can tell that it's been edited with care. It's a quick read but profound. She asks big questions that are relevant to just about any organization, and includes clear case studies on how these can be implemented in real, messy workplaces. I'm glad I ordered the hard copy version. The design is lovely.

I enjoyed the broad direction she took so the thinking could be applied to many applications. There were a few helpful tools and a glossary. It's more theoretical than practical. It's easy to read and follow, and I enjoyed her examples. I'd give it 5 stars but I felt that it's not a book I can refer to with a step-by-step guide. It's more a "take a step back" kind of book--which is valuable, but not as applicable in the day-to-day. I recommend it for folks who deal with information dumped on them and they have to package the messages, architect the information and communicate information whether schematically or in an outline of some sort.

This book is very easy to read and you get cought up in it. However I think it lacks some case studies of real life product development, and I was expecting something more about information architecture as a whole, whereas the book really focuses on companies that create products for customers.

I was expecting some clever tips and insights based on the reviews and ambitious title, but it’s a collection of ordinary high level ideas. And I didn’t like the writing style either, not prose enough to untangle a point, not bullet point enough to make it more visual or memorable. The templates are so basic, you need to be I believe in middle school not to be acquainted with them. I am disappointed.

you can use the teachings of this book in every aspect of your life. it also made my work as a researcher so much more interesting

I loved this book!

too vague and generalised