Information architecture (IA) is far more challenging—and necessary—than ever. With the glut of information available today, anything your organization wants to share should be easy to find, navigate, and understand. But the experience you provide has to be familiar and coherent across multiple interaction channels, from the Web to smartphones, smartwatches, and beyond.

To guide you through this broad ecosystem, this popular guide—now in its fourth edition—provides essential concepts, methods, and techniques for digital design that have withstood the test of time. UX designers, product managers, developers, and anyone involved in digital design will learn how to create semantic structures that will help people engage with your message.

This book includes:

• An overview of IA and the problems it solves for creating effective digital products and services
• A deep dive into IA components, including organization, labeling, navigation, search, and metadata
• Processes and methods that take you from research to strategy, design, and IA implementation

We can't predict the future, yet we do it all the time. We organize projects, events, days, weeks, and years. We plan to buy a home, build a career, travel, get married, raise children, teach a class, retire, or get in shape. Our ability to model the world as it is and might be is a gift, but mental time travel is also really hard. Fortunately, since planning is a skill, everyone from playful improviser to rigorous planner can greatly improve, if they are ready to learn:

• The principles and practices of nonlinear planning.


• How to grow and sustain hope with willpower and waypower.


• When to pivot or persist with paths, goals, values, and metrics.


• How myths, memories, fears, and feelings shift the future.


• Why the plans of an octopus are the product of evolution.


• How artificial intelligence is poised to transform what we plan.

If you hate planning, you're doing it wrong. The uncertainty of change makes us crave chaos or control, but it's as dangerous to be rigid as it is to move fast and break things. To organize the future, we will find better ways, because happiness is a prediction, and it's also the freedom you'll feel upon realizing there is no one right way to plan.

What people are saying about Search Patterns

"Search Patterns is a delight to read -- very thoughtful and thought provoking. It's the most comprehensive survey of designing effective search experiences I've seen." --Irene Au, Director of User Experience, Google

"I love this book! Thanks to Peter and Jeffery, I now know that search (yes, boring old yucky who cares search) is one of the coolest ways around of looking at the world." --Dan Roam, author, The Back of the Napkin (Portfolio Hardcover)

"Search Patterns is a playful guide to the practical concerns of search interface design. It contains a bonanza of screenshots and illustrations that capture the best of today's design practices and presents a fresh perspective on the broader role of search and discovery." --Marti Hearst, Professor, UC Berkeley and author, Search User Interfaces (Cambridge University Press)

"It's not often I come across a book that asks profound questions about a fundamental human activity, and then proceeds to answer those questions with practical observations and suggestions. Search Patterns is an expedition into the heart of the web and human cognition, and for me it was a delightful journey that delivered scores of insights." --Dave Gray, Founder and Chairman, XPLANE

"Search is swiftly transforming everything we know, yet people don't understand how mavens design search: by stacking breadcrumbs, scenting widgets, and keeping eyeballs on the engine. I urge you to put your eyeballs on this unique and important book." --Bruce Sterling, Writer, Futurist, and Co-Founder, The Electronic Frontier Foundation

"As one who searches a lot (and often ends up frustrated), Search Patterns is a revelation." --Nigel Holmes, Designer, Theorist, and Principal, Explanation Graphics

"Search Patterns is a fabulous must-have book! Inside, you'll learn the whys and wheres of practically every modern search design trick and technique." --Jared Spool, CEO and Founder, User Interface Engineering

Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe. In this provocative and inspiring book, you'll explore design patterns that apply across the categories of web, ecommerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real-time search and discovery. Filled with colorful illustrations and examples, Search Patterns brings modern information retrieval to life, covering such diverse topics as relevance, faceted navigation, multi-touch, personalization, visualization, multi-sensory search, and augmented reality.

By drawing on their own experience-as well as best practices and evidence-based research-the authors not only offer a practical guide to help you build effective search applications, they also challenge you to imagine the future of discovery. You'll find Search Patterns intriguing and invaluable, whether you're a web practitioner, mobile designer, search entrepreneur, or just interested in the topic.

• Discover a pattern language for search that embraces user psychology and behavior, information architecture, interaction design, and emerging technology
• Boost enterprise efficiency and e-commerce sales
• Enable mobile users to achieve goals, complete tasks, and find what they need
• Drive design innovation for search interfaces and applications