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Peter Morville

Like many of us, Peter Morville started out with a liberal arts degree (in this case, English) and no idea what he wanted to do. He learned to code in his spare time, and discovered the field of Library Science when he stumbled across a dusty old book in his public library. Alchemy happened, and he found himself teaching people how to use the internet for business. He got fascinated with the idea that information needs a blueprint, and that something interesting was happening between the pages of every web site. This led to the famous 'Polar Bear Book,' as us insiders call it, which he co-authored with Lou Rosenfeld. In our interview, he talks about how he finally found a career that his parents didn't laugh at.

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One afternoon, I was walking through the public library, still searching for a career, and I came across this little old book called Careers in Library Science. I still remember pulling it off the shelf, dusting it off, and flipping through it. I had never thought about how a library worked. I don't think I had ever asked the reference librarian a question. As I was reading through it and learning about this field of library and information science, it occurred to me there was some connection between the ways we have organized information in libraries, and what was happening in these online networks.

You can take any object, whether physical or digital, and ask questions like: what are all the ways someone might find this object, and how can we describe this object to make it more findable. You can also evaluate the findability of a system, asking: to what degree does this environment support search, navigation, retrieval, and wayfinding?

More About Peter Morville

Peter Morville is president and founder of Semantic Studios, a leading information architecture, user experience, and findability consultancy. He is widely recognized as a father of the information architecture field, and he serves as a passionate advocate for the critical roles that search and findability play in defining the user experience. Peter's latest book, Ambient Findability, explores search, wayfinding, marketing, information interaction, literacy, librarianship, authority, and culture at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet. Peter is also co-author (with Louis Rosenfeld) of the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (over 100,000 copies), named "Best Internet Book of 1998" by Amazon and "The Most Useful Book on Web Design on the Market" by usability guru Jakob Nielsen.