All posts from
September 2007

Card Sorting: Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned

Added on 11 September 2007 Peter Bogaards
“Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I’ve learned from running numerous card sorts over the years. By sharing these lessons learned along the way, I hope to enable others to dodge similar potholes when they venture down the card sorting path.” (Sam Ng – UXmatters)

Conducting Successful Interviews With Project Stakeholders

Added on 11 September 2007 Peter Bogaards
“A simple, semi-structured, one-on-one interview can provide a very rich source of insights. Interviews work very well for gaining insights from both internal and external stakeholders, as well as from actual users of a system under consideration. Though, in this column, I’ll focus on stakeholder interviews rather than user interviews. (And I’ll come back to that word, insights, a little later on, because it’s important.)” (Steve Baty – UXmatters)

A Map-Based Approach to a Content Inventory

Added on 6 September 2007 Peter Bogaards
“After giving it some thought, I find that the thing I like most about the map is that it is pure, stripped down navigation. Harry Beck decided that including streets, districts and other geographical information on his underground maps was distracting and added little value. All you need to know is how to get from A to B. I suspect that the same may be true in information spaces.” (Patrick C. Walsh – Boxes and Arrows)

Social Networks And Group Formation

Added on 6 September 2007 Peter Bogaards
“Humans suffer from information overload; there’s much more information on any given subject than a person is able to access. As a result, people are forced to depend upon each other for knowledge. Know-who information rather than know-what, know-how or know-why information has become most crucial. It involves knowing who has the needed information and being able to reach that person.” (Shiv Singh – Boxes and Arrows)

Web Ontology and the Semantic Web

Added on 4 September 2007 Peter Bogaards
“(…) Tim Berners-Lee’s design for the Semantic Web will enable automatic collection and correlation of various parts of information about an object, available at various different web resources. The Semantic Web will save the valuable time we spend on navigating from one web resource to another in order to obtain meaningful information on a particular object. We would be happy then on finding out, for example, our old friend’s complete information on giving partial hints on the fly without the need of our manually visiting various related web pages! But wait, there’s more.” (Goutam Kumar Saha – ACM Ubiquity)

The Tagging Growth Curve

Added on 4 September 2007 Peter Bogaards
“The apparently irregular growth and spread of tagging is simply example of the real nature of how innovations spread. Professional analysts and other meaning makers tend to draw smooth graphs to depict these things. But in reality, natural systems (and the tagging / technology landscape is a legitimate ecosystem) are noisy, cyclical, chaotic, complex, fuzzy, non-linear, and unpredictable. They only appear to follow smooth curves at a high level of abstraction, or a low level of resolution.” (Joe Lamantia – tagsonomy)