November 2002

Users Begin to Demand Software Usability Tests

"The Boeing Co. is changing the way it buys software and is making a product's usability (...) a fundamental purchasing criterion." (Patrick Thidodeau - Computerworld)

Posted by PJB on November 27, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Keep It Simple: Simplicity versus Innovation

"The site should be innovative in design and content, but, when it comes to usability, a slightly conservative mindset is the best option." (Peter-Paul Koch - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted by PJB on November 27, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

What's Your Problem?

"Trying to establish a profession on the foundation of a myth is, I think, a tactical error." (Mark Bernstein)

Posted by PJB on November 27, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

ASIST 2002 Annual Meeting: Notes

"Just spurious notes from what I saw, in general a very good conference." (Victor Lombardi)

Posted by PJB on November 26, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Three Lessons from Tufte: Special Deliverable#6

"Because his books focus primarily on producing graphics for paper and on the representation of information, not the structuring of information, many information architects wonder about the value of Tufte's writing for their work." (Dan Brown - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on November 26, 2002 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Mark Hurt interviews Maryam Mohit

"Maryam Mohit started working at Amazon.com in 1996 and soon after became Amazon.com's V.P. of Site Development, with responsibility for the online customer experience." (Good Experience)

Posted by PJB on November 25, 2002 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

History of the Graphical User Interface

"The graphical user interface, or GUI, of Microsoft Windows is based on that of the MacOS (and the earlier unsuccessful Apple Lisa), which in turn used many elements of the work of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, who produced the advanced but commercially unsuccessful Xerox Alto and Xerox Star." (Wikipedia)

Posted by PJB on November 25, 2002 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Apple Help Technologies

"When users refer to help, it is usually because they are having difficulty accomplishing a task -- they know what they want to do, but not how to do it." (Apple User Experience)

Posted by PJB on November 25, 2002 | Classification: TechCom | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Flash and Web-Based Applications

"The Internet is changing. Although people have primarily used it to read email and Web pages, more functionality-oriented applications are now emerging, with the goal of providing new features that do more for users." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on November 25, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

The Information Architect: A Missing Link?

"(...) our (information) architect is a high level designer that uses information as building material." (Ricardo Baea-Yates and Miguel Nussbaum)

Posted by PJB on November 25, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Knowledge Isn't Power (...) Unless It's Shared

"High performers consistently speak of knowledge when talking about their work, whereas lower performers speak of information." (Rachel Fielding - VNUnet)

Posted by PJB on November 22, 2002 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Adam is a House A-Fire!

"I think Nathan's smoking crack if he thinks IAs have lost stature." (Peter Merholz)

Posted by PJB on November 22, 2002 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

In 75 Words or Less, What is the Semantic Web?

"Eric Miller is the World Wide Web Consortium's Activity Lead on the Semantic Web Initiative." (NewBreed Librarian)

Posted by PJB on November 21, 2002 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Rosenfeld Explains Enterprise Information Architecture

"Rosenfeld addressed himself to the issue of practising information architecture in an unfriendly enterprise environment." (Ann Light - Usability News)

Posted by PJB on November 21, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

What Lies Beneath?

"Engaging your services as a designer or an information architect has an associated cost, and ideally anyway, also produces a tangible benefit." (Adam Greenfield - V-2)

Posted by PJB on November 21, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Nathan Shedroff: The V-2 Interview 1/2

"One can't work for too terribly long in the broader user-experience community (...) without hearing the words Experience Design." (Adam Greenfield - V-2)

Posted by PJB on November 21, 2002 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

The Use of Visual Information in Art

"Some of the factors that I hope to illustrate are aspects of depth perception, color perception, and form perception." (John H. Krantz)

Posted by PJB on November 20, 2002 | Classification: InfoViz | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

The Importance of Information Architecture

"Very glossy, but pretty much right on the money. The reasoning stresses business concepts like ROI, so it speaks to the business person pretty well." (James Melzer)

Posted by PJB on November 20, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Architecture is not Usability

"The distinction between information architecture and usability may seem like semantics, but there are significant differences between the two disciplines." (Jeff Lash - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted by PJB on November 20, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Death of a Meta Tag

"In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead." (Danny Sullivan - ClickZ)

Posted by PJB on November 19, 2002 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

A Visit with a Digital Architect

"Matt Jones is an information architect who has been building spaces for news online since 1995." (Rusty Foster - Online Journalism Review)

Posted by PJB on November 19, 2002 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Architecture for Everyone

"Information Architecture is the process of creating as structure for a body of information or content. In our case, this structure is specific to the production of a web site." (D. Keith Robinson - Evolt)

Posted by PJB on November 18, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Interface Design as a Life or Death Proposition

"(...) recent initiatives have instituted a more prescriptive, design-focused procedure encouraging extensive user research at the beginning of the development process." (Doug LeMoine - Cooper)

Posted by PJB on November 18, 2002 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data

"The usefulness of personas in defining interactive product has become more widely accepted in the last few years (...)" (Kim Goodwin - Cooper)

Posted by PJB on November 18, 2002 | Classification: Personas | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Thoughts on AIfIA and Information Architecture

"The launch of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, has proven a wellspring for discussions on the emerging profession and discipline of information architecture." (Peter Merholz)

Posted by PJB on November 18, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Bottoms Up: Designing Complex, Adaptive Systems

"Web design is under attack. Our enemy is a dangerous meme known as reductionism." (Peter Morville - New Architect)

Posted by PJB on November 15, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Connectedland

"The always-connected artifacts we carry with us are slowly eroding the idea that we should know all the information we need to complete a task." (Fabio Sergio - freegorifero)

Posted by PJB on November 15, 2002 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

The Definition of Information Architecture

"(...) a few thousand professional information architects prove their value every day in the trenches by contributing to the design of more useful, usable, and desirable systems and products." (Peter Morville - Semantic Studios)

Posted by PJB on November 15, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

An Interview with Dr. Jakob Nielsen, Usability Expert

"Trust is a huge problem. Users are justifiably very cynical about their privacy and about the extent to which they can trust Web sites." (Meryl K. Evans and Nick Finck - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted by PJB on November 15, 2002 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Design: The Design and Evaluation of Signs and Printed Material

Table of Contents (Harm Zwaga and Ronald Easterby eds. 1984)

Posted by PJB on November 13, 2002 | Classification: Classics | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Flash Satay

Embedding Flash while supporting standards (Drew McLellan - A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on November 13, 2002 | Classification: Technology | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Introducing Interaction Design

"(...) the first of a twelve-article, twelve-month series devoted to the field of interaction design." (Bob Baxley - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on November 12, 2002 | Classification: Interaction design | Comments (1) | Permalink | TrackBack

Web Ontology Language (OWL) - Guide Version 1.0

"(...) to provide a language that can be used to describe the classes and relations between them that are inherent in Web documents and applications." (W3C)

Posted by PJB on November 11, 2002 | Classification: Technology | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar Question

"The average mid-sized company could gain $5 million per year in employee productivity by improving its intranet design to the top quartile level of a cross-company intranet usability study. The return on investment? One thousand percent or more." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on November 11, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Spanking Jakob Nielsen

"Jakob Nielsen makes some fantastic claims about intranet usability that must be weighed against other business needs and constraints." (John Rhodes - WebWord)

Posted by PJB on November 11, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications

Complete styles and guidelines for publishing a variety of technical publications. (Microsoft)

Posted by PJB on November 11, 2002 | Classification: TechCom | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Flash MX Accessibility Issues

"When usability expert Jacob Neilson proclaimed Flash was 99 percent bad, he was right on at least one account: accessibility." (Jason M. Perry - O'Reilly Network)

Posted by PJB on November 11, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

An Interview With Douglas Bowman of Wired News

"The new design clearly shows what some experts have been saying: that standards-based design can be visually compelling and preserve the interface conventions we've come to expect from Web pages." (Eric A. Meyer - DevEdge)

Posted by PJB on November 08, 2002 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Architecture Overload

"I was stunned at the number of new books in these fields. There were over 20 new titles on the book shelf about information architecture, usability, interface design, web usability, flash usability, and accessibility." (David Crow)

Posted by PJB on November 08, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

When Good Interfaces Go Crufty

"(...) over the past 20 years, I've noticed that cruft has been appearing in computer interfaces. And few people are trying to fix it." (Matthew Thomas)

Posted by PJB on November 08, 2002 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Small Pieces Loosely Joined

"{a unified theory of the web}" (David Weinberger)

Posted by PJB on November 07, 2002 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Understanding Your Web Audience

"A detailed understanding of your target audience provides you with an effective metric by which to evaluate all your design decisions: structure (content and organization), visual presentation (personality and tone), and interaction (functionality and behavior)." (Luke Wroblewski - Creative Behavior)

Posted by PJB on November 07, 2002 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

The Ten Reasons Ease Of Use Doesn't Happen On Engineering Projects

"(...) I've tried to catalog the different reasons why projects didn't result in easy to use designs." (Scott Berkun - uiweb.com)

Posted by PJB on November 06, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Accountability of Accessibility and Usability

"(...) the cardinal sin of Web accessibility: they did not use the ALT attribute for images that convey information." (Anitra Pavka - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted by PJB on November 06, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Comments on the Asilomar Institute

"(...) are there any links out there today that you can recommend that explain exactly what IA is?" (Metafilter)

Posted by PJB on November 06, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Architecture: From Craft to Profession

"(...) most of my students are truly children of the Information Age." (Earl Morrogh - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on November 05, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Coming of Age

"As the information glut moves more and more online, our skills and expertise are fundamental to the success of an audience intent on finding the information they seek." (Erin Malone - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on November 05, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Beyond Usability

"After being neglected for years, suddenly people are talking about it like they've found the Holy Grail or something." (Grokdotcom)

Posted by PJB on November 04, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Research Network for the New Economy

DRAFT Case Study Proposal for IA Summit 2003 (Anne Galloway)

Posted by PJB on November 04, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

INUSE 6.2: Handbook of User-Centered Design

"This handbook on user-centered design is intended for those responsible for commissioning or carrying out usability work during the development of interactive systems." (Nectar)

Posted by PJB on November 01, 2002 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

The Design of Sites

Patterns, principles, and processes for crafting a customer-centered web experience (Nectar)

Posted by PJB on November 01, 2002 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Donald A. Norman on 'Emotion & Design'

"The emphasis will be primarily upon product design, with a discussion of how affect serves as a computationally 'weak method' that provides a useful, generalizable mechanism for dealing with the unexpected." (MIT Media Lab - Nov. 7, 2002)

Posted by PJB on November 01, 2002 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Architecture Leadership Seminar

"This advanced, full-day seminar is designed for information architecture and user experience leaders who wish to engage the most important and intractable problems faced by the architects of today’s information systems." (ASIS&T IA Summit - March 20, 2003)

Posted by PJB on November 01, 2002 | Classification: Events | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack

The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture

"(...) serves to advance the design of shared information environments. We support a global community infrastructure that connects people, ideas, content, and tools. Through research, education, advocacy and community service, we promote excellence within our field and build bridges to related disciplines and organizations." (About AIfIA)

Posted by PJB on November 01, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink | TrackBack