March 2005

The Feynman-Tufte Principle

A visual display of data should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van - "(...) information displays should be documentary, comparative, causal and explanatory, quantified, multivariate, exploratory, and skeptical." (Michael Shermer - Scientific American) - courtesy of kottke

Posted by PJB on March 31, 2005 | Classification: Information graphics | Comments (0) | Permalink

The importance of seduction and curiosity

"The brain is tuned to mirror the behavior of others, so if your passionate curiosity is stronger than the other person's passive disinterest, you have a chance to 'infect' the other person. It's not just that you know what's exciting, wonderful, fascinating about a topic -- it's that you genuinely feel it, and this is reflected in the way you talk about it, not just the actual content of your words. Passion breaks through." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted by PJB on March 31, 2005 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink

Interaction Design Encyclopedia

"If you feel something is missing, please suggest a term or contribute to the encyclopedia. You can get notified when additions are made to the encyclopedia! You may also track changes in the Encyclopedia using the RSS News Feed Service. There are currently 30 entries in the encyclopedia (86 under preparation)." (Mads Soegaard) - courtesy of guuui

Posted by PJB on March 31, 2005 | Classification: Interaction design | Comments (0) | Permalink

John Jantsch on Corporate Blogging and Referral Marketing

"I interviewed John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing to get the 'how-to' on corporate blogging and referral marketing." (Rok Hrastnik - Marketing Studies Net) - courtesy of theotherblog

Posted by PJB on March 30, 2005 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

What is Information Architecture?

Search results on Information Architecture from Brainboost: Question everything. (Brainboost Answer Engine) - courtesy of iaslash

Posted by PJB on March 30, 2005 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Community Blogging

"Basically I have four sections. I'll talk a wee bit about what constitutes a community. I'm going to rant and rave against the concept of the long tail. I'm going to explore Wittgensteinian theories of meaning. I'm going to talk about distributed network semantics. Now this may sound like it has nothing to do with community, but my intent here is to try to reframe your thoughts on what community is, what community on the web is, and what a community of bloggers is." (Stephen Downes) - courtesy of petervandijck

Posted by PJB on March 28, 2005 | Classification: Weblogs | Comments (0) | Permalink

Evangelizing Usability: Change Your Strategy at the Halfway Point

"The evangelism strategies that help a usability group get established in a company are different from the ones needed to create a full-fledged usability culture." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on March 28, 2005 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Designing Embraceable Change

"Change isn't bad. It can't be. If it were, we'd never have any technology advancement and wouldn't be pleased with our iPods and TiVos. Yet people obviously resist some change. Understanding why change is sometimes embraced and sometimes resisted is critical to successfully introducing new designs." (Jared Spool - User Interface Engineering)

Posted by PJB on March 28, 2005 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Get linked to get found in search engines: Part 2

"Go for quality. Go out and get links, and try to control the words in the links you get. Remember, an easy-to-get link is probably of little value." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on March 27, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Colon classification: An outline with examples

"Notation and examples are taken selectively from: Colon classification. Basic classification: 6th edition / S R Ranganathan -- Sarada Ranganathan endowment for library science: Bangalore: 1960. SRELS has been asked permission of reproducing." (S.R. Ranganathan) - courtesy of petervandijck

Posted by PJB on March 26, 2005 | Classification: Classics | Comments (0) | Permalink

Joseph Konstan on Human-Computer Interaction: Recommender Systems, Collaboration, and Social Good

"A very interesting project. Computer scientists don't always try to change people's social behavior." (ACM Ubiquity)

Posted by PJB on March 25, 2005 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

CPH127: Design + Innovation

"This is a brand spanking new blog about the major influence of design as a motor for innovation, and like wise the other way around. We are neither 100% design-focused nor are we 100% business-focused. Our team consists designers, MBAs, dot-com entrepreneurs and all the other folks you would never expect to be on this kind of blog." (About CPH127) - courtesy of kelake

Posted by PJB on March 24, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

ASIS&T 2005 Information Architecture Summit Presentations

Select the session title to download a presentation. (IA Summit 2005) - courtesy of donnam

Posted by PJB on March 24, 2005 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

How to build a better web browser

"I'm in the lucky minority of people that have actually designed successful browsers, or parts of them, for any length of time, and with Firefox and Opera in the headlines, and the art of browser design becomes important again, I thought I'd write down some of what I know. Its been years since I was a program manager on the Internet Explorer project, but I’ve maintained interests in the design of navigation and searching systems of all kinds: what follows is a rough summary of what I've learned." (Scott Berkun) - courtesy of lawrence lee

Posted by PJB on March 24, 2005 | Classification: Navigation | Comments (0) | Permalink

Information Esthetics: Lecture Series One

"Making data meaningful - this phrase could describe what dozens of professions strive for: Wall Street systems designers, fine artists, advertising creatives, computer interface researchers, and many others. Occasionally something important happens in these practices: a data representation is created that reveals the subject's nature with such clarity and grace that it both informs and moves the viewer. We both understand and care. This is the focus of Information Esthetics." (Chelsea Art Museum) - courtesy of victor lombardi

Posted by PJB on March 23, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

The Consumer Infotronics Industry

"(...) I think that the iPod represents the tip of the iceberg. The iPod heralds the emergence of a new 21st century industry that I will call, for lack of a better set of words, consumer infotronics. The reason why we need a new term to describe this industry (versus calling it a new category) is that it is about going beyond what the consumer electronics industry currently represents." (John Maeda - Simplicity)

Posted by PJB on March 23, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Happy times for IA?

"It's certainly good news for the field, but are we simply in for another boom and bust cycle? Surprise: I'm optimistic. The field seems healthier than it was four years ago for at least a couple reasons: (...)" (Louis Rosenfeld)

Posted by PJB on March 22, 2005 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Component Content Management in Practice

"As the market for content management technology continues to grow, so too do the ways in which organizations seek to use content management. What began as a market focused on web content management has grown to include document management, digital asset management, and records management. What has emerged along with this growth is the use of the umbrella term Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to describe a broad, enterprise-class platform of content management technology that can handle all kinds of content." (Bill Tripp - The Gilbane Report) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted by PJB on March 22, 2005 | Classification: Content management | Comments (0) | Permalink

Experience Cards

IA Summit 2005 Presentation in Montréal - "information architecture experience" (CD Evans - infostyling)

Posted by PJB on March 22, 2005 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Conversation with Richard Saul Wurman

"I had an epiphany at about twenty years of age, a true momentary epiphany. It had nothing to do with making things understandable for the world. It had to do with my own ignorance. Everything comes from that terrifying moment, that milli-second, that terrifying moment of utter truth that I understood that I understood nothing. Understanding what it is like not to understand is the one thing that touches every part of my life, Even at those times when I am engaged in fun, games, frivolity, glitzy stuff and making a fool of myself it always comes from that moment, the moment when I am an empty bucket." (GK VanPatter - NextD Journal 6.1)

Posted by PJB on March 21, 2005 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

Seb's Open Research on the IA Summit 2005

"I am at the Information Architecture Summit, blogging the sessions I'm attending." (Sébastien Paquet)

Posted by PJB on March 20, 2005 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Making Personas More Powerful: Details to Drive Strategic and Tactical Design

"How can something that feels so right be so wrong? Personas ought to be one of the defining techniques in user-focused design. Lots of professionals create them, yet too often the personas end up being too vague to guide a product's focus. They often lack the detail to be useful in guiding low-level design trade-offs. And, as typically done, personas have been too narrowly focused. They often aren’t helpful in identifying the information a user needs or creates. Nor do they have much to say about the sensory and emotional aspects of user experience—the sorts of factors that cause consumers to lust after products like Apple's iPod." (turok - LiveJournal)

Posted by PJB on March 20, 2005 | Classification: Personas | Comments (0) | Permalink

Get linked to get found in search engines

"Search optimization is about getting links. The more links you get to your website, the more likely you are to get into the first page of search engine results." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on March 20, 2005 | Classification: Search | Comments (0) | Permalink

Tags Turning Web Chaos into Categories

"In the quest to organize the Web's information, an emerging approach is putting the power to categorize everything from links to digital photos into the hands of users." (Matt Hicks - eWeek) - courtesy of lawrence lee

Posted by PJB on March 18, 2005 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink

Towards a Toolkit for Interaction Design

"I begin with a definition, and illustrate my approach to partitioning the terrain of interaction design using five conceptual 'lenses'. In so doing, I cover most of what I see as the theoretical roots of interaction design. I then turn to the role of theory in interaction design, and suggest that a good way to begin is to assemble a toolkit of concepts for interaction design that consists of appropriately sized theoretical constructs." (Tom Erickson) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted by PJB on March 17, 2005 | Classification: Interaction design | Comments (0) | Permalink

The IA of Things: Twenty Years Of Lessons Learned

IA Summit 2005 Presentation - "It's the dawn of an age where interactive functionality and information is available and intertwined everywhere. The past two decades have been a pre-dawn period where products, software, environments, functionality, and interaction with information have gradually converged. What lessons have been learned within a single consulting design career during this period, pursuing from the beginning, convergence in these areas?" (James Leftwich) - courtesy of functioning form

Posted by PJB on March 17, 2005 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

The Bloggies 2005: And the winners are...

"The Bloggies are a set of 30 publicly-chosen awards given to weblog writers and those related to weblogs. This is the fifth ceremony (...)"

Posted by PJB on March 17, 2005 | Classification: Weblogs | Comments (0) | Permalink

Animation

"Animation permits the representation of change, including time in the visual equation. In this issue, we review the basic variables of animation and the profit we can extract from its use." (Juan C. Dürsteler - InfoVis!)

Posted by PJB on March 17, 2005 | Classification: InfoViz | Comments (0) | Permalink

Lower-Literacy Users

"Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on March 14, 2005 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Search optimization, not search engine optimization

"Search optimization focuses on how people search. Search engine optimization focuses on how search engines work. Search optimization sees quality web content as its foundation stone." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on March 13, 2005 | Classification: Search | Comments (0) | Permalink

WWW@10 Videos: The Dream and the Reality

"Keynote speeches from the 10th Anniversary of the World Wide Web. September 30 through October 2, 2004 - Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology - Terre Haute, Indiana, USA" (WWW@10 Conference)

Posted by PJB on March 12, 2005 | Classification: Hypertext | Comments (0) | Permalink

d.school: Stanford Institute of Design

"We believe great innovators and leaders need to be great design thinkers. We have a dream about building a place for design at Stanford. We want to build a place where design thinking is the glue that binds people together, a place we call the d.school. We want the d.school to be a place for Stanford students and faculty in engineering, medicine, business, the humanities, and education to learn design thinking and work together to solve big problems in a human centered way. We want it to be a place where people from big companies, start-ups, schools, nonprofits, government, and anyone else who realizes the power of design thinking, can join our multidisciplinary teaching, prototyping, and research." (Stanford University)

Posted by PJB on March 11, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

First and Second Law of Simplicity

"(1) A complex system of many functions can be simplified by carefully grouping related functions. (2) The positive emotional response derived from a simplicity experience has less to do with utility, and more to do with saving time." (John Maeda - Simplicity)

Posted by PJB on March 11, 2005 | Classification: Complexity | Comments (0) | Permalink

IA Summit Folksonomies Panel

"I thought the panel went well overall. Enough friction to keep the discussion interesting, smart presentations from the panelists, and good questions from the audience helped keep things rolling." (Gene Smith - Atomiq)

Posted by PJB on March 11, 2005 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink

Rapid Contextual Design: A How-To Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design

Book Excerpt - "Today companies want to infuse more user data into their processes. But if we analyze the 'right' way to do customer-centered design for any project we may be dismayed at the time and resources it takes. And, companies are also resistant to changing their own development processes. So what to do?" (Karen Holtzblatt et al. - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted by PJB on March 09, 2005 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink

IA Summit 2005 Blog

Weblog of the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit 2005: Crossing Borders (IA Summit 2005)

Posted by PJB on March 09, 2005 | Classification: Weblogs | Comments (0) | Permalink

Information Aesthetics

"Form follows data - Artistic ambient information visualization design weblog." (Andrew Vande Moere)

Posted by PJB on March 08, 2005 | Classification: Weblogs | Comments (0) | Permalink

mSpace: Exploring the New Web

"mSpace helps people build knowledge from exploring those relationships. mSpace does this by offering several powerful tools for organizing an information space to suit a person's interest: slicing, sorting, swapping, infoViews and preview cues." (M.C. Schraefel) - courtesy of nooface

Posted by PJB on March 08, 2005 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink

Getting Your Design Built

"Kim Goodwin spoke about a subject that is of great importance to all digital product designers—getting buy-in for our designs and ensuring that they get built. First, she enumerated various reasons why a product might not get built as designed or even get built at all—some of which are beyond our control—like shifting corporate priorities. However, the substance of her talk was about the many things that we can do to help set the proper scope for our projects and get buy-in for our designs." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - BayDUX)

Posted by PJB on March 07, 2005 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink

Intranets: strategy first, usability second

"More and more intranet teams are buying into the need for usability. However, usability is not a strategy, and without a clear strategy, usability can become a pointless, wasteful and counter-productive exercise." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on March 06, 2005 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

User Experience and the Future of Usability 

A presentation for Usability and User Experience 2005 - "Companies are aggressively trying to seize the minds, hearts, and spirits of people by innovating their products through basic listening and responding." (Dirk Knemeyer - Involution Studios)

Posted by PJB on March 06, 2005 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink

Someone Forgot To Tell Schools That It's The 21st Century

"Are school systems, classrooms and teachers obsolete? No less so than the horse was with the coming of the automobile age (...)" (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted by PJB on March 06, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Use Cases Part II: Taming Scope

"The use case model can be a powerful tool for controlling scope throughout a project's lifecycle. Because a simplified use case model can be understood by all project participants, it can also serve as a framework for ongoing collaboration as well as a visual map of all agreed-upon functionality. It can, therefore, be a precious reference during later negotiations that might affect the project's scope." (Norm Carr and Tim Meehan - A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on March 06, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Visualizing Shared Metadata: The Tag Landscape

"While some continue to debate the usefulness of tag-based folksonomies, others are starting to build abstraction layers on top of a growing body of user-tagged data." - (The Social Software Weblog) - courtesy of langemarks cafe

Posted by PJB on March 03, 2005 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink

Design and Strategy: Nobody Knows Anything

"Clement talked about his experience as president of AIGA and, more recently, his return to Sapient in trying to help them put together a(nother) design practice. Clement, being Clement, thinks in models, and presented two." - (Peter Merholz)

Posted by PJB on March 03, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

The Information Architecture Institute

"(...) a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. Founded in 2002, the Institute has over 600 members in 40 countries. Learn more or join now." - (previously The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture)

Posted by PJB on March 03, 2005 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Jef Raskin The Movie

"Beginning with conversations on interface design and creating a better computer, Our footage reveals a remarkable man who changes the lives of people around him. Passionately described as an inovator with an unfailing moral compass and a gifted educator with an active commitment to play Jef attributes his success in part to a foundation based on music, math and physics." (Dave Burstein) - courtesy of cityofbits

Posted by PJB on March 01, 2005 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink