October 2005

Information Architecture 2.0

"The consequent explosion of content and functionality on the Web and the new ways in which we're making use of Web content has recast the role of the information architect. This article explores the information architect's evolving responsibilities in light of the changes we're experiencing on the Web." (Dan Brown - UXmatters Preview)

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

In praise of web experts

"People like experts because people like clear answers and rules. On the Web, Jakob Nielsen is seen as an expert. It's one of the reasons he's so popular." (Gerry McGovern)

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

Incompetent Email Marketing = Lost Future Opportunities

"Lack of personalization made an email newsletter completely useless to the recipient, damaging long-term customer relationship efforts." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on October 30, 2005 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Mobile Web Design: Tips & Techniques

"This article attempts to present technical advice on a superficial level. Some tips may surprise the reader; others may disappoint. But let's be clear about one thing: We're not aiming to publish a replete guide to advanced mobile development, but rather a starting point for mobile development - both practical and ambitious. Hence, a superficial treatment of the topic." (Cameron Moll - Authentic Boredom)

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

Visual Complexity: A visual exploration on mapping networks

"(...) a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of discipline s, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web." (Manuel Lima)

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

Is Your Homepage Immature?

"Every large corporation has a marketing strategy that outlines what it wants to say to customers, but many of them still aren’t using their homepages effectively to highlight that message." (Indy Young - Adaptive Path)

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

ImproViz: Visual Explorations of Jazz Improvizations

"Viewing the Miles Davis composition All Blues through the lens of ImproViz illustrates the contrasting melodic and harmonic styles of three musicians: Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and John Coltran." (Jon Snydal - Offhand Designs) - courtesy of jasonkottke

Posted by PJB on October 26, 2005 | Classification: InfoViz | Comments (0) | Permalink

Intranet Portals Get Streamlined

"An analysis of intranet portals found slimmer information architectures and a renewed emphasis on fresh content and useful applications. Past findings, including those on role-based personalization, were confirmed" (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on October 24, 2005 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Graphic design plays a minor role on the Web

"The best websites are highly functional. They are task-focused. Graphic design has an important, though limited role. Don't try and force the Web to be what it's not." (Gerry McGovern)

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

Emotion and the sense of presence in HCI design

"Emotion is becoming accepted as an important ingredient of successful humancomputer interaction design. It has always been important in design, but as a discipline rooted in the methods and mindset of the cognitive psychology of the 70s and 80s, HCI has been slow to accept that affect (as exhibited in feelings of happiness or anxiety) is an essential component of reasoning about the world, not an opposing force. Although we may loosely speak of emotion versus reason, both too much and too little emotion will have a negative impact on cognition, with the latter being the more pathological." (John Waterworth - uiGarden.net)

Posted by PJB on October 20, 2005 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink

World Usability Day

A project of the Usability Professionals' Association: Promoting usability concepts and techniques worldwide - "World Usability Day promotes the value of usability engineering, user-centered design,and every user's responsibility to ask for things that work better. The Usabililty Professionals' Association is doing that by encouraging, organizing, and sponsoring 36 hours of activities at the local level around the globe, all occurring on November 3, 2005." (About WUD)

Posted by PJB on October 20, 2005 | Classification: Events | Comments (0) | Permalink

A Sense of Place: The Global and Local in Mobile Communication

"Issues of placelessness, the spatial and social relations created by television's emergence as a dominant medium, have been around since the mid-1980s. With the triumphant march of mobile telephony these issues today appear to gain new significance and are seen in a new light. Social science focussing on mobile communication increasingly recgnizes that the mobile telephone is not only a revolutionary instrument that connects people globally, it is also a powerful tool for connections on a more local scale: an organizer of life in small spaces and communities." (Kristóf Nyiri)

Posted by PJB on October 20, 2005 | Classification: Mobile design | Comments (0) | Permalink

EuroIA mailinglist

One of the results of the first European IA Summit 2005 in Brussels of last weekend is available now. - "The EuroIA mailinglist is the online conversational platform for researchers and practitioners in the field of Information Architecture in an European context." (Peter J. Bogaards) - sponsored by Webtic - Paul Jongsma

Posted by PJB on October 19, 2005 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

The Search Lurch: Have We Become Lazy Googlers or Smarter Web Researchers?

"Now that it's so easy for people to search for anything in a fraction of a second and retrieve content buried in deep links thanks to Google and other high-speed tools such as MSN Search, is this creating a kind of laziness on the part of Web users?" (Garth A. Buchholz)

Posted by PJB on October 19, 2005 | Classification: Search | Comments (0) | Permalink

For Inspiration Only: Thesis

"This research has looked at how designers interact with visual material in the early phases of design and what new tools can do to support this. These questions were addressed by literature reviews and field studies, furthermore several working prototypes have been built, which have been used to gain and demonstrate the knowledge built up during this research." (Ianus Keller - ID-Studiolab) - courtesy of peterboersma

Posted by PJB on October 19, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Peter Morville: The Tagsonomy interview

"I'm an impatient information architect. I spend no more time organizing than absolutely necessary. (...) With respect to personal information architecture, less is more." (Gene Smith - Tagsonomy)

Posted by PJB on October 19, 2005 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

Information Design: A map to meaning 

"(...) a presentation suggesting that in the most compelling information design, the expression of an idea should form a map to its meaning. This presentation includes collected exhibits and ideas from leading voices on the study of information design and its meaning. The first presentation of this material was given at Abt Associates in Cambridge Massachusetts." (Andrew Maydoney - Sametz Blackstone Associates articles) - courtesy of cph127

Posted by PJB on October 18, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

New Challenges Retreat: Ideas, discussion, and a call to action

"This year's IA Retreat - 'New Challenges in Information Architecture' - took place at the Edith Macy Conference Center, just north of New York City, October 7-9, 2005. Of the many themes discussed at the retreat, those that stood out revolved around the challenges of enterprise information architecture (as in very large enterprises, such as government agencies, and Fortune 100's), cross-cultural IA issues, and designing user experiences for evermore complex, and increasingly less, web-centric systems." (Anders Ramsay - Boxes and Arrows)

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

Information architecture in an European dimension: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats

Presentation from Europe's first information architecture summit - "This talk will take an analytical but subjective approach to the current state-of-affairs of (continental) European IA. The local IA communities of practice, knowledge and interest seem still premature, fragmented and not well-connected. Even if there is such a thing as an European IA community, it lacks a solid identity and definitely a strategy." (Peter J. Bogaards - BogieLand)

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

Closing of the First Phase of the Fall European Tour 2005

"(...) the Europeans have been implementing mobile and trying to work through a means to access information in the environment and context where the information makes sense. Boy, was I right." (Thomas VanderWal - InfoCloud Solutions Inc.)

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

Digital Future: Blogs and Knowledge

Addressing the US Library of Congress - "... provocative, entertaining and truely delightful." (David Weinberger) - courtesy of euansemple

Posted by PJB on October 16, 2005 | Classification: Weblogs | Comments (0) | Permalink

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

"Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on October 16, 2005 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Hurricane Katrina and the Dot Com Bubble

"There has never been more information. And that's exactly the problem. Too much information too quickly published is just as bad as too little." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on October 15, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

EuroIA Blog

"Join the conversation." - Platform for sharing knowledge, ideas, experiences and contacts during the ASIS&T 2005 Euro IA Summit in Brussels: Oct. 15-16, 2005. (EuroIA 2005)

Posted by PJB on October 13, 2005 | Classification: Weblogs | Comments (0) | Permalink

Ambient Findability: Findability Hacks

"(...) excerpt from Mr. Morville's new book, Ambient Findability - Findability precedes usability in the alphabet and on the web you can't use what you can't find." (A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on October 13, 2005 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Authority

"The real upheaval lies just ahead, as a generation of school kids (and their teachers and librarians) struggle to reconcile traditional notions of education and objectivity and authority with the constructivist web of social facts and collective intelligence where folksonomies flourish and the truth is a virus of many colors. I can hardly wait." (Peter Morville)

Posted by PJB on October 12, 2005 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

The best thing about Web 2.0

"Real knowledge and understanding is the product of a co-creation." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted by PJB on October 12, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Usability-driven open platform for mobile government

"The main goal of USE-ME.GOV is to contribute to a Next-Generation Open Service Platform for mobile users that can be shared by networked authorities and institutions (e.g. on a regional scale) in terms of technical infrastructure, information (content) as well as a framework for commercial exploitation." (Contact use-me.gov) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted by PJB on October 12, 2005 | Classification: Mobile design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Selecting a content management system 

"The biggest risk is selecting the wrong product." (James Robertson - Step Two Design)

Posted by PJB on October 12, 2005 | Classification: Content management | Comments (0) | Permalink

Co-Experience

"This dissertation introduces an approach to understanding user experience that departs from the more traditional user or product centric approaches. This approach, co-experience, builds on an understanding of experience as social interaction. It focuses on how in and through social interaction experiences and their products come to find their place in people's lives." (Katja Battarbee - University of Art and Design Helsinki Dissertations)

Posted by PJB on October 10, 2005 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink

R.I.P. WYSIWYG

"Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on October 10, 2005 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Why is corporate communications seen as fluffy?

"In many organizations, corporate communications doesn't get a lot of respect. The intranet gives a rare opportunity for corporate communications to get the respect it deserves." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on October 09, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

InfoGraphics Seminar Handout 

"I prepared this document as a handout to my October 2005 seminars on Infographic Design to the Visual Communications students at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and the Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay." (Venkatesh Rajamanickam: venkatra at gmail dot com)

Posted by PJB on October 08, 2005 | Classification: Information graphics | Comments (0) | Permalink

Content is King No More: Web 2.0 is About Interaction

"(...) the thing that is most glaring and poignant to me is the seismic shift in importance from a focus on content and information to behavior and interaction." (Dirk Knemeyer) - Like interacting with other humans, a combination of structure ('parts and wholes'), content ('thoughts'), and form ('behaviour') is what makes a digital environment 'tick'.

Posted by PJB on October 07, 2005 | Classification: Interaction design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Putting people first

"Daily insights in the burgeoning field of experience design, user experience and innovation." (Mark Vanderbeeken)

Posted by PJB on October 06, 2005 | Classification: Weblogs | Comments (0) | Permalink

The Design Encyclopedia

"The design encyclopedia is a wiki, which means that any registered user can add, delete or change any of the information on the encyclopedia. (...) The purpose of the design encyclopedia is to build a resource where anything and everything is explained through its design implications and background." (UnderConstruction) - courtesy of antenna

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

Cross-Disciplinary Exchanges

An interview with Donald A. Norman - "One of the interesting things about the iPod, one of the things that people love most about it is not the technology; it's the box it comes in. That's because Apple really understood that the iPod was not about the iPod; it was about the entire experience: the way they design their stores, the box it comes in, the iTunes website, the ease of getting the user back and forth." (Mark Zachry - RedNova News) - courtesy of usernomics

Posted by PJB on October 05, 2005 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005

"The oldies continue to be goodies - or rather, baddies - in the list of design stupidities that irked users the most in 2005." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on October 03, 2005 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

University websites come of age

"University websites have matured significantly over the last 2-3 years. There are fewer pictures of buildings and smiling faces, and greater focus on helping students decide why they should enroll." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on October 02, 2005 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink