November 2006

Information Architecture 3.0

"(...) the future's quite bright, especially for information architects who find ways to connect the timeless principles of design and organization with new transmedia models of interaction, co-creation, tagging, and user participation." (Peter Morville - Semantic Studios)

Posted by PJB on November 30, 2006 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Cautions Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens

DRAFT: Chapter 1 of 'The Design of Future Things' - "As our technology becomes more powerful, more in control, its failure at collaboration and communication becomes ever more critical. Collaboration requires interaction and communication. It means explaining and giving reasons. Trust is a tenuous relationship, formed through experience and understanding. With automatic, so-called intelligent devices, trust is sometimes conferred undeservedly." (Donald A. Norman) - courtesy of michelvuijlsteke

Posted by PJB on November 29, 2006 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

Enterprise Information Architecture: A Semantic and Organizational Foundation

"Two key elements distinguish an enterprise IA from a basic IA. The first is the role an EIA plays in the design, development, and maintenance of an enterprise’s semantic infrastructure. The second is the scope and type of projects an EIA can be involved in as they develop applications that use and build on this semantic infrastructure." (Tom Reamy - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on November 29, 2006 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

From Data to Wisdom

An interview with Paco Underhill - "(...) Boxes and Arrows talks with Underhill about what's changed about behavior research, the science of watching people, and new considerations for the design community." (Liz Danzico - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on November 29, 2006 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Information Architecture Is Not Dead ... But It Might Be Stuck

"(...) information architecture is stuck. While this implies a problem with the practice, I’m going to suggest that it really has more to do with the practitioners. The practitioners are stuck and the conversation is not evolving. Not enough of us are getting uncomfortable and knocking down fences to reach out to other people from other fields and engaging in meaningful conversation about design and business problems. The conversation is stuck and we need to evolve." (Scott Weisbrod - Experience Planner)

Posted by PJB on November 28, 2006 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

A Polar Bear for Christmas

"We have done our best to balance old and new. We have addressed emerging technologies while maintaining a focus on fundamentals. And, we have tried to emphasize goals and approaches over specific tactics or technologies. In this way, we hope to provide not only knowledge about information architecture, but a framework that will enable you to learn and unlearn over an extended period of time." (Peter Morville - findability) - chapeau lou and peter

Posted by PJB on November 28, 2006 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Presentations and the 'Laws of Simplicity'

"John Maeda's book, The Laws of Simplicity, is a good quick read. I love the clear presentation of the ideas in the book and the fact that the author imposed a limit of 100 pages for himself, an idea consistent with his Third Law: 'Savings in time feels like simplicity'. This book is not the final word on the topic of, of course, and in fact more is to come soon on the topic by MIT press." (Garr Reynolds - Presentation Zen)

Posted by PJB on November 28, 2006 | Classification: Complexity | Permalink

IA Retreat in Chile

"If you couldn't be there, you can read a nice overview by Jorge Arango, view the photos and presentations, and even watch the movie. Podcasts from the subsequent Encounter will be posted soon." (Peter Morville - findability)

Posted by PJB on November 26, 2006 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Creating Pleasurable Interfaces

Notes and presentation slides - "A special thanks to everyone who made it out to either of these events. As was probably evident, this is a topic I'm somewhat passionate about. And, as is true of any subject dealing with emotions, beauty or pleasure, this is a rich and somewhat subjective discussion. My User Experience Hierarchy of Needs model forms the skeleton of my presentation. Think of it as 'Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs' except for interfaces." (Stephen P. Anderson - poetpainter)

Posted by PJB on November 26, 2006 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

An empirical examination of Wikipedia's credibility

"Wikipedia is an free, online encyclopaedia which anyone can add content to or edit the existing content of. The idea behind Wikipedia is that members of the general public can add their own personal knowledge, anonymously if they wish. Wikipedia then evolves over time into a comprehensive knowledge base on all things. Its popularity has never been questioned, although its authority has. By its own admission, Wikipedia contains errors. A number of people have tested Wikipedia’s accuracy using destructive methods, i.e. deliberately inserting errors." (First Monday 11.11)

Posted by PJB on November 25, 2006 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture

"But the fact is that IA is a theory about the inherent structure of information - the architecture of information - and if we are moving away from that we should call it something else. Relationship Architecture, perhaps?" (Joshua Porter - bokardo)

Posted by PJB on November 21, 2006 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Interaction Frontiers 06: Conference Report

"On June 16, 2006, Interaction Frontiers was held at the Bicocca University, in Milano, Italy." - Speakers included Dirk Knemeyer, Matteo Penzo, Fabio Sergio, Christian Peter, Leandro Agrò, Dario Nardi, Andrea Benassi, Francesco Di Nocera, Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Antonio Rizzo, and Nathan Shedroff. (Laura Caprio - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on November 21, 2006 | Classification: Events | Permalink

Improving User Workflows with Single-Page User Interfaces

"Over the last two years, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have been a hot topic of discussion. While the sheen has already begun to wear off the buzzword Ajax a bit among Web application designers, RIAs are bigger than ever with our clients and their customers. Everyone seems to love slider-based filtering, drag and drop, fisheye menus, and auto-completion for input fields. Web application designs that include none of these typical Ajax features are not well received. Sometimes, one gets the feeling that Web developers implement richness just for the sake of making a Web site and the company that commissions it look cool. Obviously, user experience design should be about a lot more than creating cool controls." (Joost Willemsen - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on November 21, 2006 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy

"People have been trying to classify and organize information for thousands of years. There are many examples of cataloged items in ancient repositories, including items in the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Taxonomy arose as an attempt to organize information about plants and animals in the physical world, and Aristotle is often considered the father of classification or taxonomy. In his Categories, he names Substances (nouns) and determines the nine distinctive things that can be said about a particular thing. How we ultimately name something reflects the category to which we assign it. Through the development of categories, one is trying to answer the question, 'What is it?' Taxonomic methodology has also become important in mathematical set theory through discussions of set, class, aggregate, and collection. Neo-Aristotelian realists are as interested today in taxonomy as they are in ontology. Accurate classification is important in most, if not all, disciplines. In today's networked world of digital information, classification has become very important. One gathers, collects, and shares resources, making the organization of databases and websites crucial. Items that are different or strange can become a barrier to networking. Therefore, with the advent of the Internet, structure and consistency of classification or indexing schemes has taken on a new relevancy." (Elaine Peterson - D-Lib Magazine November 2006) / Replies by Thomas vanderWal and David Weinberger - courtesy of thomasvanderwal

Posted by PJB on November 20, 2006 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink

Digital Divide: The Three Stages

"The Internet can be an empowering tool that lets people find good deals, manage vendors, and control their finances and investments. But it can just as easily be an alienating environment where people are cheated. Members of the Internet elite don't realize the extent to which less-skilled users are left out of many of the advancements they cheer and enjoy. Ultimately, I'm extremely optimistic about the economic divide, which is vanishing rapidly in industrialized countries. The usability divide will take longer to close, but at least we know how to handle it -- it's simply a matter of deciding to do so. I'm very pessimistic about the empowerment divide, however, which I expect will only grow more severe in the future." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on November 20, 2006 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Creative Generalist Q&A: Jane Fulton Suri

"By calling it the 'empathic economy' I'm emphasizing that part of the inspiration and motivation for innovation that comes from creativity sparked by emotional, human, empathic resonance with other people's conditions, not only the more traditional functional analyses of interdependencies that might be more common." (Steve Hardy - Creative Generalist) - courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Posted by PJB on November 17, 2006 | Classification: | Permalink

Bring Your Personas to Life!

"Method acting is just one technique to better enable user-centered design and is not intended to replace observational usability testing, but it can (and should) work in unison. For each observational user test, your actors will gain even more insights to the real world and can refine their method." (Zef Fugaz - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on November 16, 2006 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

Teehan+Lax UX Fund

"The UX Fund is an investment experiment inspired by Jeneanne Rae and the Design Council. We believe that companies that deliver a great user experience will see it reflected in their stock price." (teehan+lax)

Posted by PJB on November 14, 2006 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Ergonosearch: A search engine about usability and accessibility

"Ergonosearch is a vertical search engine about accessibility and usability, indexing only selected quality resources: articles and expert blogs, research papers, specialized lists and forums, official specifications and guidelines." (Sébastien Billard)

Posted by PJB on November 14, 2006 | Classification: Search | Permalink

IA: More Than Just Rearranging Marketing Sites

"We still need IA to make a good user experience. All the Ajax in the world couldn't make a great site if there wasn't a solid structure and organization holding it together. I hope we don't lose sight of that." (Chiara Fox - Adaptive Path)

Posted by PJB on November 14, 2006 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Why am I so angry?

"Despite no longer calling myself an information architect (I've been happy with entrepreneur for some time) and despite a deep affection for the community I've been part of for so long, the lists have been making me crazy. I'd been off them for a while, and had gotten back on for a number of reasons, from promoting the new Boxes and Arrows features to seeing if new trends were emerging in my (former?) profession. And I was shocked at the blatant stupidity I thought I was seeing. Only it wasn't stupidity; I had radically changed my point of view. It was as if I had been enjoying the company of swans for some time, went to sleep and woke up a duck-- and thought the swans looked silly, all long necked and white and show." (C. Wodtke - Elegant Hack)

Posted by PJB on November 12, 2006 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Idea 2006: Provocation and revelation

"In a room full of designers, software developers, architects, museum design professionals, and even a solitary (but charming and Canadian) archaeologist, here was a profound statement of principles about the relationship between designer, information, and audience. So much of the activity around the profession of information architecture and user-centred design in my experience is based on tasks, goals, functions, and flows. It's about attempting to control the user's experience to such a degree that some claim to be able to actually design an experience. And here was a set of principles, first articulated 50 years ago that seemed as relevant and as fresh as anything we'd seen or talked about at the conference." (Gordon Ross - Disseminate) - courtesy of heyblog

Posted by PJB on November 12, 2006 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Making Life Easy

"As more examples are posted to this website we'll be encouraging visitors to cast their votes for what they think are worthy inductees to the Usability Hall of Shame and the Usability Hall of Fame. On 14 November, World Usability Day, we'll be announcing the first ever inductees!" (About MLE) - courtesy of bloug

Posted by PJB on November 09, 2006 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Interview with Jeff Veen

"In this interview, conducted at the Future of Web Apps Summit, Sarah Drew talks to design and UI expert Jeff Veen, Design Lead at Google." (vitamin)

Posted by PJB on November 09, 2006 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

User Experience Research

"Creating a 'killer user experience' owes a lot to understanding subtle aspects such as User Interface Friction, and that is why I believe it is a very important notion. In many ways, creating an excellent user interface has become the digital equivalent of first-class manufacturing: we need it as users, and we need to understand what contributes to it if we are developing technology." (Andreas Pfeiffer - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted by PJB on November 07, 2006 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Creating a Universal Usability Agenda

"How do you keep usability, accessibility, and user experience requirements on track while developing standards? It is part of the very nature of standards to focus on details—and in the process, to sometimes lose sight of the real goals. This is especially true when a standards-making process goes on for a long time, a situation is highly political, or most people are focused on technology issues. For over two years, I’ve worked in just such a situation as part of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) creating federal standards for voting systems in the United States." (Whitney Quesenbery - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on November 07, 2006 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

User Research: Subjectivity and Objectivity in Practice

"There has been an interesting dialogue on the IxD Discussion mailing list in recent months, in which some participants have questioned the need for and benefits of doing user research rather than relying on the experience and intuition of designers. These comments led others to voice concerns about the actual quality of the user research companies are undertaking and the validity of any conclusions they have drawn from the resulting data." (Steve Baty - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on November 07, 2006 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

Book Review: Designing Interfaces

"I must admit that I am not a fan of pattern books in general - especially in the field of design. I've always felt they are excellent sources of inspiration if you’re crafting a quilt or stenciling a wainscot for your living room, but for more involved design activities, I've concluded they are too simplistic—perhaps even limiting. I suspect this opinion was informed by my architecture professor’s intensely negative reaction to Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language and A Timeless Way of Building when they were first published. Years later, when I learned that software engineers were enamored of Alexander's books, and the emergence of software patterns had its basis in Alexander's notion of design patterns, I was bemused and skeptical." (Leo Frishberg - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on November 07, 2006 | Classification: Patterns | Permalink

100 Million Websites

"The early Web's explosive growth rate has slowed, but even the mature Web is still expanding and recently crossed the 100 M websites mark." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on November 06, 2006 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Web Science

"Since its inception, the World Wide Web has changed the ways scientists communicate, collaborate, and educate. There is, however, a growing realization among many researchers that a clear research agenda aimed at understanding the current, evolving, and potential Web is needed. If we want to model the Web; if we want to understand the architectural principles that have provided for its growth; and if we want to be sure that it supports the basic social values of trustworthiness, privacy, and respect for social boundaries, then we must chart out a research agenda that targets the Web as a primary focus of attention." (Tim Berners-Lee et al.)

Posted by PJB on November 03, 2006 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Weblog-mediated relationship: A co-constructed narrative

Draft chapter - "Although weblogs are perceived as low-threshold tools to publish on-line, empowering individual expression in public, there is growing evidence of social structures evolving around weblogs and their influence on norms and practices of blogging. This evidence ranges from voices of bloggers themselves speaking about the social effects of blogging, to studies on specific weblog communities with distinct cultures (e.g. knitting community described by Wei, 2004, or Goth community described by Hodkinson, 2004), to mathematical analysis of links between weblogs indicating that community formation in the blogosphere is not a random process, but an indication of shared interests binding bloggers together (Kumar, Novak, Raghaven & Tomkins, 2003)." (Lilia Efimova & Andrea Ben Lassoued - Mathemagenic)

Posted by PJB on November 01, 2006 | Classification: Weblogs | Permalink

Personas: the podcasts

"Too busy to decide if you want to buy the book? Try the podcasts, which take you on a whirlwind tour of the book's content. The audio comes from a Molecular webinar I did a while back. For the industrious, you can also download the PowerPoint slides used in the webinar (warning: 23MB) for the full audio/visual experience." (Steve Mulder - Practical Personas)

Posted by PJB on November 01, 2006 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

The Web before the Web

"In September 2004 I was a guest-blogger for the French online magazine fluctuat.net. I wrote a series of short posts about what could be called 'the precursors of the Web' - or 'the Web minus the technology' (...). Here is an augmented and updated version in English that will be published in the magazine for art and new media aminima N°20. Some of my pieces are described as well, in relation to these precursors." (Christophe Bruno) - courtesy of brucesterling

Posted by PJB on November 01, 2006 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink