Information design

Working through Screens: 100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work

"(...) a reference for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products." (Jacob Burghardt - Flashbulb Interaction)

Posted on November 18, 2008 | Permalink

The Design Manifesto

"Here is the 'manifesto' of our Global Agenda Council/Design group that came out of an amazing day of discussion in Dubai about the financial/economic crisis and what design thinking can do to help reshape the big issues of the day. It is an excellent summary of the state of art of design and innovation." (Bruce Nussbaum) - courtesy of marcelzwiers

Posted on November 13, 2008 | Permalink

Demand a better ballot

"(...) as I review my sample ballot in preparation for my visit to the voting booth, I am discouraged to find that it includes many of the design flaws that the AIGA's Design for Democracy project has been working to expose and eliminate over the past eight years." (Suzy Thompson - Cooper Journal)

Posted on November 05, 2008 | Permalink

Designing universal knowledge

"Knowledge is power. If one possesses a collection of the ‘universal knowledge’ of the world, one has ultimate power. Establishing comprehensive, global collections of knowledge already fascinated mankind thousands of years ago. Today, modern communication and information technologies offer quick and prompt collecting, high memory capacities and wide-ranging access. In addition, globalization and the Internet advance a mentality which moves away from the local and regional towards the international and universal. Collections of knowledge, such as archives, encyclopaedias, databases and libraries, also follow this trend. They are engaged in a race against time in both the technological and creative area. Their clearly formulated aim is to establish for us a complete and up-to-date collection of 'universal knowledge'." (Gerlinde Schuller - Information Design Studio)

Posted on October 30, 2008 | Permalink

A Timeline of Information History

"This timeline presents significant events and developments in the innovation and management of information and documents from cave paintings (ca 30,000 BC) to the present. Only non-electronic innovations and developments are included (that is, digital and electronic communications are excluded)." (AI3) - courtesy of ruudruissaard

Posted on October 27, 2008 | Permalink

Web 2.0 Expo Presentation Files

"Presentation files will be made available after the session has concluded and the speaker has given us the files. Check back if you don't see the file you're looking for—it might be available later!" (O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo) - courtesy of janjursa

Posted on October 27, 2008 | Permalink

Are Designers also Marketers?

"One interesting supposition bubbled up... when designers are tasked with selling their product they make better products." - No way, José! (Joshua Porter - Bokardo)

Posted on October 16, 2008 | Permalink

Concept Design Tools

"Designers of digital products and services like ourselves can dramatically improve our work by generating more concepts early in our projects. In this article, I'll try to make concept design easier to learn by illustrating three simple tools for generating concepts." (Victor Lombardi - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on October 01, 2008 | Permalink

Activity-Centered Design

"Apparently the forces of interaction design have been facing off against the forces of information architecture in an epic battle for quite some time. I was flying a flag I didn’t know I was flying." (Joshua Porter)

Posted on September 25, 2008 | Permalink

Is Adam Greenfield A Communist Or...?

"Having been to 'The Web and Beyond 2008' and hearing about Adam Greenfield's keynoting at the coming EuroIA Summit in Amsterdam, I started thinking about what he said at the time and what his words could mean. I also took into account two of the other main presenters: Ben Cerveny and Jyri Engeström." (Jeroen Elstgeest)

Posted on September 25, 2008 | Permalink

LIFT Talks in Video

"This page contains all the LIFT speeches that have been recorded over the years." (LIFT Conference)

Posted on September 09, 2008 | Permalink

Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer

"Since at least Richard Saul Wurman's 1996 book Information Architects>, architecture has been the primary metaphor for how 'those who build websites' think about what we do. By adding a new metaphor to our theoretical toolboxes, we can gain a richer, more nuanced understanding of the way that we inhabit cyberspace. This enhanced apprehension of the medium should enable us to create websites that better serve our users." (Aaron Rester - A List Apart)

Posted on August 26, 2008 | Permalink

Is the Future of the Internet the Future of Knowledge?

"US-based panel speakers Lawrence M. Sanger, PhD and Andrew Keen discuss issues of legitimacy, credibility, regulation and censorship on the Internet. What role do truth, trust and expertise have to play in the creation and dissemination of knowledge and news through the Internet? What (or who) should we believe and why? Is the Internet's role in shaping knowledge creation and dissemination broadly a force for good? Doesn't participation educate? Doesn't such an array of easily accessible knowledge and information have a potentially democratising effect? Should knowledge and news production by non-professionals on the Internet be limited in any way? This panel discussion was part of the Weidenfeld Scholars' Speaker Series in Oxford, sponsored by the Weidenfeld Institute for Strategic Dialogue (London) and organized in collaboration with the OII." (Oxford Internet Institute)

Posted on August 11, 2008 | Permalink

Adaptive Path explores the future of the browser

"Aurora is a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series. Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios." (Mark Vanderbeeken - Experientia)

Posted on August 05, 2008 | Permalink

In search of a beautiful mind

Video included - "He was long a jewel of the MIT faculty. Now, after a devastating brain injury, mathematician Seymour Papert is struggling bravely to learn again how to think like, speak like, be like the man of genius he was." (Linda Matchan - The Boston Globe)

Posted on July 29, 2008 | Permalink

Better Ballots

"The notorious butterfly ballot that Palm Beach County, Florida election officials used in the 2000 election is probably the most infamous of all election design snafus. It was one of many political, legal, and election administration missteps that plunged a presidential election into turmoil and set off a series of events that led to, among other things, a vast overhaul of the country’s election administration, including the greatest change in voting technology in United States history." (Whitney Quesenbery et al.)

Posted on July 24, 2008 | Permalink

An activity-theory-based model to analyse Web application requirements

"Few proposals for modelling and developing Web applications, deal with how to properly elicit and represent Web application requirements. Web applications introduce unique characteristics such as navigation that are not properly considered at the requirements level. In this paper, we seek to improve on improve on existing methods through the use of cultural-historical activity theory." (Lorna Uden et al. - Information Research 13.2)

Posted on June 22, 2008 | Permalink

Cautious Cars and Cantankerous Kitchens 

"What does it mean, asks Don Norman in his provocative lecture when our automobiles get frightened, when our refrigerator won't let us eat that nice piece of pie, and when our homes detect our moods and play music they think will cheer us up? And why, asks Norman, does he obey his car when it asks him to slow down, but not his wife? In his provocative and witty talks, Norman examines the future of devices we may all have to live with, even if they do not serve us the way they are intended. Some of these devices are already upon us while the others are still in the planning stage - that is, unless we can somehow turn the tables and get the engineers and designers to switch from building stuff just because they can, to building stuff because we need and want them to." (Donald A. Norman - From Business To Buttons 2008)

Posted on June 20, 2008 | Permalink

Modeling Portals for Cultural Landscapes

"A great variety of Web sites displaying cultural aspects of landscapes exist today. Although built on different design patterns, all these Web sites have to cope with the typical problem of creating a concise but comprehensive representation of a variety of cultural resources within a framework of time and space. In this paper we discuss currently predominant but very different approaches, ranging from an historical GIS and a wiki with Google maps to illustrated HTML-documents and Flash-based visual narratives. We propose a model that identifies generic requirements for spatiotemporal cultural heritage Web sites. The model helps to understand how well different implementation environments suit various objectives. The model is applied to our own cultural landscape portal on the region around the Vecht, a small river which runs from the city of Utrecht to the north, at both sides fringed by a rich historical landscape." (Leen Breure et al. - Museums and the Web 2008)

Posted on June 20, 2008 | Permalink

Sketching in Code: the Magic of Prototyping

"Over the last year, I've noticed more and more conversations about prototyping as a method of approaching web application development. Beyond casual conversations, prototyping has also increasingly been the topic of blog posts or subject matter for conference presentations. The reasons for this increased interest include a laundry list of benefits that prototyping can bring to the process of developing compelling web applications. Ranging from increased collaboration to more effective solutions, these benefits have made prototyping a valuable new approach to consider for your next project." (David Verba - A List Apart)

Posted on June 19, 2008 | Permalink

International Address Fields in Web Forms

"As enablers of online conversations between businesses and customers, Web forms are often responsible for gathering critical information—email addresses for continued communications, mailing addresses for product shipments, and billing information for payment processing to name just a few. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that one of the most common questions I get asked about Web form design is: How do I deal with international addresses?" (Luke Wroblewski - UXmatters)

Posted on June 09, 2008 | Permalink

Better Bills

"The bill is a cornerstone communication in the customer experience, especially when it comes to billing for services. Customers want to easily understand and pay their bills, and businesses want to get paid on time. One would think a business would value the bill enough to invest in a thoughtful design. Yet many bills are poorly designed, causing needless confusion and frustration for customers and businesses alike—not to mention expensive customer service and customer churn. To encourage forward progress in the design of bills, this column profiles three common types of bill readers, discusses nine tips for improving bills, and notes some common implementation challenges." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted on June 09, 2008 | Permalink

Design Coding

"Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration (...)"
(Tasty Blog Snack)

Posted on May 19, 2008 | Permalink

What is Design?

"Since the word 'design' means many things to many people, let's define design as seen from a usability consultant's perspective." (Frank Spiller - Demystifying Usability)

Posted on April 28, 2008 | Permalink

Information Design = Complexity + Interdisciplinarity + Experiment

"Information design is the transfer of complex data to, for the most part, two-dimensional visual representations that aim at communicating, documenting and preserving knowledge. It deals with making entire sets of facts and their interrelations comprehensible, with the objective of creating transparency and eliminating uncertainty." (Gerlinde Schuller - AIGA)

Posted on April 22, 2008 | Permalink

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe

"In this companion to last year's EMC-sponsored white paper, IDC again calibrates the size (bigger than first thought) and the growth (faster than expected) of the digital universe through 2011. IDC also explores new dimensions of the digital universe (e.g., the impact of specific industries on the digital universe; your digital shadow) and discusses the implications for individuals, organizations, and society. The tools are in place - from Web 2.0 technologies and terabyte drives to unstructured data search software and the Semantic Web - to tame the digital universe and turn information growth into economic growth." (EMC)

Posted on April 16, 2008 | Permalink

The Super Bowl and Information Design?

"The truth is, really effective design should leave people wondering what the big deal is. Here’s the irony, clients expect things that cost lots of money and take lots of time to seem like they did. To look complex or shiny. But the really great designs, the ones that break through and solve the real problems, will often be the most underwhelming. If there are lots of fancy bells and whistles and animations, be very concerned. That’s probably novelty. Not good design. Look at the iPod, basic box, right? However, the simplest designs are often the most difficult to design. How many sites get the basic things wrong?" (Stephen P. Anderson - poetpainter)

Posted on April 16, 2008 | Permalink

The Web Beyond the Desktop

"In the desktop space we've had decades of evolving user interface best practices that work reasonably well across platforms and browsers. In the device space, many of those bets are off due to their drastically different nature." (David Shea - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on April 07, 2008 | Permalink

Finding is the new advertising

"Don't they get it? Don't they understand that a great and growing number of us hate traditional advertising? That we find it at best annoying and irrelevant, and at worst insulting and manipulative? By 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990 (...)" (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on March 31, 2008 | Permalink

We Tried To Warn You: The Organizational Architecture of Failure

"There are many kinds of failure in large, complex organizations – breakdowns occur at every level of interaction, from interpersonal communication to enterprise finance. Some of these failures are everyday and even helpful, allowing us to safely and iteratively learn and improve communications and practices. Other failures – what I call large-scale – result from accumulated bad decisions, organizational defensiveness, and embedded organizational values that prevent people from confronting these issues in real time as they occur." (Peter Jones - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on March 20, 2008 | Permalink

What Is Your Mental Model?

"To coincide with the release of her new book, Indi Young talks about the power of the mental model and how it came about. She also shows how it can grow over time and help your organization avoid strategic blindspots." (Chris Baum - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on February 14, 2008 | Permalink

Why Design?

"Legendary designer Philippe Starck -- with no pretty slides behind him -- spends 17 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question "Why design?" Along the way he drops brilliant insights into the human condition; listen carefully for one perfectly crystallized motto for all of us, genius or not. Yet all this deep thought, he cheerfully admits, is to aid in the design of a better toothbrush." (TED.com)

Posted on December 05, 2007 | Permalink

The Web That Wasn't

"For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever really known. It's almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP. But in the years leading up to Tim Berners-Lee's world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative systems that often bore little resemblance to the Web as we know it today. In this presentation, author and information architect Alex Wright will explore the heritage of these almost-forgotten systems in search of promising ideas left by the historical wayside." (YouTube)

Posted on November 30, 2007 | Permalink

idX: Information Design eXchange 

"What information designers know and can do (...) Development of International Core Competencies and Student and Faculty Exchange in Information Design within the EU/US Cooperation Programme in Higher Education and Vocational Education and Training." (IIID)

Posted on November 28, 2007 | Permalink

The Language of Graphics

"This study presents a framework for the analysis of the visual language of graphic representations. Diagrams, maps, charts and symbols, from ancient inscriptions to computer visualizations, are examined with respect to visual grammar and principles of interpretation. The issues explored include the different roles that a graphic constituent may play within a representation, the nesting of graphic structures and the nature of meaningful space." (Yuri Engelhardt)

Posted on November 26, 2007 | Permalink

A review of Edward Tufte's 'Beautiful Evidence'

"I have always been, and still am, a great fan of Edward Tufte's work, and I feel almost a bit embarrassed about some of the sections of Beautiful Evidence from which I have quoted above. Abducting Tufte's own words to express this feeling of embarrassment, few things are more appalling than listening to inept and specious arguments made by one’s allies." (Yuri Engelhardt)

Posted on November 26, 2007 | Permalink

Understanding Web Design

"We get better design when we understand our medium. Yet even at this late cultural hour, many people don’t understand web design. Among them can be found some of our most distinguished business and cultural leaders, including a few who possess a profound grasp of design—except as it relates to the web. (....) Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity." (Jeffrey Zeldman - A List Apart)

Posted on November 22, 2007 | Permalink

It Depends: ID – Principles and Guidelines  

"Information Design is a multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional, and worldwide consideration. It is not possible to develop a number of firm message design rules telling the information designer exactly how to best design a message and develop information materials. However, based on research it is possible to formulate several ID-principles and then develop a number of guidelines for the design of effective and efficient messages and information materials." (Rune Pettersson - International Institute for Information Design)

Posted on November 09, 2007 | Permalink

Rethinking Collections

Libraries and librarians in an open age - "Open access, one of the most important of the potentials unleashed by the combination of the electronic medium and the World Wide Web, is already much more substantial in extent that most of us realize. More than 10 percent of the world’s scholarly peer–reviewed journals are fully open access; this does not take into account the many journals offering hybrid open choice, free back access, or allowing authors to self–archive their works. Scientific Commons includes more than 16 million publications, nearly twice as much content as Science Direct. Meanwhile, even as we continue to focus on the scholarly peer–reviewed journal article, other potentials of the new technology are beginning to appear, such as open data and scholarly blogging. This paper examines the library collection of the near and medium future, suggests that libraries and librarians are in a key position to lead in the transition to an open age, and provides specific suggestions to aid in the transition." (Heather Morrison - First Monday 12.10)

Posted on November 06, 2007 | Permalink

Think from the Center – Design for the Edge 

"How will applications like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word exist five to ten years from now? Will internet appliances like the iPhone truly change the way everyones accesses the web? Will browser-based web applications truly look and behave more like their desktop counterparts in the near future? Will an eTicket kiosk ever completely replace the human being behind the counter? Are rich internet applications built using Adobe AIR simply a fad? What more will the cell phone be capable of in the near future?" (Andrei Michael Herasimchuk - Design by Fire Conference 2007)

Posted on November 02, 2007 | Permalink

Business Needs Design, Now!

"While I've spoken publicly on information architecture, interaction design, and interface related topics, behind the scenes I spend much more of my time focusing on design as it relates to business. Corner me for more than five minutes and the conversation will inevitably trend toward this larger, more strategic view of Design (...)" (Stephen P. Anderson - Poetpainter)

Posted on October 25, 2007 | Permalink

Scalable Design

"You've spent the last six months toiling away at a product design. The last few weeks were especially rough—tying up loose edge cases, closing out bugs, polishing up interaction and visual design details. And now your product has launched, so its time for some well deserved rest, right? (...) Your seemingly elegant design begins to bloat with features, tear under the pressure of localization, and nearly keel over under the weight of new content that pushes it to its breaking point. Before long you give up. It's time to redesign—again." (Luke Wroblewski - UXmatters)

Posted on October 09, 2007 | Permalink

MIT's 'clutter detector' could cut confusion

"The danger of clutter - especially on a visual screen - is that it causes confusion that affects how well we perform tasks. To that end, visual clutter is a challenge for fighter pilots picking out a target, for people seeking important information in a user interface, and for web site and map designers, among others." (MIT news) - courtesy of maria acosta

Posted on October 05, 2007 | Permalink

Information Design of the New Web

"People are changing the way that they consume online information, as well as their expectations about its delivery. The social nature of the Web brings with it an expectation of interaction with information and modern Web design is reflecting that. There are now alternate forms of navigation including the ability to browse by user, tag clouds, tabbed navigation etc. Advances in technology along with these shifts in user expectations are affecting the way that information is laid out on a webpage. Today's websites are aiming for intuitive and usable interfaces which are continuously evolving in response to user needs. Website designers are approaching information design differently and designing simple, interactive websites which incorporate advancements in Web interface design, current Web philosophies, and user needs. Information design for the New Web is simple, it is social, and it embraces alternate forms of navigation." (Ellyssa Kroski - InfoTangle)

Posted on September 25, 2007 | Permalink

Getting A Form's Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Applications (Part 1)

"Although I have focused solely on financial applications, this does not mean that you can't use these strategies to improve the usability of the forms outside of the banking domain. As usability practitioners, we need to first and foremost understand the user’s intentions and expectations, in order to provide an online experience that accommodates them.'” (Afshan Kirmani - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on August 30, 2007 | Permalink

All The Knowledge of the World

"A documentary about Paul Otlet, often considered the father of information management, narrated by W. Boyd Rayward, his biographer. In the late 1800s and early 1900s Otlet pioneered the field of what we today call information science, but what he called documentation. A hundred years before the development of the Internet, Otlet used terms like web of knowledge, link, and knowledge network to describe his vision for a central repository of all human knowledge. In English and French. Produced for Dutch television in 1998." - See also Françoise Levie's documentary film 'The Man Who Wanted To Classify The World' (€ 28 plus shipping and handling) - (Internet Archive)

Posted on August 23, 2007 | Permalink

Alex Wright, The Deep History of the Information Age

"Alex Wright showed an astonishing video of how Paul Otlet's distributed telephone-plus-screen sysem worked." (Stewart Brand - Long Now Foundation)

Posted on August 23, 2007 | Permalink

The Politics of Design by Paul Rand

"It is no secret that the real world in which the designer functions is not the world of art, but the world of buying and selling." (Dexo Design) - courtesy of usernomics

Posted on August 16, 2007 | Permalink

Home Page Design

"It is time to review a company home page design. There are a number of stakeholders involved in home page design, and each of them wants a piece of the home page real estate. Are there questions you can ask before approaching home page design that can move it beyond the influence of specific stakeholders in the company toward a common vision? Are there tips to consider when designing a home page? This is article will help you better understand how to approach home page design." (Daniel Szuc - UXmatters)

Posted on August 15, 2007 | Permalink

User Assistance Walkthroughs: Helping Best Practices Emerge

"There is an astonishing amount of disbelief that the users of web pages have learned to scroll and that they do so regularly. Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won't scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters)

Posted on July 24, 2007 | Permalink

Quiet Structure

"One of the basic, overriding elements featured in CNN's new website design and layout is something I like to call quiet structure. Quiet structure is achieved when you de-emphasize the structural elements; the containing boxes, structural lines, bullets, structural color elements, etc. and bring a rhythmical consistency to the layout. The result is that the content becomes more conspicuous and the overall clarity of presentation is greatly enhanced." (Andy Rutledge - Design View)

Posted on July 09, 2007 | Permalink

Yes, design can make you happy

VIDEO - "Analyzing a list of things that have made him happy, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister realized that almost half of the items were in some way related to design. In this intensely personal talk, he shares the details of some of those moments, and gives props to three artists whose work has had a positive impact on his world. Concluding with some examples of his own work, Sagmeister offers a real insight into his aesthetic and philosophy of work -- and life." (TED Talks) - courtesy of 43folders

Posted on July 05, 2007 | Permalink

Audio interview with David Sless

"Here in conversation with Conrad Taylor, he explains how for him information only has a meaning within a context; how information designers improve data collection and presentation by redesigning pathological forms and statements; the historical roots and ethical stance of the information design movement; how the automated production of text layouts from computer systems (bank statements, dynamic Web pages) calls for a closer relationship between professionals in IT and design; and how all designers of information systems have an obligation to use benchmarking and testing to prove that they are making things better. David also explains his philosophy of design with reference to an approach to linguistics that emphasises pragmatics rather than semantics and syntactics; the later thought of Wittgenstein; an understanding of language as a collaboratively designed artefact; and Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas about the relationship between reader and text." (Radio KIDMM)

Posted on June 26, 2007 | Permalink

The Minister of Information

"If this messy world is becoming easier to understand, thank Edward Tufte." (New York Magazine) - courtesy of kottke

Posted on June 14, 2007 | Permalink

Design is Not Art, Redux

"That's a big difference between design and art. We can measure the results of design because it's meant to solve a problem. We can see if the problem has been resolved or lessened in some way. With Art we can't do that… other than some subjective 'Do you like it?'." (Joshua Porter - Bokardo)

Posted on June 14, 2007 | Permalink

Form Development Best Practice Slides

"As a number of people have asked about form development best practices in the comments on this site. I thought it would be useful to include Aaron Gustafson's 'Learning to Love Forms' talk from WebVisions 2007. The big news is that Aaron has agreed to lend his expertise to my upcoming book and will be writing a 'perspective' on Web form development best practices." (LukeW - Rosenfeld Media)

Posted on June 11, 2007 | Permalink

The Anatomy of a Help File: An Iterative Approach

"This article presents an approach to Help file design that focuses on creating a task-centered user experience and accommodates an iterative development strategy." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters)

Posted on May 23, 2007 | Permalink

Dynamic Help in Web Forms

"Many Web application designers strive to reduce the amount of instructional text that appears in the user interfaces they create. A likely part of their motivation is the perception that, if explaining how to use something requires too much instruction, it probably isn’t that easy to use and, therefore, has room for improvement in its design. (...)" (Luke Wroblewski - UXmatters)

Posted on May 23, 2007 | Permalink

PLATO People: A History Book Research Project

"Before Microsoft. Apple. The Web. AOL. The Internet. Before everything, there was PLATO: the first online community. The network that time forgot. The birthplace of instant messaging, chat rooms, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers, flat-panel plasma displays, one of the first spell-checking/answer-judging mechanisms, and countless other innovations. This site offers information regarding a book being researched and written about the PLATO system and the user culture that it spawned in the 1970s." (About PLATO People)

Posted on May 16, 2007 | Permalink

Interfaces That Flow: Transitions as Design Elements

"Actively influencing a person's emotional state throughout an experience—in particular, his or her sense of anticipation, involvement, and desire for a certain outcome—is still an evolving concept in the realm of user interface design." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on April 26, 2007 | Permalink

Web Form Design Best Practices

"Forms broker the most crucial online interactions: checkout (commerce), registration (community), data input (participation and sharing). This book will provide everything you wanted to know and more about designing effective and engaging Web forms that optimize these key customer interactions." (LukeW - Rosenfeld Media)

Posted on April 25, 2007 | Permalink

Information Design Conference 2007

"Here is a very short summary of the contents of the conference. (...) It is likely that audio recordings and slides of several of these talks will soon be available from the IDA website." (Information Design Association)

Posted on April 03, 2007 | Permalink

Intelligent Designs

"When information needs to be communicated, Edward Tufte demands both truth and beauty." (STANFORD Magazine)

Posted on March 23, 2007 | Permalink

LIFT 2007 Videos

"Here you can watch and download the videos of the presentations given at the conference over the years." - including Adam Greenfield (Studies and Observations), Jan Chipchase (Nokia), and Florence Devouard (WikiMedia). (LIFT07)

Posted on March 14, 2007 | Permalink

The Future of the World Wide Web

Testimony of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee (CSAIL Decentralized Information Group - Massachusetts Institute of Technology) before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce (Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet). Hearing on the 'Digital Future of the United States: Part I - "(...) some of my experience of having designed the original foundations of the Web, what I've learned from watching it grow, and some of the exciting and challenging developments I see in the future of the Web." (Tim Berners-Lee)

Posted on March 09, 2007 | Permalink

Doing Today's Job with Yesterday's Tools

"In the same way the user interfaces are much more consistent because applications all use the same toolkits, then having a common information management framework that other applications can build upon will go a long way towards a more consistent set of interactions. I'd like to outline what I think are the key requirements for such a framework to be successful." (Patrick Dubroy - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on February 26, 2007 | Permalink

Envisioning the Whole Digital Person

"Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce transactions, to our online research. As storage becomes cheaper and data pipes become faster, we are doing more and more online—and in the process, saving a record of our digital lives, whether we like it or not. As a human society, we're quite possibly looking at the largest surge of recorded information that has ever taken place, and at this point, we have only the most rudimentary tools for managing all this information—in part because we cannot predict what standards will be in place in 10, 50, or 100 years." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on February 21, 2007 | Permalink

Book Preview: Information Foraging Theory

"Most books on human-computer interaction (HCI) and usability give recommendations based on empirical research, guidelines fit to observed user behavior, and cognitive models after the fact. Peter Pirolli, the father of information foraging theory, has written a new book that models and predicts what users will do before they navigate a website. Using mathematical models of human behavior, Pirolli lays out the foundation of information foraging theory, a relatively new field based in part on optimal foraging theory in animals (Stephens & Krebs 1986). The result is a seminal work in Oxford University Press' series on Human-Computer Interaction. We were fortunate to review a proof of Pirolli's new book Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information, due out April 2007." (Website Optimization) - courtesy of petermorville

Posted on February 08, 2007 | Permalink

DevSource Videos

Interviews with Lou Rosenfeld, Jesse James Garrett, Danah Boyd, Steve Krug and Marti Hearst (DevSource)

Posted on February 05, 2007 | Permalink

So You Think You Want to be a Manager

"Every designer faces a choice at some point in their career — to manage or not to manage. Erin Malone helps you walk through the questions you need to make that choice." (Erin Malone - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on January 17, 2007 | Permalink

Early and often: How to avoid the design revision death spiral

"One lesson we've learned over the past several years here at Cooper is that on the vast majority of our projects, intimate client collaboration is a critical ingredient for success. This is a lesson that we have sometimes learned the hard way; collaboration can be messy, unpredictable and has often forced us to compromise what we thought was a supremely clear and elegant vision. Despite these growing pains, we have now come to embrace the unpredictability and compromise; through well-managed client collaboration, our designs are stronger and are more likely to serve our clients' needs and satisfy the goals of end users" (David Cronin - uiGarden.net)

Posted on January 13, 2007 | Permalink

Review of 'Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing'

"Adam's thesis is that technology and our experience of it will change significantly in the very near future: computer processing will insinuate its way in into our daily lives deeply and invisibly, in a way that PCs haven't. It will move from our desktops and server rooms into our walls, our furniture, our clothing, and perhaps even into our bodies; everyware will literally be everywhere." (Andrew Otwell - heyblog)

Posted on December 27, 2006 | Permalink

Seeing the World in Symbols: Icons and the Evolving Language of Digital Wayfinding

"Of all the objects that occupy our digital spaces, there are none that capture the imagination so much as icons. As symbols, icons can communicate powerfully, be delightful, add to the aesthetic value of software, engage people’s curiosity and playfulness, and encourage experimentation. These symbols are key components of a graphic user interface-mediators between our thoughts and actions, our intentions and accomplishments." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on December 18, 2006 | Permalink

Slideshare and the 'slideumentation' of presentations

"Don't get me wrong, there are some cool features in Slideshare. SlideShare does indeed make it easy to upload PowerPoint slides and it is quite cool that you can embed clickable slides into your blog or view them in good quality on a large screen. But without the possibility to include audio (or video and animation) with slides I just do not see what all the excitement is about (yet)." (Garr Reynolds - Presentation Zen)

Posted on December 14, 2006 | Permalink

Communicating Web 2.0 Through Design

"(...) how to educate your visitors about the features of contemporary sites and web apps through instructive design." (Robert Hoekman - Vitamin)

Posted on December 12, 2006 | Permalink

Information Design redux

"The importance of information design (ID) as a discipline with much to loan other design disciplines -- especially those that deal with human-human and human-system communication -- was brought home to me by two events." (Bob Jakobson - Total Experience)

Posted on December 06, 2006 | Permalink

INFODESIGN: brazilian journal of information design

"In this opening edition of InfoDesign, the articles – all with differing approaches and themes - deal with 'information design of inclusion', in which the information readers/users must steer their way through decisions taken during the design process in order to achieve successful communication." (SBDI)

Posted on December 06, 2006 | 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 on November 25, 2006 | 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 on November 03, 2006 | Permalink

We Got Sick of Hearing About Design & China, So we Got on a Plane and Went There

"There has certainly been a great deal of speculation lately regarding the real or perceived rise of Chinese industrial design. We say 'perceived rise' to emphasize that their impending world domination in this field is not a foregone conclusion, despite the frequent flurries of listserve chatter and design-conference panel discussions supporting such a notion." (Bruce M. Tharp and Stephanie Munson - uiGarden.net)

Posted on October 29, 2006 | Permalink

Interfaces for People, Not Products

"Without cooperation among designers of digital products, the proliferation of complex information systems can lead to unintended consequences - chiefly user fatigue, frustration, and the confusion that results from dealing with a host of variant user interfaces." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on October 25, 2006 | Permalink

Why award-winning websites are so awful

"Practical and functional websites rarely win prizes for design but they do win sales and make profits." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on October 15, 2006 | Permalink

Characteristics of new media in the Internet age

"(...) this article explores new artistic media and forms of expression emerging in the twenty-first century, and the effects of digital networking on them. The article starts with a historical view of the arts and the social changes that accompany them, and features a list of seven characteristics for new media on the Internet." (Andy Oram)

Posted on October 09, 2006 | Permalink

A Discussion with Danah Boyd

"(...) Boyd is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information, explores how young people negotiate the presentation of self in online mediated contexts. Her research focuses on how this young audience engages with 'digital publics' - connected social spaces such as MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube." (Ibiblio's Speaker Series) - courtesy of boingboing

Posted on September 28, 2006 | Permalink

Hospital care desperately needs design

"If I ran my business like this hospital conducted business, I would be out of business!" (Dirk Knemeyer)

Posted on September 24, 2006 | Permalink

Design And Innovation Are Sizzling: Companies Are Hiring Like Crazy

"After pushing on the door of the business community for years, the doors are being flung open and business is embracing design. Now design has to deliver." (Bruce Nussbaum - NussbaumOnDesign)

Posted on September 22, 2006 | Permalink

Multilingual website: A different approach

"Before you can launch a successful multilingual website, certain issues need to be addressed, including how the webserver chooses what language to present to the specific end user and how to handle pages that need be launched but have not yet been (fully) translated. In the year 1517 Martin Luther needed no less than ninety five statements to cause a reformation. I will do my best to address all of the issues mentioned before in the next eight statements." (Cornelis Kolbach - cornae.org)

Posted on September 19, 2006 | Permalink

From design to meaning: a whole new way of presenting?

"Logical reasoning is a necessary condition. However, it's increasingly clear that logic alone is not a sufficient condition for success for individuals and for organizations." (Garr Reynolds - Presentation Zen)

Posted on September 03, 2006 | Permalink

The Web and the culture of free

"The Web has encouraged a belief that things can be free, or at least very cheap. It seems everyone is looking for a deal on the Web." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on September 03, 2006 | Permalink

The end of deference and the rise of customer power

"The Web empowers the customer more than it empowers the organization. This shift in power is only beginning to be felt." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on August 28, 2006 | Permalink

Is it broken?

"Good design is possible with PowerPoint, so long as one knows a little something about design and how to best display information appropriate for their own unique situation." (Garr Reynolds - Presentation Zen)

Posted on August 26, 2006 | Permalink

Design Futures: Part 1

"In July 2006, a group of designers with nearly 50 cumulative years of experience designing products for companies like Apple, eBay, Macromedia, Nike, Palm, and Yahoo got together to talk about the future of design. We weren't looking to predict what’s next but instead to discuss the patterns and trends affecting the design industry as we move forward." (Luke Wroblewski - Functioning Form)

Posted on August 23, 2006 | Permalink

Do you know what's in your Long Neck?

"A website that doesn't understand what's in its Long Neck is doomed to underperformance, if not outright failure." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on August 20, 2006 | Permalink

E-Learning 2.0

"E-learning as we know it has been around for ten years or so. During that time, it has emerged from being a radical idea—the effectiveness of which was yet to be proven—to something that is widely regarded as mainstream. It's the core to numerous business plans and a service offered by most colleges and universities. And now, e-learning is evolving with the World Wide Web as a whole and it's changing to a degree significant enough to warrant a new name: E-learning 2.0." (Stephen Downes - eLearn Magazine)

Posted on August 09, 2006 | Permalink

Is Design Political?

"In 2001, design and politics hit the news big time when it was revealed that Florida's badly designed butterfly ballot could have cost Al Gore the U.S. presidency. It is perhaps the most widely quoted example of the political impact of design. Yet pose the question, 'Is design political?' to the design industry and you'll get back a big, resounding, 'no'." (Jennie Winhall - uiGarden.net)

Posted on August 08, 2006 | Permalink

What's Happening to Knowledge?

"The old principles for the organization of knowledge turn out to be based on principles for organizing physical objects; in the digital age we're creating new principles free of the old limitations. This is changing the basic shape of knowledge, from (typically) trees to miscellanized piles. This has consequences for the nature of topics, the role of metadata, and, crucially, the authority of knowledge. In short, the change in the shape of knowledge is also changing its place. Despite the hysteria too often heard, knowledge is not being threatened. We are way too good at generating knowledge, and it is way too important to us as a species. But, much of what we're doing together on the Web is about increasing meaning, not knowledge. That re-frames knowledge -- traditional and Wikipedian -- in ways that are hard to predict but important." (David Weinberger - Wikimania 2006 Proceedings)

Posted on August 06, 2006 | Permalink

Label Placement in Forms

"In using eyetracking to evaluate the usability of search forms for my previous article (...), we discovered much interesting data. I'll provide an in-depth analysis of that data here." (Matteo Penzo - UXmatters)

Posted on July 12, 2006 | Permalink

The Next Web: Kevin Kelly's Keynote

"(...) if you've been feeling jaded, skeptical, or even cynical about the hype surrounding Web 2.0, you should take advantage of any opportunity to hear Kelly's perspective. It's optimistic, refreshing, and downright uplifting; and he's a great speaker, with a good sense of humor, too." (The Yourdon Report)

Posted on July 10, 2006 | Permalink

Understanding Design 3.0

"This material was created by NextD Research in collaboration with UnderstandingLab and as part of the NextD Futures series. This was part of a larger presentation originally made by GK VanPatter at the AIGA national design conference in September 2005." (NextD)

Posted on July 10, 2006 | Permalink

The reinvention of information design

"And every generation has to reinvent things in their own idiom. But it would be nice if a little history and an awareness of past work was added to what we do now, rather than continually reinventing it as if it were NEW. So wasteful, and at times quite boring to old farts like me. (...) it is difficult to see anything genuinely new in the excitable and shallow research about web sites which was not already established know-how in document design long before digital technology." (David Sless - CRIA) - Comments are closed.

Posted on July 07, 2006 | Permalink

Knowledge Communities: Online Environments for Supporting Knowledge Management and its Social Context

"Knowledge management is often seen as an information problem: how to capture, organize, and retrieve information. Given this perspective, it isn't surprising that knowledge management evokes notions of data mining and text clustering and databases and documents. This is not wrong, but it is only part of the picture. We suggest that knowledge management is not just an information problem, but that it is, as well, a social problem." (Thomas Erickson and Wendy A Kellogg)

Posted on July 06, 2006 | Permalink

Complexity delivers short-term gain but long-term pain

"Complexity sells (sometimes). Customers are often impressed by all the extra features. The mood can change when they have to use the product." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on July 02, 2006 | Permalink

Senior managers: you can't keep ignoring the Web

"The Web deserves professional management because the Web is central to the future of the organization." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on June 26, 2006 | Permalink

The value of openness in an attention economy

FM10 'Openness: Code, Science, and Content': Selected Papers from the First Monday Conference, 15–17 May 2006 - "A theory of how we pay attention to other humans suggests why receiving it is both desirable and difficult. Humans can absorb as much attention as can be obtained, which differentiates it from other sorts of scarce goods. The theory also suggests a typology of openness, permitting an analysis of the different forms addressed in this Conference, along with others, both existing and potential. In this context, it seems reasonable to speculate on how attention–economic activity manifested through openness may help lead to further dominance of this type of economy. Groupings based on and espousing openness eventually may come increasingly to replace profit–making firms and even non–profit institutions such as universities, while making the pursuit of money largely irrelevant." (Michael Goldhaber - First Monday 11.6)

Posted on June 14, 2006 | Permalink

Mosh Pit as Innovation Model

"Our success is not about what we think up, but rather who we think about." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted on June 12, 2006 | Permalink

Beautiful Evidence: Book production

"Stop it!" (Ask Edward Tufte)

Posted on June 09, 2006 | Permalink

Innovation Through Design Thinking

"(...) a 'design thinker' must not only be intensely collaborative, but 'empathic, as well as have a craft to making things real in the world.' Since design flavors virtually all of our experiences, from products to services to spaces, a design thinker must explore a 'landscape of innovation' that has to do with people, their needs, technology and business. Timothy Brown (CEO of IDEO) dips into three central 'buckets' in the process of creating a new design: inspiration, ideation and implementation. " (MIT World) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on June 03, 2006 | Permalink

Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism

"The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it? The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous." (Jaron Lanier - Edge)

Posted on May 30, 2006 | Permalink

The Overlap Blog

"Overlap is an un-conference for anyone who wants to learn more about merging business practices with design-centric problem solving and customer understanding. (...) Overlap aims for an experience that is multidisciplinary, collaborative, pragmatic and ultimately human." (overlap.org)

Posted on May 30, 2006 | Permalink

Exposing the Local InfoCloud

"The Local InfoCloud started as an idea of information that was physically close. What is stored or accessed by physical location (information that is physically close) as in an Intranet or location-based information accessed on your mobile device. The more I thought about it and chatted with others it became clear it was more than physical location, it is information resources that are familiar and easier to access than the whole of the web (Global InfoCloud) as a framing concept." (Thomas Vander Wall - Personal InfoCloud)

Posted on May 28, 2006 | Permalink

The Web is still a thrilling place

"When you get frustrated by the pressures of managing a website, look back five years. You've achieved a lot." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on May 28, 2006 | Permalink

Tufte Story: AnswerBook

"(...) we lured him into our usability lab to look at the user interface for Answerbook, of which were were very proud. (...) He played with our AnswerBook for about 90 seconds, turned around, and pronounced his review: 'Dr Spock's Baby Care is a best-selling owner's manual for the most complicated 'product' imaginable -- and it only has two levels of headings. You people have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven't even stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it's complicated.'" (Sun.com Design, Usability & Other Stuff) - courtesy of jasonkottke

Posted on May 11, 2006 | Permalink

The Webby Awards Winners 2006

"Reflecting the tremendous growth of the Internet as a tool for business and everyday lives, the 10th Annual Webby Awards expands the mission of the Webby by honoring excellence in over 65 consumer, business and culture categories." (Webby Awards)

Posted on May 09, 2006 | Permalink

Moving up the wisdom hierarchy

"And fortunately, even those focused on information architecture and information design often consider knowledge and understanding as well as information." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted on April 24, 2006 | Permalink

Transliterature: A Humanist Format for Re-Usable Documents and Media

"This work derives from a simple question we asked long ago: 'How can computer documents - shown interactively on screens, stored on disk, transmitted electronically - improve on paper?' Our answer was: 'Keep every quotation connected to its original source.' We are still fighting for this idea, and the great powers it will give authors and readers. (Others would later ask a very different question: 'How can computers SIMULATE paper?' - the wrong question, we believe, whose mistaken pursuit has brought us to the present grim document world.)" (Theodor Holm Nelson)

Posted on April 23, 2006 | Permalink

Information and Knowledge Management: What Technical Communication Can Learn From Library Science

"Technical communication and librarianship share a common foundation in mediating information. Technical communicators traditionally have been concerned with the production of information while librarians have focused on the organization and management of information. However, as information and communications technologies have broadened the definition of technical communication and librarianship, they have expanded opportunities and career choices for practitioners in both fields. Technical communicators may now be employed in such fields as information architecture, web site design and development, information design, instructional design, and many more. Increasingly, information and knowledge management have become concepts required for effective technical communication, requiring an understanding of effective organization, storage, and management of information." (Barbara J. D’Angelo - STC Information Design and Architecture SIG)

Posted on April 12, 2006 | Permalink

No boundaries: The challenge of ubiquitous design

"Sometimes a change in technology has implications that are so epochal that everyone must wrestle with them, accommodate them, or prepare for them. The revolution in information technologies known as 'ubiquitous computing' (or ubicomp) is the most recent such change, and it is beginning to impact the practice—and the business—of digital design." (Adam Greenfield - Adobe Design Center) - courtesy of annegalloway

Posted on April 12, 2006 | Permalink

The Concept of Information

"The concept of information as we use it in everyday English in the sense knowledge communicated plays a central role in today's society. The concept became particularly predominant since end of World War II with the widespread use of computer networks. The rise of information science in the middle fifties is a testimony of this. For a science like information science (IS) it is of course important how its fundamental terms are defined, and in IS as in other fields the problem of how to define information is often raised. This review is an attempt to overview the present status of the information concept in IS with a view also to interdisciplinary trends." (Rafael Capurro and Birger Hjørland)

Posted on April 09, 2006 | Permalink

Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing

Chapter samples (and more to come soon) - "The age of ubiquitous computing is here: a computing without computers, where information processing has diffused into everyday life, and virtually disappeared from view. What does this mean to those of us who will be encountering it? How will it transform our lives? And how will we learn to make wise decisions about something so hard to see?" (Adam Greenfield - Studies and Observations) - courtesy of petermorville

Posted on April 03, 2006 | Permalink

5 Ways To Make Sure That Users Abandon Your Form

"This isn't just about form usability. You can have a very usable form and still violate me in any number of ways." (Eric Myers - ICE) - courtesy of henrikolsen

Posted on April 03, 2006 | Permalink

G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide

"I want to talk about what it means to connect the global and local together in technology and how this affects the design process. I want to talk about why social software must address glocalization in order to succeed. This means thinking about all sorts of squishy stuff like language, economics, policy, culture, social relations, and values. These are not just issues for marketing or business; they directly affect how people use your technologies and, thus, how you must design them." (Danah Boyd) - courtesy of gunnarlangemark

Posted on March 21, 2006 | Permalink

Design Vision Complete

"In the later half of January 2006, a group of designers with nearly 50 cumulative years of experience designing products for companies like Adobe, Apple, eBay, Macromedia, Nike, Palm, and Yahoo got together to talk about design vision. It was a concept for which we all had a personal definition -forged by our unique experiences and insights. Yet we all recognized the important role design vision played in our lives as designers so we took the first step toward a public discussion about what it can do for you, your organization, and your products." (LukeW - Functioning Form)

Posted on March 20, 2006 | Permalink

The trouble with personalization

"Personalization has rarely been implemented well. Its failure is usually because of a lack of understanding of customer behavior." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on March 19, 2006 | Permalink

Six degrees of reputation: The use and abuse of online review and recommendation systems

"This paper reports initial findings from a study that used quantitative and qualitative research methods and custom–built software to investigate online economies of reputation and user practices in online product reviews at several leading e–commerce sites (primarily Amazon.com). We explore several cases in which book and CD reviews were copied whole or in part from one item to another and show that hundreds of product reviews on Amazon.com might be copies of one another. We further explain the strategies involved in these suspect product reviews, and the ways in which the collapse of the barriers between authors and readers affect the ways in which these information goods are being produced and exchanged. We report on techniques that are employed by authors, artists, editors, and readers to ensure they promote their agendas while they build their identities as experts. We suggest a framework for discussing the changes of the categories of authorship, creativity, expertise, and reputation that are being re–negotiated in this multi–tier reputation economy." (Shay David and Trevor Pinch - First Monday 11.3)

Posted on March 17, 2006 | Permalink

Websites reflect true face of an organization

"A website shows the true face of the organization as never before. A website is increasingly the place where customers get that vital first impression." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on March 12, 2006 | Permalink

Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006

"A tech world that talked about ordinators, instead of Artificial Intelligence, probably would have produced Google in about 1980." (Bruce Sterling - Viridian) - courtesy of petermorville

Posted on March 12, 2006 | Permalink

Breaking the Web Wide Open!

"Even the web giants like AOL, Google, MSN, and Yahoo need to observe these open standards, or they'll risk becoming the 'walled gardens' of the new web and be coolio no more." (Marc Canter - AlwaysOn) - courtesy of ruurdpriester

Posted on March 06, 2006 | Permalink

Wayshowing: A Guide to Environmental Signage Principles & Practices 

By Dr. Per Mollerup (Director of Mollerup Designlab) - "Thus wayshowing relates to wayfinding as writing relates to reading and as speaking relates to hearing. The purpose of wayshowing is to facilitate wayfinding. Wayshowing is the means. Wayfinding is the end. The introduction of the term wayshowing is an important contribution to information design." (Reviewed by Rune Pettersson)

Posted on March 02, 2006 | Permalink

Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace

"I want to talk with you today about how teenagers are using a website called MySpace.com. I will briefly describe the site and then discuss how youth use it for identity production and socialization in contemporary American society." (Danah Boyd - American Association for the Advancement of Science) - courtesy of karstenschmidt

Posted on February 28, 2006 | Permalink

Beautiful Evidence

"Edward Tufte's new book, Beautiful Evidence, is now at the printer and should be available in May 2006. The book is 214 pages, full color, hard cover, and at the usual elegant standards of Graphics Press. Beautiful Evidence may be ordered now; the book will be sent immediately from the bindery when completed. The introduction and table of contents are shown (...)." (Edward Tufte)

Posted on February 27, 2006 | Permalink

How architects lost the wayfinding mojo...

"Wayfinding as a discipline: In your experience do you see wayfinding as a discipline becoming more integrated with design in architecture, urban, planning, landscape and retail? If so, in what areas has theories and practices towards wayfinding taken root? What barrier have you seen among designers in integrating wayfinding, egd and identity principals and practices in projects? What success stories have you seen, and what should designers do to communicate design process?" (The Wayfinding Place)

Posted on February 27, 2006 | Permalink

Can Large Companies Succeed with Social Media?

"While many companies will want to enhance their business with social media, not all will succeed. A social media platform doesn’t simply mean adding an online forum or blog. It requires a shift in organizational mindset, a mindset of constant and immediate customer interaction, customer-driven innovation, and exponential network effects. Only companies willing to make this shift will have the discipline to ask the right questions." (Victor Lombardi - Management innovation Group)

Posted on February 23, 2006 | Permalink

The Evolution of Information Grazing

"The frustration with feed grazing is that we soon have too many feeds, and many of the feeds overlap content. Ironically, however, we still want to add more feeds if they are relevant to us, and so we prune our feed list over time." (Joshua Porter)

Posted on February 16, 2006 | Permalink

Design Vision

"A conversation about the role of design-driven leadership in the product development process with Bob Baxley, Dirk Knemeyer, Jeff Leftwich, and Luke Wroblewski." (Functioning Form)

Posted on February 10, 2006 | Permalink

Introduction to Web 2.0

"Web 2.0 is an term referring to the ongoing transition to a full participatory Web, with participation including both humans and machines." (Squidoo - Joshua Porter)

Posted on February 10, 2006 | Permalink

Alain de Vulpian on the Process of Civilization

"I have reached the conviction that we are in the epicentre of a developmental process of civilisation that is carrying us elsewhere, transforming western culture in depth and possibly preparing the way for a worldwide civilisation." (Michael J. - Notio)

Posted on February 07, 2006 | Permalink

The Role and Evolution of Design in Software Products

"Design professionals often decry the lack of importance and investment their companies place on design. After all, most software projects revolve around a product’s engineering, to the ongoing detriment of its design—not to mention the chagrin of so many designers, who wriggle uncomfortably toward the bottom of the food chain. But there is a good reason for this: products can be very profitable without investing a single penny in interface design—at least, beyond the user interfaces the engineers build. Indeed, at least in the early stages of a market or company, resources dedicated to intentional interface design are often a bonus rather than being viewed as a necessity. Sound crazy? Consider the natural and normal evolution of a software product." (Dirk Knemeyer - UXmatters)

Posted on February 06, 2006 | Permalink

Web 3.0

"Web 2.0 is a fresh-faced starlet on the intertwingled longtail to the disruptive experience of tomorrow. Web 3.0 thinks you are so 2005. (...) my discomfort with the hype surrounding an emerging genre of web development turned into a full-blown hate-on." (Jeffrey Zeldman - A List Apart)

Posted on January 17, 2006 | Permalink

A Summary of My Ideas about National Culture Differences

"(...) there has been much discussion about cultural differences in the web design, especially in reference to animation and flashy elements. It looks right to offer Professor Hofstede's ideas to readers here. These ideas were first based on a large research project into national culture differences across subsidiaries of a multinational corporation (IBM) in 64 countries." (Geert Hofstede - uiGarden.net)

Posted on January 16, 2006 | Permalink

Clear: IIID|AIGA Journal of Information Design

"Information design makes complex information easier to understand and to use, and Clear is dedicated to informing, inspiring, and defining the rapidly growing discipline and its participants. The journal is dedicated to stimulating thinking about information design through timely and thoughtful essays and articles from leaders in the field." (AIGA)

Posted on January 13, 2006 | Permalink

Co-creating unique value with customers

"The traditional system of company-centric value creation (that has served us so well over the past 100 years) is becoming obsolete. Leaders now need a new frame of reference for value creation. In the emergent economy, competition will center on personalized co-creation experiences, resulting in value that is truly unique to each individual. The authors see a new frontier in value creation emerging, replete with fresh opportunities. In this new frontier, the role of the consumer has changed from isolated to connected, from unaware to informed, from passive to active. As a result, companies can no longer act autonomously, designing products, developing production processes, crafting marketing messages, and controlling sales channels with little or no interference from consumers. Armed with new tools and dissatisfied with available choices, consumers want to interact with firms and thereby co-create value. The use of interaction as a basis for co-creation is at the crux of our emerging reality. The co-creation experience of the consumer becomes the very basis of value. The authors offer a DART model for managing co-creation of value processes." (C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy)

Posted on January 08, 2006 | Permalink

Evaluating the ROI of design

"The top two reasons executives usually cite when they decide to short-change the design process are a Shortage of Time and a Lack of Money. However, companies have much more time and money to lose by not investing in design. Several myths lead to the misperception that it's easier and cheaper to do without design." (Steve Calde - Cooper Newsletter)

Posted on January 04, 2006 | Permalink

Learning increases resolution

"Learning music changes music. Learning about wine changes wine. Learning about Buddhism changes Buddhism. And learning Excel changes Excel. If we want passionate users, we might not have to change our products--we have to change how our users experience them. And that change does not necessarily come from product design, development, and especially marketing. It comes from helping users learn." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted on January 02, 2006 | Permalink

Intranet Trends to Watch for in 2006

"The intranet ecosystem still does matter (...). However, the focus has moved away from the analyst firms, the consulting companies and the gurus and back to the business customers." (Shiv Singh - CIO)

Posted on December 20, 2005 | Permalink

Living La Vida Virtual: Interfaces of the Near Future

"Personal computing is in an awkward adolescence right now. On one hand, we are rapidly moving into ubiquitous computing environments that let people constantly interact with the omnipresent network; on the other, the devices and interfaces we are using to enter these new frontiers provide woefully inadequate user experiences. Let's take a look at one of the key technologies that will take mobile user experiences to the next level: holography." (Dirk Knemeyer - UXmatters)

Posted on December 20, 2005 | Permalink

Notes from User Interfaces for Physical Spaces

"(...) unlike screen-based work, where we tend to get caught up in breakpoints with a single "organizer" -- the software -- MAYA had to grapple with three potential points of failure. This is orders of magnitude more complex." (Peter Merholz)

Posted on December 15, 2005 | Permalink

From Information Design to Experience Design: Smart Artefacts and the Disappearing Computer

"It seems like a paradox but it will soon become reality: The rate at which computers disappear will be matched by the rate at which information technology will increasingly permeate our environment and determine our lives. This notion of the 'disappearing computer' is one of the starting points that determines our work. Another one is the shift from information worlds to experience worlds. This was a consequence of our work on innovative office environments where we explored the range of social processes that should be supported with information technology and the shift to a new application domain, i.e. games and entertainment in the context of home environments." (Norbert Streitz et al. - uigarden)

Posted on December 07, 2005 | Permalink

Carnegie Library: Dynamic Information Environment

"Do pioneers have to end up as has-beens? Despite an early and influential role as organizers, protectors, and providers of information, libraries have not always evolved in tandem with the desires and expectations of their customers." (MAYA Design: Taming Complexity) - courtesy of peterme

Posted on December 04, 2005 | Permalink

Human-Centered Intranet Design

"Just as physical ergonomics is important to the health of the body, cognitive ergonomics is important to the health of the mind. Developers need to have a deeper understanding that regardless of what technology allows them to do, the end product must conform to the natural way in which humans work." (Paul Chin - Intranet Journal) - courtesy of usernomics

Posted on November 29, 2005 | Permalink

Crossing Frontiers of Understanding

Lecture at the ICOGRADA/FRONTEIRAS congress, Sao Paulo, April 29th and 30th, 2004 - "Structure is an important way to start: structure information in ways that make it accessible to others: facilitating access is like giving out a passport: if designers help their users to cross frontiers of cultural knowledge and experience, and facilitate them to exchange and share information and experiences with others, then design has answered its first and most important brief: to build interfaces." (Max Bruinsma)

Posted on November 25, 2005 | Permalink

Designing for Start-ups

"Because most start-ups run lean and mean, their employees tend to take on multiple roles to fill in gaps in expertise and role. Consultants working for a start-up are no different. A designer brought in to work on the visual design of an application is likely to do some coding, interaction design, or information architecture." (LukeW - Functioning Form)

Posted on November 23, 2005 | Permalink

The 'Microsoft Method' of presentations

"Shibumi is a principle that can be applied to many aspects of life. Concerning visual communication and graphic design, shibumi represents elegant simplicity and articulate brevity, an understated elegance." (Garr Reynolds - Presentationzen)

Posted on November 21, 2005 | Permalink

Find out what your customers really need from your website

"If there is one reason - more than any other - why a website fails, it is because it doesn’t understand its customers." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on November 20, 2005 | Permalink

The Principles of Universal Design

"The authors, a working group of architects, product designers, engineers and environmental design researchers, collaborated to establish the following Principles of Universal Design to guide a wide range of design disciplines including environments, products, and communications. These seven principles may be applied to evaluate existing designs, guide the design process and educate both designers and consumers about the characteristics of more usable products and environments." - (Center for Universal Design - uiGarden.net)

Posted on November 16, 2005 | Permalink

The Web 2.0 Experience Continuum

"So what will the next ten years feel like? Disorienting at first, but normal eventually. It will take time for users to acclimate to the semi-structured experiences available on the Web, and even longer to accept the unstructured experiences. We’ll shed some of the metaphors — sites, bookmarks, pages, and so on - that we've used to orient ourselves on the Web, in the same way that cars stopped having running boards and television has stopped broadcasting stage plays." - (Dan Saffer - Adaptive Path)

Posted on November 15, 2005 | Permalink

Ryanair success has strong web lessons

"Despite record fuel prices, Ryanair makes record profits. Its no-frills website has helped this no-frills airline achieve such phenomenal success." - (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on November 13, 2005 | Permalink

Rethinking Application Design

"(...) with more than a year of experience working in Silicon Valley and seeing inside various leading technology companies - both as a consultant/designer and through my speaking and networking activities - I've realized that the basic corporate design model for Web and application design is broken. This article will share some of the conclusions I've drawn and propose some better approaches for designing successful applications." - (Dirk Knemeyer - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on November 08, 2005 | Permalink

Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic

"(...) two contrasting visual approaches employed by Gates and Jobs in their presentations while keeping key aesthetic concepts found in Zen in mind. I believe we can use many of the concepts in Zen and Zen aesthetics to help us compare their presentation visuals as well as help us improve our own visuals. My point in comparing Jobs and Gates is not to poke fun but to learn." - (Garr Reynolds - Presentation Zen)

Posted on November 07, 2005 | 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 on October 30, 2005 | 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 on October 27, 2005 | 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 on October 19, 2005 | 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 on October 18, 2005 | 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 on October 15, 2005 | 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 on October 12, 2005 | 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 on October 09, 2005 | 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 on October 06, 2005 | 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 on October 02, 2005 | Permalink

Computational Information Design

"The ability to collect, store, and manage data is increasing quickly, but our ability to understand it remains constant. In an attempt to gain better understanding of data, fields such as information visualization, data mining and graphic design are employed, each solving an isolated part of the specific problem, but failing in a broader sense: there are too many unsolved problems in the visualization of complex data. As a solution, this dissertation proposes that the individual fields be brought together as part of a singular process titled Computational Information Design." (Ben Fry)

Posted on September 28, 2005 | Permalink

Crisis management: your website can help

"A website can be a valuable source of information during a time of crisis. Using your website should become part of your crisis planning." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on September 25, 2005 | Permalink

Who Will Lead Design In The 21st Century?

"The session was smart, thrilling, provocative—and somewhat frightening. VanPatter answers his own question, “Who will lead design in the 21st century?” almost immediately and this is his response, folks: It might not be designers." (Speak Up) - courtesy of cph127

Posted on September 23, 2005 | Permalink

Why web managers are leaders

"The Web requires leadership if it is to achieve its full potential. That leadership will rarely be given by senior management. So that means it's up to you." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on September 18, 2005 | Permalink

From Objects to Subjects: Design History and Oral History

"The paper will address questions about the value of personal life story recordings by examining the fate of the role of individual agency and authorship in design historiography. Taking as its starting point that subjectivity is socially constructed and that language is the medium in which that construction is articulated, it will show how life histories are inevitably evidence of broader cultural discourses. With the resurgence of historiographic concerns with experience and memory, The paper will demonstrate the ways in which interviews with designers create a multi-layered document/recording that reflects the complex interactions with constitute a designer's identity formation as well as his/her historical consciousness." (Linda Sandino at Show/Tell Papers)

Posted on September 16, 2005 | Permalink

Guru Questionnaire 6

InfoDesign testimonial by Peter Morville - "I rely on InfoDesign by Peter J. Bogaards to keep up with current events in user experience, information architecture, and findability. I met Peter last year in Amsterdam. We had a wonderful dinner and an intense, fascinating conversation about our industry. InfoDesign stands testament to the value of passion, dedication, and human filtering in an age of automation. I use it every day." (Online Information) - courtesy of usabilitynews.
thnx peter; much appreciated - 'sharing knowledge is better than having it'

Posted on September 14, 2005 | Permalink

Proving to senior management your website delivers value

"It's time for public websites and intranets to show clearly how they are delivering value. The first step in doing this is to understand how senior management thinks about value." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on September 11, 2005 | Permalink

The internet circa 2010: How to recognize the future when it lands on you

"The Adaptive User Environment suggests that the most successful technologies will be those that can fit user needs; proponents of 'Not the Smart Internet' want a simple, user-friendly web; Rich Media advocates want to be able to see 'any content, on any device, in any format, at any time'; and the Chaos Rules school holds that the internet 'may be in a continual state of decay and worsening disorder'. The report says 'ubiquity will be the byword of the net's future'. (...) Instead of the net society, it's about the net in society. It will become this indispensable lifestyle tool." (Smart Mobs) - courtesy of langemarkscafe

Posted on September 08, 2005 | Permalink

Registration Forms: What to do if you can't avoid them

"(...) the sad thing about registration forms is that users hate them. Stick a form in front of them and they leave your site, they lie, or if they are really web-savvy they use a privacy protection service. But organisations love them." (Caroline Jarrett - Usability News)

Posted on September 08, 2005 | Permalink

Web manager: You can't serve everybody

"Every time you serve someone, you make someone else wait. Every time you publish a piece of content you make other content less findable." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on September 04, 2005 | Permalink

Design+Innovation Collaboration Wiki

"It's polite to say 'hello' and welcome to you very important members of this vibrant Design, Innovation and Leadership community. Feel free to join and form the thoughts, writings and ramblings on and about these very important issues that forms you, the companies you know and the society you live in. Welcome on board." (CPH127 Weblog)

Posted on September 01, 2005 | Permalink

Metrics make the case for quality content

"The essential business case of a website is self-service. To maximize value from self-service, you want a limited menu, a fast transaction and a significant volume of people." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on August 28, 2005 | Permalink

Online Communities: Design, Theory, and Practice

"This special thematic section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together nine articles that provide a rich composite of the current research in online communities. The articles cover a range of topics, methodologies, theories and practices. Indirectly they all speak to design since they aim to extend our understanding of the field. The variety shown in these articles illustrates how broad the definition is of this rapidly growing field known as 'online communities.'" (Jenny Preece and Diane Maloney-Krichmar - JCMC 10.4) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on August 25, 2005 | Permalink

Designing medicine information for people

"This paper introduces you to the methods for designing usable medicine information by showing you how medicine information design has grown out of the traditional crafts, and more recently, out of the design professions. It is an introduction to your training in medicine information design." (David Sless and Ruth Shrensky - CRIA)

Posted on August 22, 2005 | Permalink

How firms can co-create knowledge with their customers

"The paper defines the 'story of co-creation', explores his research question, presents a conceptual framework for market-learning capabilities (before and after co-creation) and suggests some of the challenges to be resolved when conducting the research." (Putting people first) - courtesy of cph127

Posted on August 17, 2005 | Permalink

Digital Information Design Camp

"Many traditionally trained, professional designers wonder what the next generation of computing technologies might bring to their field. At the same time, many digitally trained, professional designers feel that they have missed out on some of the cornerstones of a traditional design education. To work towards a common ground between the digital and traditional design sensibilities, during the summer of 2005 Professor John Maeda organized the first 'Digital Information Design Camp', a three-week-long exploration, completely in cyberspace." (John Maeda - AIGA)

Posted on August 04, 2005 | Permalink

We Are the Web

"Cartography has gone from spectator art to participatory democracy. (...) In part because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture. (...) Our Machine is born. It's on." (Kevin Kelly - Wired Magazine)

Posted on August 02, 2005 | Permalink

Key benefits of a single intranet or public website

"A single website is more connected and credible. It is more consistent and cost effective. It is easier to manage and measure." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on July 31, 2005 | Permalink

Have you got too many websites?

"Too many websites are nearly always a bad idea. Getting your customer to remember one web address is more than enough of a challenge." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on July 24, 2005 | Permalink

Information and knowledge: An evolutionary framework for information science

"Many definitions of information, knowledge, and data have been suggested throughout the history of information science. In this article, the objective is to provide definitions that are usable for the physical, biological, and social meanings of the terms, covering the various senses important to our field." (Marcia Bates - Information Research 10.4)

Posted on July 20, 2005 | Permalink

The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News

"This study examined the effects of line length on reading speed, comprehension, and user satisfaction of online news articles. Twenty college-age students read news articles displayed in 35, 55, 75, or 95 characters per line (cpl) from a computer monitor. Results showed that passages formatted with 95 cpl resulted in faster reading speed. No effects of line length were found for comprehension or satisfaction, however, users indicated a strong preference for either the short or long line lengths." (A. Dawn Shaikh - Usability News 7.2 2005)

Posted on July 17, 2005 | Permalink

Designing for the Personal InfoCloud

Presentation at WebVisions 2005 July 15, 2005 in Portland, Oregon USA (Thomas Vander Wal)

Posted on July 17, 2005 | Permalink

Recall ability: Web content versus print content

"People are extremely task-focused on the Web. That means they are much less open to content that is not directly related to the task at hand." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on July 17, 2005 | Permalink

Every user is new and different...

"Every reader is new and different. And as long as the user is new, then the experience of their interaction with the product, service, book... is new and different. Every new user breathes new life into what we create and deliver." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted on July 14, 2005 | Permalink

Prove the value of your content with numbers

"Getting senior management's attention is about showing how costs can be reduced and/or value created. Content needs to show how it will reduce costs by X percent and increase productivity by Z percent." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on July 10, 2005 | Permalink

First Monday Special Issue: Music and the Internet

"The relationship between music and the Internet is a site of perceived possibility and volatility. Stories of music theft, illegal downloads, unresolved court cases, and anti-piracy technologies, are now prominent. Conversely, stories about the creation of real-time music composition, music's increasing accessibility, the regeneration of music collecting, and the development of virtual music communities have also become prominent. " (First Monday)

Posted on July 10, 2005 | Permalink

Web branding is more than skin deep

"Web branding is much more about function than image. Great websites put substance before flash. This reflects a knowledge society that has become more rational in how it makes decisions." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on July 03, 2005 | Permalink

Knowledge management: No such thing as knowledge worker

"For those who manage well, there is a bright and prosperous future. For those who are managed, the future - certainly the income prospects are not so bright." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on June 27, 2005 | Permalink

Visual Communication Questions

"If any stakeholders complain about their visual prominence in the design, offer to revisit the ordering of the list and bring in the rest of the stakeholders that already agreed to the prioritization." (Luke Wroblewski - Functioning Form)

Posted on June 26, 2005 | Permalink

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Relinquish Control

"Relinquishing control is a scary prospect because it diminishes certainty. With control comes predictable outcomes that you can bank on. But in this increasingly complex, messy, and option-filled world, we must acknowledge that our customers hold the reins. Attempts to control their experience will lead to abandonment for the less onerous alternative. What we can do is provide the best tools and content that they can fit into their lives, and their ways." (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path)

Posted on June 26, 2005 | Permalink

Return of Ideas

"Some time ago I wrote about the great conference in New Zealand, 'Better by Design', and recommended that people would go to their site and look at the slides. I suppose a lot of you did, and I would now like to give you some heads-up for reading even more informational stuff. Peter Zec's slideshow 'Return of Ideas' is now online and I really recommnd you go there and read the slides - it's killer stuff. Infact it's 110 pages of killer stuff. Free." (cph127)

Posted on June 19, 2005 | Permalink

The two fundamental skills of web writing

"Writing for how people search and writing quality links are the two fundamental skills of web writing. Think carefully about search behavior and make sure your links are always clear and logical." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on June 19, 2005 | Permalink

You've got to find what you love

Audio included - "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." (Steve Jobs - Stanford Report) - courtesy of kottke

Posted on June 16, 2005 | Permalink

Turning knowledge into power

"We are in an era of knowledge abundance. Traditional management theory focuses on knowledge scarcity. We need new management strategies to deal with so much communication and so much knowledge." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on June 12, 2005 | Permalink

Stop your presentation before it kills again!

"I'll leave you with Tufte's fateful words, 'Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.' Be careful out there... someone could get hurt." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted on June 09, 2005 | Permalink

John Maeda at Cologne

Video download - "On January 12th, 2002 the students of the Design Department at the University of Applied Sciences awarded John Maeda the 'Cologne Thumper' (Kölner Klopfer). Recording of the award ceremony including Maeda's talk. It is 1 hour and 32 minutes long and contains the introduction and John Maeda's talk." (sendung.de)

Posted on June 06, 2005 | Permalink

Why it matters to focus on your reader

"Where are those who see websites as acts of creation separate from the people who will visit those websites. There are those who see people and create websites to meet these people’s needs." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on June 05, 2005 | Permalink

Think Sexy

"If you want to create passionate users, you need to understand passion. We do it in the geekiest of ways on this blog by reverse-engineering. But we can't just study it; we have to feel it." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted on May 31, 2005 | Permalink

Business & Design

"As the number of designers interested in owning a seat at the corporate decision-making 'table' grows, the number of business strategies advocating design solutions expands as well. Designers keep asking: 'How can we convince business owners that investments in design processes are money well spent?'
Simultaneously, a number of business publications (most notably Fast Company) are telling corporate decision makers that 'design matters'. It's useful for both sides to view the discussion from each other's perspective." (Luke Wroblewski - Functioning Form)

Posted on May 30, 2005 | Permalink

Make sure your intranet is well perceived by staff

"Many intranets are only now beginning to show their true potential. However, many staff, having had unsatisfactory previous experiences of the intranet, may need quite some convincing that the intranet is now genuinely useful." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on May 29, 2005 | Permalink

Completely Rethinking the Web

"The Web is broken. Sites are clumsy and not optimized for each customer. Interface devices are woefully inadequate. Despite the power of the Web and the potential of ever-evolving technology, our execution is collectively dreadful. For all of the good things we've done and the gains we’ve made, the Web in general remains a very poor experience." (Dirk Knemeyer - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on May 19, 2005 | Permalink

Your website needs a call to action

"The Web is task-focused. The best websites get to the point. They ruthlessly eliminate waffle and happy talk. They focus on helping people complete key tasks as quickly as possible." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on May 15, 2005 | Permalink

Publish the website you can manage

"Your job as a web manager must be about a relentless focus on quality. Always put quality first and you will create a website that delivers real and sustainable value." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on May 10, 2005 | Permalink

Personal, anticipated information need

"The role of personal information collections is a well known feature of personal information management. The World Wide Web has introduced to such collections ideas such as filing Web pages or noting their existence in 'Bookmarks' and 'Favourites'. It is suggested that personal information collections are created in anticipation of some future need for that information-personal, anticipated information need, which also underlies the design of formal information systems." (Harry Bruce - Information Research 10.3)

Posted on May 02, 2005 | Permalink

Context matters

"Context plays a more fundamental role for Asians than for westerners. Asians have a more difficult time thinking of an object as completely separate from its background. Americans, on the other hand, focus on objects... things and categories more than relationships. Asians think in verbs where we think in nouns. And these differences can have profound implications." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted on May 02, 2005 | Permalink

Why web managers need to get out on the road

"The better the web manager the more time they will spend out of the office; the more time they will spend in front of the reader." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on May 01, 2005 | Permalink

In Defense of PowerPoint

"I started this essay in January 2004 - over a year ago - but it lay hidden in my file of 'in progress' writings. I didn't finish the essay because I gave an interview with Cliff Atkinson on the topic, but the paper goes into the issues in much more depth than the interview. So, here it is: it may be late, but the lessons are just as relevant as ever." (Donald Norman)

Posted on April 29, 2005 | Permalink

Number one skill for managing a website

"Having a deep understanding of the gut instinct of your customer is the number one skill of managing a website. That involves getting face to face with them." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on April 25, 2005 | Permalink

It's a Whole New Internet

"Something is happening right now, and the developer community has an electric gleam in its eye. Curious, inventive people are making cool stuff again. There’s been a notable shift, and it's incredibly exciting. (...) Watch closely, ladies and gentlemen. Things are about to change in a very big way." (Janice Fraser - Adaptive Path)

Posted on April 22, 2005 | Permalink

Metaphors We Surf The Web By 

"The way people think about the World-Wide Web (WWW) has implications for the way that they navigate it. In this paper, we discuss the nature of people's metaphorical conception of the WWW, as gathered from interviews with beginning and experienced web users. Based on linguistic data, we argue that people naturally think of the web as a kind of physical space in which they move, although information on the web is not physical, and web users do not actually move. Nevertheless, such metaphorical thought is motivated by the same basic image schemata that people rely on to mentally structure everyday life." (Paul P. Maglio and Teenie Matlock 1998) - courtesy of iai digilib

Posted on April 21, 2005 | Permalink

Development of the Genre Concept

"The elements of this framework can be traced back in the theory of genre, as it has developed during the 20th century. The overview of this development below covers the dominant ideas and theories, that have given rise to the genre concept as summarized by Berkenkotter and Huckin. The first part is an outline of modern genre theory. It summarizes the historical background, necessary to understand the application of the genre concept to digital communication. The second part is a review of literature on digital genres (or cybergenres). This section is more detailed than the first part. The broader context is 'genre as framework for electronic publishing'. This point of view is inspired by the idea, that genre creates shared expectations about the form and content of communication. In this way, genre characteristics are relevant to the design of electronic documents and websites, and genre analysis can be incorporated in the broad field of content engineering (or information engineering, as it is named elsewhere). Leading questions are, in which way such an approach might help to increase the effectiveness of electronic documents, and how the engineering process itself could benefit from a detailed analysis of generic elements." (Leen Breure - University of Utrecht) - courtesy of peterme

Posted on April 13, 2005 | Permalink

In Defense of Cheating

"In this essay, I focus upon changes to curriculum and instruction that would change the emphasis in school systems from that of competition to cooperation, from arbitrary grading on the curve to mastery assessment of a student's accomplishments. But these changes are only part of the restructuring required of our educational systems. Many more changes are needed." (Donald A. Norman - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on April 06, 2005 | 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 on March 27, 2005 | 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 on March 24, 2005 | 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 on March 23, 2005 | 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 on March 23, 2005 | 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 on March 11, 2005 | 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 on March 06, 2005 | 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 on March 06, 2005 | 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 on March 03, 2005 | Permalink

Is communications up to running intranet?

"The natural home of the intranet is in communications. However, intranet management requires particular skills that many traditional communications departments don’t have." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on February 27, 2005 | Permalink

The Cognitive Science Millennium Project

"Here is the list of the one hundred most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th century as selected by our panel of esteemed judges from all the nominations we received. The works on the list are rank ordered, with #1 being the most influential." (Millennium Project) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on February 24, 2005 | Permalink

So where are all the Information Designers?

"Over time, we believe that this combination of skills will become the norm and may even become mandatory for many Information Design positions. Given the current economic climate, employers are already demanding more from their prospective new hires. As evidence of this trend, look at the career section in your local newspaper and you will see that employers are now asking for combination skill sets for many jobs. Companies are looking for people who can simultaneously write, design and develop websites. With a small amount of cross-training, many of today's Information Designers could position themselves for these multi-skilled jobs." (Online Learning)

Posted on February 17, 2005 | Permalink

Artefacts for Understanding

"Artefact derives from latin arte factum, which means artificial. In general, that implies an object made by the human hand, an artificial object. Artefacts are manmade for a specific purpose with an intention of fulfilling that purpose. Sometimes they also fulfill unspoken purposes. This paper addresses some aspects of the intentionally made artefacts and their way through the cooperative design process and how they will be attached to new meanings on the way." (Sinna Lindquist and Bosse Westerlund - Working Papers in Art and Design)

Posted on February 11, 2005 | Permalink

Designing Documents That Work 

"Documents must work for the people who send them, the people who produce them and the people that receive them." (Cheryl Kay - The Financial Communications Forum 2004)

Posted on January 31, 2005 | Permalink

Art 491: Information Design Course

"(..) designed to give you experience in participating on an interdisciplinary project research, design and development team to produce solutions that address real-world issues and clients. Information design focuses on the communication of complex ideas with clarity, precision, and efficiency (usable). Methodologies and technologies for efficient and effective information transfer are changing rapidly and will play a fundamental, and continual, role in your future. Products of information design range from computer (and other machines) interfaces, forms and documents (online or paper), wayfinding systems in 3D space (real or virtual), to maps, charts, diagrams, graphs and business presentations. Whatever your content area of specialty, you will be involved with the design and transfer of information the rest of your life." (Information Design Group - University of Idaho)

Posted on January 27, 2005 | Permalink

Real World Objects as Media for Augmenting Human Memory  

"This paper describes wearable interfaces for augmenting human memory, i.e., providing users with functions for archiving, transporting, exchanging, and retrieving their experiences by employing real world objects as memory storage, in everyday life." (Yasuyuki Kono et al. - Workshop on Multi-User and Ubiquitous User Interfaces 2004)

Posted on December 22, 2004 | Permalink

Social Aspects of Digital Information in Perspective

"This collection of articles will give JoDI readers a sample of the insights that social informatics studies can bring to understanding digital information design, use and implementation. It is a vibrant field that draws contributions from academics and practitioners in a wide range of disciplines. It is sometimes difficult to find these works scattered among the many journals in which they are published." (Journal of Digital Information 5.4)

Posted on December 16, 2004 | Permalink

The Marriage of Presentation and Structure

"Like marriage, just because you don't know what you're getting into doesn't mean you can't have fun with it." (Molly E. Holzschlag and Ethan Marcotte)

Posted on December 15, 2004 | Permalink

The History of Memory Techniques Leading to Mind Maps

"Mind Maps are an incredibly powerful memory tool that have been compared to having a 'Swiss army knife for the brain'. I am going to take you on a voyage of discovery that will take you, step by step, through the experiences, frustrations and explorations of one brain who found memory becoming his life's passion and work." (Tony Buzan - Map it!) - courtesy of xblog

Posted on December 14, 2004 | Permalink

Information Design Watch Dec. 2004

"(...) an insightful monthly briefing on information design issues and ideas." (Subscribe Dynamic Diagrams Newsletter)

Posted on December 08, 2004 | Permalink

Design Engaged: The final programme

"Design Engaged really was a smashing success, and I'd hate to think my encapsulation has failed to convey the intellectual contact high I experienced and in some ways am still riding. At least, maybe you can infer something useful from the shape these thoughts have assumed as they've filtered through my own vocabulary and prejudices." (Adam Greenfield - v-2 Organization)

Posted on December 07, 2004 | Permalink

Ten ways to continuously improve your intranet

"The amount of work involved in designing a new intranet or redesigning an existing intranet is minor compared to the time needed to maintain an effective intranet over the longer term. In fact, it is common for the initial excitement of a new intranet to fade away as the reality of day-to-day maintenance and the challenges of improving the intranet become apparent." (Donna Maurer and Tina Calabria - KM Column)

Posted on December 06, 2004 | Permalink

Technology not answer to every problem

"Understanding where technology is strong and where people are strong is an essential skill of the modern manager. Too often today, technology is doing things that would be better done by people." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on December 05, 2004 | Permalink

Activity-Centered Design: An Ecological Approach to Designing Smart Tools and Usable Symbols

Review - "The book is clearly intended as the beginning of an on-going dialogue. It ends a bit like a Star Wars movie, with the promise of a sequel. There is clearly opportunity for additional work in data representation, as well as deeper study into each of the areas described in these six chapters. However, the book provides an excellent incentive for system designers to pursue activity-centered design, and a good initial set of tools to start them on their way." (Carl Bedingfield - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on December 02, 2004 | Permalink

Gregory Bateson: The Centennial 1904-2004

"Aspects of this worldview derived from his association in the 1940s with Warren McCulloch, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Norbert Wiener et al, who were all present at the creation of cybernetic theory. It was the radical epistemology behind these ideas seemed to inform a lot of this thinking." (John Brockman - Edge)

Posted on November 30, 2004 | Permalink

Internet marketing motto: be useful

"E-marketing is about substance over show, logic over emotion, and text over graphics. Good web marketers follow the Google motto: be useful." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on November 29, 2004 | Permalink

Orange: An Online Journal of Technical Communication and Information Design

"The growing field of Technical Communication once primarily focused on the communication of technical information through manuals and help systems. In recent years the field has expanded to include a variety of specialized disciplines that utilize technology to communicate -- and has adopted much more sophisticated theories of communication to accomodate these changes. The Orange Journal of Technical Communication and Information Design is a graduate student journal that strives to foster critical thinking and discussion on a wide variety of topics and issues important to technical communicators." (About Orange)

Posted on November 28, 2004 | Permalink

Design Engaged retrospect

"Amsterdam was not only centrally located for many of the participants, but it's also small, walkable, dense, vital, complex, efficient, stylish, and civilized. All of which make it kind of perfect for a bunch of designers to wander around for three days taking thousands of pictures. I've felt that Amsterdam tends to embody naturally whatever theme Doors of Perception's focussed on: from 'lightness' to 'play' to 'flow'." (Andrew Otwell)

Posted on November 24, 2004 | Permalink

IIID Expert Forum for Knowledge Presentation: Preparing for the Future of Knowledge Presentation (Revisited)

Resources for Communication Forum for discussion, planning, and collaboration: Experience the conference via audio or video and summaries or papers via html or pdf (May 30-31, 2003, Institute of Design, IIT Chicago, IL). - (About the Expert Forum)

Posted on November 21, 2004 | Permalink

Corporate Identity and the Web: What your homepage tells about your organization 

"In the literature you find a lot of hints concering web design and usability of web pages. But how do you compare web pages? Which ones are good or bad? What does a homepage say about your organization? This paper is based on research over the last couple of years and uses linguistic strategies to analyze electronic business communications - including newsletters and web sites. Unfortunately, linguistics is usually not used very often for electronic communication theories, but the variety of theories and tools are a good starting point to find synergies between computer science, marketing and webdesign." (Michael Beer - UI4ALL: 8th ERCIM Workshop)

Posted on November 21, 2004 | Permalink

Design Engaged Presentations

"An ongoing list of links to Design Engaged presentations." (Andrew Otwell)

Posted on November 18, 2004 | Permalink

From Collision to Convergence 

Presentation from Design Engaged 2004 in Amsterdam - "Just as Portable Media Players are getting ready to flood the market, bit-based video streams seep into the liquid crystal displays of our connected mobile devices. Scattered findings from a born-again viewer playing auto-ethnographer." (Fabio Sergio)

Posted on November 16, 2004 | Permalink

Innovation Heats Up! 

"An important conversation at an important moment: The nature of business is changing... The nature of design is changing too... Let's try to assess the new role of a switched design experience." (Larry Keeley - AIGA Gain Conference 2004)

Posted on November 15, 2004 | Permalink

The Sphere of Design

"The web design community thankfully seems to be wrapping up the 'design vs. usability' argument. In case you missed it, the conclusion was: 'Not either/or but both, and it depends.' Design leaders have proved that web sites can be both usable and beautiful, but we lack a vocabulary to talk about this new standard. The question now is not 'Which is most important?', but 'How do we deliver what's most important?' This article introduces the 'Sphere of Design', which is a simple conceptual model that illustrates the relationship and trade-offs between 'looks' and 'works'." (Ben Hunt - Scratchmedia)

Posted on November 15, 2004 | Permalink

How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility?

"Our results about the connection between Design Look and perceived credibility suggests that creating Web sites with quality information alone is not enough to win credibility in users' minds." (Consumer WebWatch)

Posted on November 14, 2004 | Permalink

Do you manage a website or a warehouse?

"There are two types of people involved in websites today: those who see content as an asset, and those who see it as a commodity. The latter better start looking for a new career." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on November 14, 2004 | Permalink

Design Engaged Photos

"Place for participants in the November 2004 Design Engaged workshop to put photos" (flickr beta) - courtesy of thomas vander wall

Posted on November 13, 2004 | Permalink

Do you make this obvious web design mistake?

"The most common web design mistake is to design for the exception, and to ignore the obvious. That's because designing for the obvious is boring, while designing for the exception is fun." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on November 07, 2004 | Permalink

The Dance of Understanding

"We subscribe to the view (...) that a satisfying experience of understanding does not result from invoking objectivity, the truth, or a compelling argument, to achieve agreement by the force of reason, nor from a process of information exchange, but from some other qualities of the biological interaction itself." (Lloyd Fell and David Russell - Radical Constructivism)

Posted on November 05, 2004 | Permalink

Mapped Pictures: A draft chapter from Beautiful Evidence

"Here is a long chapter from Beautiful Evidence. Comments appreciated. The chapter will be up on the board for a few weeks. Thanks, E.T." (Edward Tufte)

Posted on November 01, 2004 | Permalink

Stupid Voters

"At the end of the article, he quotes a Florida elections supervisor, who makes a mean-spirited remark about 'stupid people' who vote -- arguing that no matter how good the redesign, they (those stupid people) won't mark it right. Cynical comments like these make me believe that every time one of us has the chance to articulate the needs of citizens, we should. There are too many of these public officials who pollute the air with their snide remarks and who blame the general public for not knowing what to do when confronted with their atrocious writing and design." (Karen Schriver - InfoDesign-Cafe Oct. 2003)

Posted on October 29, 2004 | Permalink

The users' voice in the timetable dialogue

"Research indicates that people have difficulty understanding and using public transport timetables when they are presented in the well-established genre of a two-dimensional matrix. In a project (...), we used a methodology which integrated user's information needs with research into historical design solutions, legibility, and current technology. Our application of the methodology generated a design solution which our testing showed helped to enhance user’s effective understanding of the public transport system." (Maureen MacKenzie - Communication Research Institute of Australia)

Posted on October 20, 2004 | Permalink

Institute of Network Cultures

"The Institute of Network Cultures (INC), which was set up in June 2004, caters to research, meetings and (online) initiatives in the area of internet and new media. Not only will the INC facilitate, but also initiate and produce a range of projects. Its goal is to create an open organizational form with a strong focus on content, within which ideas (emanating from both individuals and institutions) can be given an institutional context at an early stage. Based on the fusion of old and new media, the INC aims to organize both public and internal meetings and to formulate new research." (About INC)

Posted on October 20, 2004 | Permalink

eGovernment: No website is better than a bad one

"Not publishing is much better than publishing poor quality content. Most people come to websites to carry out tasks. Quality content will help them complete these tasks quickly and efficiently. Poor quality content hinders task completion, and frustrates and annoys people." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on October 17, 2004 | Permalink

Elegance Through Simplicity

"By keeping goals in mind and design simple, you can achieve elegant, easily understandable data presentations." (Stephen Few - Intelligent enterprise Magazine) - courtesy of john rhodes

Posted on October 17, 2004 | Permalink

Homemade Mayonnaise

"Too lazy to leave my home in the middle of food preparation (...), I grabbed a clean bowl and my whisk to make some of my homemade mayo." (Michael Chu - Cooking for Engineers) - courtesy of mark bernstein

Posted on October 11, 2004 | Permalink

New Europe, New Spirit

"In central Europe, design is at a crossroads. It is 15 years since the collapse of communism and the arrival of democracy and the free market and a great deal has happened in the design communities of countries such as the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovenia, Poland and Hungary. Design is at different stages of development, reflecting national economic conditions and the relationship of designers with their own local traditions of design, but certain factors are shared, and it is these opportunities and dilemmas that I want to explore." (Rick Poynor - Design Observer)

Posted on October 06, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Design Journal + Document Design 12:1

"(...) a forum for both practitioners and researchers. It aims to enhance design knowledge and practice so that informed design can support people's interactions with printed and electronic materials, whether using verbal text, numbers, pictures, diagrams or other forms of representation. IDJ+DD brings together the variety of ways of investigating and thinking about the effective design of information in various genres." (John Benjamins Publishing Company)

Posted on October 04, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Interactive Annual 10 Winners

"This year's winners were selected by our distinguished jury from a group of entries including Web sites, Kiosks, CD-ROM projects and PDA's. The 43 winning projects are showcased, and in further detail in the September/October 2004 issue of Communication Arts magazine." (Communication Arts) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on September 29, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Panadol 24 Pack: New instructions for consumers

"This case history demonstrates how information design research and practice can bring about useful social change on a large scale. It is a lightly edited version of a report prepared for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in August 2002 following our work on redeveloping the consumer instructions for Panadol, the most widely used paracetemol analgesic in Australia." (David Sless - Communication Research Institute of Australia)

Posted on September 29, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Knowledge management: Are you too busy to think?

"There are certain words you need to ban the use of, and 'busy' is one of them. In knowledge-driven economies, 'busy' is an outdated word that reflects a manual labor approach to work. Instead of 'busy' you need to use words such as 'effective' and 'productive'." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on September 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Culture and Websites

"Internationalization has become a very popular topic around web design. Designers are becoming more aware of the global scale of websites and are taking into account different language character sets, date formats and currencies. The more subtle effects of culture, however, are less evident. In an attempt to study these factors, Aaron Marcus and Emilie W. Gould discuss how Hofstede's cultural dimensions of power-distance (PD), individual vs. collectivism (IC), masculinity vs. femininity (MAS) and uncertainty avoidance (UA) and long term vs. short term orientation (LTO) may apply to global web sites. As an exercise, I looked at several corporate and consumer websites that might illustrate - or perhaps contradict - the patterns Marcus and Gould described." (Kevin Cheng - OK/Cancel) - courtesy of chris mcevoy

Posted on September 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

What is a digital document?

"The question 'What is a digital document?' is seen as a special case of the question 'What is a document?' (...) Old confusions between medium, message, and meaning are renewed with digital technology because technological definitions of "document" become even less realistic when everything is in bits." (Michael K. Buckland)

Posted on September 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Information as thing

"Three meanings of 'information' are distinguished: 'Information-as-process'; 'information-as-knowledge'; and 'information-as-thing', the attributive use of 'information' to denote things regarded as informative. The nature and characteristics of 'information-as-thing' are discussed, using an indirect approach ('What things are informative?'). Varieties of 'information-as-thing' include data, text, documents, objects, and events. On this view 'information' includes but extends beyond communication. Whatever information storage and retrieval systems store and retrieve is necessarily 'information-as-thing'." (Michael K. Buckland)

Posted on September 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Credibility of Online Health Information

"Kris Freeman (University of Washington) let me know her thesis research got published. A while back I gave Kris a tiny bit of help, for which she graciously thanked me. I'm always happy to see new research about web credibility and expect more good things from Kris. Congrats!" (Captology Notebook)

Posted on September 14, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom

"What follows is the current level of understanding I have been able to piece together regarding data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. I figured to understand one of them I had to understand all of them." (Gene Bellinger et al.)

Posted on September 13, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Less is more for government websites

"Many governments have so far approached the Web with a rather crude strategy of getting every service online. This has resulted in a proliferation of often poor quality websites. The strategy should be to identify the most appropriate government services for the Web and to do them really well." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on September 12, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Intranet Trends to Watch For

"Cultures and priorities vary, but there are some common issues for organizations as intranets continue to evolve." (Shiv Singh - Line56)

Posted on September 02, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Links and Causal Arrows: Ambiguity in Action

"Here is a complete draft of a chapter on linking lines and causal arrows from my Beautiful Evidence. This chapter suggests methods for showing linking lines and causal arrows, and also demonstrates ideas for assessing the credibility of various links. That is, the links themselves are taken as explanatory evidence. Note the typographic design of the organization chart which replaces the conventional design of bureaucrats-in-boxes." (Edward Tufte)

Posted on August 30, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Design Models and Processes: Introduction to a special issue

"A crucial aspect of most (if not all) Web systems is the way in which information is utilised and managed. Recent work on areas as diverse as topic maps, information architectures, adaptation of the Unified Modeling Language, agile development methods such as extreme programming, and modelling for the semantic Web, have all contributed to an emerging understanding of how to design the information structures that underpin the Web (and of course much of this work has in turn been informed by research in areas like hypertext and HCI)." (David Lowe - Journal of Digital Information 5.2)

Posted on August 13, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Information: The New Currency

"I = VT/AP: I = perceived cost of information to owner of information; V = validity of the information; T = time and effort to enter the information; A = availability of the information elsewhere; P - potential value to the owner of the information." (Kevin Cheng - OK/Cancel)

Posted on August 10, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

e-Learning and language change: Observations, tendencies and reflections

"This paper discusses the globalization of e–learning, changes in languages as an effect of distance technologies and the lingua franca of modern times, English, and its effects on other languages. Hybrid languages such as Spanglish (Spanish English) and Swenglish (Swedish English) emerges as an effect of the increasing interaction between non–English languages and the dominant English language. The need for speed and efficiency in communication and the adaptation to new technology changes language dramatically as is observed in chat and SMS–mediated communication. The complexity of modern human communication is discussed with a historical perspective - the old modes of communication can now be used via Internet but this transfer changes their characteristics." (First Monday 9.8)

Posted on August 07, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Attract and Keep Customers: Site Design Tips to Improve Your Sales

"Research has long shown that the leading factor in persuading shoppers to buy from an e-commerce Web site is ease of navigation -- findings that were supported in a recent survey by Jupiter Research. In other words, customers are saying make your site easy-to-use, and you'll earn our sale." (James Maguire - eCommerce Guide)

Posted on August 06, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Embracing Information Architecture and Information Design

"Information architecture (IA) and information design (ID) are two fields that are taking the Web experience to a new level. They form the foundations of what is now widely known as user experience design (UXD). In this article, I argue that e-learning teams too have to embrace UXD practices in addition to learning design practices to take the learning experience to a higher level." (Australian Flexible Learning Community)

Posted on August 03, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

DIS2004: Day One: Bill Mitchell Keynote

"He's given an excellent talk on how campus design and design for learning spaces have been changed by wifi and ubiquitous computing." (Black Belt Jones)

Posted on August 03, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Not everyone is worth supporting

"Support costs money. Some customers are worth supporting because they are, or have the capacity to be, profitable. Some customers are not worth supporting because the cost of supporting them is greater than the profit that can be made from them. Differentiating between profitable and unprofitable customers is a critical skill." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on August 01, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Bringing human information behaviour into information systems research: an application of systems modelling

"In their influential paper, Dervin and Nilan compared and contrasted the 'traditional' and 'alternative' paradigms for human information behaviour research, highlighting the inadequacies of the former and promoting the importance of the latter. In this paper, we argue that the two paradigms are not irreconcilable. We offer a research framework that allows qualitative and quantitative views of the same problem to be combined using systems models. We demonstrate how this approach can be used to reconcile the six key differences between the two paradigms as argued by Dervin and Nilan." (David Johnstone et al. - Information Research July 2004) - courtesy of chris mcevoy

Posted on July 30, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

These web sites are identical - or are they?

"This survey compares 10 web sites through elements of their layout: styles, page construction and elements. The survey seeks similarities and differences between those well known web sites, built by famous, talented designers. What can be observed is that those web sites agree on implicit, internalized layout and design norms (Consensus rate), and that deviance from these rules (Dissidence rate) is uncommon." (François Briatte) - courtesy of douglas bowman

Posted on July 28, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Forms: The importance of getting it right

"Problems start when forms are forgotten or not given the attention they require. Forms are not seen as exciting or prestigious when compared to a glossy brochure, so they are often left with no owner or person responsible for them, which leads to inconsistency and confusion." (Lift)

Posted on July 27, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Political Web sites not pulling in voters

"The sites often made it hard for users to find policies on particular topics due to poor information design, such as structure and labelling, and poor interaction and visual design, where it was unclear where links were taking the user." (ZDNet Australia)

Posted on July 27, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Support is where brands are won and lost

"If brand loyalty is best measured by gut feeling then there are few better ways to test its strength than when a customer requires support, because that’s when feelings are high. Today, most organizations pretty much wash their hands of the customer after they’ve sold them the product. This is a shot-sighted strategy." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on July 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Design Methods and Productivity

"In many ways this is a model project: it provides empirical evidence of successful problem-solving methods in information design with clear evidence from before and after the introduction of the new designs. It stands on its own as a case study of successful information design, and much of this paper is concerned with the detailed methods that were used and the resulting performance of the designs." (Phil Fisher and David Sless - CRIA)

Posted on July 20, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Software That Lasts 200 Years

"The structure and culture of a typical prepackaged software company is not attuned to the long-term needs of society for software that is part of its infrastructure. This essay discusses the ecosystem needed for development that better meets those needs." (Dan Bricklin)

Posted on July 20, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Getting senior management engaged in the Web

"The extent of senior management involvement in the Web is a clear indication of the value of the Web to your organization. If your senior management currently don't recognize the importance of the Web, then it is vital that they are educated as to its value." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on July 18, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Too Much Information Is Not Enough

"With all the information available, the information design challenges are daunting. But banks are learning that it is better for their customers, and ultimately more profitable for the bank, to provide all the facts and to simply focus on how best to present these facts than it is to leave customers to speculate as to what is happening with their checking account." (Chris Musto - CMP) - courtesy of karel van der waarde

Posted on July 15, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The Web: Inside the bubble was a revolution

"It is said that we overestimate the short-term impacts of a revolution and underestimate the longer-term ones. I have known people who overestimated and others who underestimated the short-term impacts of the Web. I have met some who believed that after the dot com bust, the Web wasn't that important anymore. They couldn't be more wrong." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on July 12, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Small Screens, Big Lessons

"Small screens devices, with their constrained design environment and demanding target market, compel designers to strive for highly concise, effective user interfaces. This website is the companion to the 'Small Screens, Big Lessons' seminar series, which examines the various beneficial design elements that can be found in well-designed small screen interfaces. Many of the approaches and ideas found in the user interfaces for small screens can also serve as the basis for designing more effective desktop applications and websites." (Paul D. Hibbitts)

Posted on July 05, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Papers from the Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference

New York May 17-22, 2004 (WWW 2004) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on June 24, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Making Knowledge Management Work on your Intranet

"In the information economy, the longevity of an organization is based as much on the sophistication of its knowledge management practices as it is on traditional differentiators such as the strength of its products, the talent of its employees, and its marketplace reputation and partner relationships. Simply speaking, as actionable and insightful information becomes the currency of an organization, there are few other ways to tap into any latent potential lost in the office corridors." (Shiv Singh - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on June 22, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Toward a Critical Practice in Design

"A critical practice challenges prevailing values through works based in some other set of values. This is a form of conscientiousness. In a world where technique has too often become an end in itself, a culturally critical attitude has become essential to meaningful design. How to seek and identify a problem is as important as how to solve a problem." (Usability News)

Posted on June 17, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The mentality Of Homo interneticus: Some Ongian postulates

"Because typical experiences will differ, the mentality of the typical Internet user, or Homo interneticus, is likely to be significantly different from that of the typical reader of printed works or of writing or of the typical member of purely oral cultures. These differences include deep assumptions about time and space, authority, property, gender, causality and community." (Michael H. Goldhaber - First Monday 9.6)

Posted on June 09, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Escher Staircases on the World Wide Web

"It is shown that Escher Staircases, i.e. cycles of four nodes in a graph with reciprocal links, form a basic structural element on the World Wide Web." (Ronald Rousseau and Mike Thelwall - First Monday 9.6)

Posted on June 09, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Masters of Design

"No matter what you do for a living, design matters. Meet and learn from 20 visionary men and women who are using design to create not just new products, but new ways of working, leading, and seeing." (Bill Breen - Fast Company Issue 83) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted on June 07, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

If you're on the Web, you're in sales

"Everybody on the Web is in the business of sales. It doesn’t matter whether you’re managing an intranet, a government or university website. You’re still selling something; still trying to get someone to do something. What do you want people to do? How are you going to convince them to do it?" (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on June 06, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Sparklines: New revised draft from Beautiful Evidence

"The chapter is now 18 pages long and probably will require a high speed connection. Images that are blurry on the computer screen are crystal clear on paper. Stephen Malinowski, Brad Paley, and Bonnie Scranton helped with several important graphics. New examples or helpful comments much appreciated." (Edward Tufte) - courtesy of jason kottke

Posted on June 02, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Design Journal + Document Design

General Editors: Jan Renkema, Wilbert Spooren, Paul Stiff and Sue Walker (University of Tilburg, NL / Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, NL / University of Reading, UK) - "Please note that as of 2004 volume 12, the Information Design Journal has joined forces with Document Design." (John Benjamins Publishing Company)

Posted on May 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Doceo + mentum - a ground for a new discipline

"The aim of Documentation is rapidly and easily to provide all researchers, whatever their level of knowledge or culture, both with the materials of study which represent the totality of human experience and with detailed information on particular points. In scientific, technical, historical, social and industrial matters, it is the systematically organised intermediary between the public and documents, between those who read and those who write. It provides recorded information, that is, the distribution of information by the book, periodical, newspaper, and photographic image." (Niels Windfeld Lund - DOCAM'03 Conference)

Posted on May 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Simplicity

"(...) an experimental research program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab focused on developing technologies for design - designs that are simpler to understand, easier to use, and, ultimately, more enjoyable." (John Maeda)

Posted on May 25, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Serious Games Summit 2004

"The Serious Games Initiative is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy. (...) This is the page to add your notes and slides from the 2004 Serious Games Summit 2004." (Serious Games Initiative) - courtesy of jeroen van mastrigt

Posted on May 18, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The Power of Design

"IDEO redefined good design by creating experiences, not just products. Now it's changing the way companies innovate." (Business Week)

Posted on May 18, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Flexing Paper's Muscles

"Paul Curzon of the Interaction Design Centre at Middlesex University looks at what paper is still good for and the blend of technologies useful for the writing process." (Usability News)

Posted on May 12, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Intranets and knowledge sharing

"Much has been made of the emphasis on people and process in knowledge management. While it is certainly true that knowledge management is not a technology issue, effort must still be spent in providing a suitable environment to facilitate knowledge capture and sharing." (James Robertson - KM Column)

Posted on May 06, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Digital Convergence: Insight into the future of Web design

"As digital products continue to converge, the Web will increasingly become just one component of more complicated products." (Dirk Knemeyer - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on May 06, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Sharing Digital Resources: Web-Wise 2004

"Selected papers from the Fifth Annual Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World, sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services and the university of Illinois at Chicago, 3-5 March 2004, Chicago." (First Monday) - courtesy of beth mazur

Posted on May 05, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Web content management: a lot of great progress

"Every day there is tremendous work being done on the Web. Talented, dedicated people are working with limited resources and support to achieve brilliant results. If you're one of those people struggling to achieve the recognition you need, take a moment to take a bow." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on May 02, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The Evolution of Corporate Web Sites

"It's fascinating to see how they have evolved over the years, from the early days of magazine-style brochureware to the most recent trends of two-way Web interfaces." (Richard MacManus - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on April 29, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Reproduced and emergent genres of communication on the World-Wide Web

"Genres are useful because they are more easily recognized and understood by recipients of the communications. Therefore, we suggest that Web site designers consider the genres that are appropriate for their situation and attempt to reuse familiar genres. More explicit attention to genres may also speed the wider acceptance of newly emerging genres of communication unique to the Web." (Kevin Crowston and Marie Williams) - courtesy of victor lombardi

Posted on April 28, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

How much human support does your website need?

"A website should be measured based on the value it creates. What results do you want to get from your website? A 100 percent self-service website may simply not deliver the results you need. The right mix of self service and human support may in fact deliver the best value." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on April 24, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Storytelling: Scientist's Perspective: John Seely Brown

"The implications when technology is brought into the storytelling process." (John Seely Brown: Chief of Confusion)

Posted on April 23, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The Impact of Design on Stock Market Performance 

"Design is a critical component of business performance. We've heard designers, commentators and companies say it. But, to date, the evidence for the link between shareholder return and investment in design has been scarce and anecdotal." (Design Counsil) - courtesy of jason kottke

Posted on April 23, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The secret of managing a successful website

"The Web is about self-service. To achieve success in self-service you need to really understand how your visitors think and behave. If they are to serve themselves they must feel comfortable and confident. That requires getting to know their needs in a comprehensive manner. It requires an ongoing conversation with them." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on April 19, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The nonsense of 'knowledge management'

"Examines critically the origins and basis of 'knowledge management', its components and its development as a field of consultancy practice. Problems in the distinction between 'knowledge' and 'information' are explored, as well as Polanyi's concept of 'tacit knowing'. The concept is examined in the journal literature, the Web sites of consultancy companies, and in the presentation of business schools. The conclusion is reached that 'knowledge management' is an umbrella term for a variety of organizational activities, none of which are concerned with the management of knowledge. Those activities that are not concerned with the management of information are concerned with the management of work practices, in the expectation that changes in such areas as communication practice will enable information sharing." (T.D. Wilson - Information Research 8.1)

Posted on April 15, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The three core principles of great web design

"The essence of a website is self-service. There are three core things that self-service needs to get right: convenience, speed, and price. Convenience means task achievement with minimum effort. Speed means that you get in and out of a website as quickly as possible. People are cheap on the Web." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on April 11, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Are you publishing too much on your website?

"Many websites are still publishing content that is not core to their business. The justification is that such content will indirectly deliver benefit. This is not a good idea. Focus on the content that is directly applicable to your organization’s objectives. Any other content confuses. It wastes time and money." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on April 05, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Web Design is Information Design

"Whereas the graphic designers job is usually to make something look good, the information designers job is to make something as logical and as easy to understand as possible. The information designer is less artist and more information architect and usability expert." (Andy Budd - Blogography) - courtesy of d. keith robinson

Posted on April 03, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Content Mapping 

"Content Mapping is the theoretical framework used by Namahn's information designers to turn traditional, sequential information into manageable and re-usable document-like content objects, ready for multiple purposes." (Namahn Research Notes)

Posted on March 28, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Smart style for conveying information 

"The catch is that the style ingredients - content, presentation structure and aesthetics - are mutually dependent. Resolving these dependencies is exactly why graphic design is difficult and the reason that our style has to get smart." (Lynda Hardman)

Posted on March 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

It's all in the process 

"Information design isn't necessarily about databases, spreadsheets, or even infographics. It's about process - designers and clients working together to solve problems and convey complex information though design systems that are functional and beautiful." (Ann Senechal - Adobe Magazine)

Posted on March 23, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

How to tell people what else you do on your website

"People come to your website on a mission. They want to do something specific. They are tunnel readers. Telling them what else you do - without annoying them - is a major challenge. Doing it well is about relevance and context. It’s about presenting the right content at the right time." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on March 21, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Programmers, designers and the Brooklyn Bridge

"Do engineers design? Can designers engineer? Looking back at great projects throughout history, it seems these kinds of questions never needed to be asked. There was a philosophy that surfaced in many great works that to do anything well required more than one skill set or discipline. On the contrary, unchecked specialization breeds fragile and shallow ideas. As technology has progressed, I think we’ve lost our connections with the great works of the past and the philosophies and attitudes that enabled their creation. The design and engineering of modern technology, software and the web has bred a hubris that anything older than a few years can’t possibly be relevant, and I think it’s a mistake. To argue this point, there is no better place to start as a basis of comparison and learning than the story of the Brooklyn Bridge." (Scott Berkun - UIweb) - courtesy of lawrence lee

Posted on March 21, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

A republic of information designers

"The introduction of an information elite does little to reassure us. Wurman (1995) sees a heroic role for 'a group of people, small in number, deep in passion, called Information Architects', struggling forward through the 'field of black volcanic ash' constituted by current design, in order to save humanity from the 'tsunami of data that is crashing onto the beaches of the civilized world'. This sounds more like a blurb for the next Spielberg blockbuster, with Information Architects as the good guys, than as a serious proposal about the role of information design. However, the conference brochure similarly suggests that the 'Republic of Information' is 'going to be laid out and planned by a new breed of architects, informed with a new level of understanding and purpose'." (Jos de Bruin and Remko Scha - Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam)

Posted on March 19, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Calm Technologies in a Multimedia World

"In an ideal world, computers will blend into the landscape, will inform but not overburden you with information, and make you aware of them only when you need them." (Alexandru Tugui - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on March 19, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Design: A young discipline 

"Information Design, ID, comprises research on analysis, planning, presentation, and understanding of a message - its content, language, and form. Regardless of the selected medium, a well designed information material will satisfy aesthetic, economic, ergonomic, as well as subject matter requirements. The study of information design can be summarised as a multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional, and worldwide consideration." (Rune Petterson - Information Design and Product Development, Mälardalen University, Eskilstuna, Sweden)

Posted on March 17, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

How to design for the tunnel reader

"People may initially scan read on the Web; their eyes moving quickly across a page. However, when they find the keywords they are interested in, they tend to tunnel read. What this means is that they focus on a specific set of content. They basically don’t see anything else on your website." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on March 14, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

How to make links work for your website

"Quality links from external websites will help get more of the right people to your website. Well written links within your website will ensure your readers can act in a way you want them to. Linking is about driving action. It's about getting the right people to the right content as quickly as possible." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on March 07, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Sparklines or Wordgraphs

"Here are some pieces of the sparkline chapter from Beautiful Evidence. I hope this material will be read carefully. Perhaps several Kindly Contributors will make some beautiful and interesting sparklines (or wordgraphics) with lots of data from a variety of fields." (Edward Tufte - Ask E.T.) - courtesy of peter merholz

Posted on March 05, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

A Recipe for Learning Web Design

"Web design and its related fields are still relatively young in the grand scheme of things and are still developing. (...) There are many different paths one can take to become a professional Web designer, each as different as the individuals that make up the Web design community." (D. Keith Robinson - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on March 04, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Cooperative brands: The importance of customer information for service brands 

"Focusing on a critical aspect in the relationship with consumers, Rob Waller and Judy Delin urge designers to create 'cooperative' communications - media that are relevant, clear, concise, thruthful, and informative. These attributes strengthen brand and build loyalty. Ignoring them causes confusion and doubt, weakening the connection with customers. Violating them - a 'final straw' experience - can end the customer relationship." (Rob Waller)

Posted on March 02, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Design Matters

"Design matters. It matters in everyday life. It matters in everything we consume or use. It matters in every human endeavor. Without design and those people that commit their lives to its practice, the world that would result from that absence would be an intolerable place to live." (Andrei Herasimchuk - Design by Fire)

Posted on February 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Wizards and Guides: Principles of Task Flow for Web Applications 2/2

"Although wizards are a common feature of the interface landscape, their rigidity clearly runs counter to one of the basic tenets of user-centered design: providing the user with appropriate control over the interaction. Therefore, like the pointy-hat mystics for whom they’re named, wizards should generally be treated with suspicion and skepticism, and ideally avoided whenever possible." (Bob Baxley - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on February 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Web Content Design

"What makes Web content effective? You'll find the answer here. Learn the basics of information design, Web writing style, and content maintenance." (Mazzie Ballheim)

Posted on February 24, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Press releases are awful web content

"In the hierarchy of content, the press release is a bottom feeder. It is a single cell organism. In fact, it was never meant to see the light of day. To most people, reading a press release is about as interesting as reading a parking fine. And yet press releases proliferate on the Web." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on February 22, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

The knowledge management puzzle: Human and social factors in knowledge management

"Knowledge management is often seen as a problem of capturing, organizing, and retrieving information, evoking notions of data mining, text clustering, databases, and documents. We believe that this view is too simple. Knowledge is inextricably bound up with human cognition, and the management of knowledge occurs within an intricately structured social context. We argue that it is essential for those designing knowledge management systems to consider the human and social factors at play in the production and use of knowledge." (J. C. Thomas, W. A. Kellogg, and T. Erickson - IBM Research)

Posted on February 18, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Genre and Multimodality: A computer model of genre in document layout

"Layout and graphics are not random: they are used creatively to express meaning, just as language is. The GeM project analyses expert knowledge of page design and layout to see how visual resources are used in the creation of documents, both printed and electronic. The genre of a page (...) plays a central role in determining what graphical devices are chosen and how they are employed." (GeM Project Team)

Posted on February 17, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Do you have a smiling face on your website?

"If you think it's great to have a smiling face on your website, join the crowd. It's hard to find a website these days that doesn't have a happy face. Unfortunately, the happy face syndrome is often a reflection of lack of focus. When everyone is smiling, where's the differentiation?" (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on February 16, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Managing the Complexity of Content Management

"Content management systems suck. Or so you would think from the strife heard from analysts and practitioners alike. And yet, many websites regularly publish vast amounts of information with superior control and ease compared to manually editing pages. So where's the disconnect between what's possible and the too-often failure of CMS?" (Victor Lombardi - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on February 10, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Value-Driven Intranet Design

"Fundamentally, your intranet must be tied to value creation like other business services within your organization." (Shiv Singh - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on February 10, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Abstract identifiers, intertextual reference and a computational basis for recordkeeping

"This paper presents three proposals concerning the structure and maintenance of formal, inter–referential, digitally stored texts: (1) include abstract atomic identifiers in texts, (2) identify these identifiers with references to text objects, and (3) keep among the texts records of computationally substantiated claims about those texts. We use 'formal' in a narrow sense approximating computer–checkable; we are informed by informal symbolic practices used in mathematical text and program source text, which we hope to enhance and exploit explicitly. The basic management problem is how to alter texts rather freely without ruining the bases for claims depending upon them; this becomes an issue of accounting for various dependencies between texts." (Stuart Frazier Allen - FirstMonday 9.2)

Posted on February 10, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Why Google is such a great brand

"Google has clarity and focus. Google knows that great brands serve a purpose. They are useful. Google genuinely believes in the motto: the searcher is king. It demonstrates that you can put the customer first and make a profit. Google keeps it simple and wins." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on February 08, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

From Brick to Click - Bridging the Divide 4/7: Mastering Virtual Customer Service

Divide 4/7: Mastering Virtual Customer Service "(...) the secret to good customer service is paying attention: not allowing it to quietly slide out of focus and thus increasing the likelihood of damaging your profits and brand." (Dirk Knemeyer - Thread, Inc.)

Posted on February 06, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

What makes a great website?

"What makes a great website is focus and clarity of purpose. A great website is unpretentious. It doesn't pretend to be what it is not. It never wastes your time because it always gets to the point. A great website helps you to act." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on February 01, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

How to manage smart people

"(...) years at Microsoft, sometimes managing projects, sometimes managing people, but always with a manager above me. I think I'm smart, but many of the people who have worked for me definitely were. Over the years, I've experienced many mistakes and successes in both how I was managed, and how I managed others. What follows is a short distillation of some of what I've learned. There's no one way to manage people, but there are some approaches that I think most good managers share." (Scott Berkun - UIweb) - courtesy of lawrence lee

Posted on January 31, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

What is Zzstructure?

"Zzstructure is a way of representing the structure of information. Zzstructure is very different, for example the concepts of 'file', 'folder' and 'application' are abandoned. Because of this a bit of fantasy, creativity and an ability to forget previous knowledge is needed in order to understand Zzstructure. A Zzstructure structure consists of cells and dimensions. A cell is the basic unit of information of a Zzstructure structure. Cells containing related information can be connected with each other along dimensions, the number of which is unlimited. A Zzstructure structure is separate from its visualisation (= the way the data is presented on the screen), which means that a Zzstructure structure can have many visualisations designed for different purposes. Even though a Zzstructure structure is separate from its visualisation, a Zzstructure structure is not separate from other Zzstructure structures. Every piece of information stored in a digital device using based on Zzstructure is in the same space: the same cells can be connected on several dimensions created for different structures." (Gzz)

Posted on January 29, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Indicators for European Content for the Global Networks: Executive Summary 

"We recommend that the EU recognise the importance of developing European focused e-Portals and the addition of a more European focus to international sites and their content. The strong presence of US e-Portals that largely use the English language also has longer-term development implications for those Member States and candidate countries where English is not widely used." (eContent Strategic Studies)

Posted on January 29, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

A longitudinal study of Web pages continued: A consideration of document persistence

"It is well established that Web documents are ephemeral in nature. The literature now suggests that some Web objects are more ephemeral than others. Some authors describe this in terms of a Web document half-life, others use terms like 'linkrot' or persistence. It may be that certain 'classes' of Web documents are more or less likely to persist than are others. This article is based upon an evaluation of the existing literature as well as a continuing study of a set of URLs first identified in late 1996. It finds that a static collection of general Web pages tends to 'stabilize' somewhat after it has 'aged'. However 'stable' various collections may be, their instability nevertheless pose problems for various classes of users. Based on the literature, it also finds that the stability of more specialized Web document collections (legal, educational, scientific citations) vary according to specialization. This finding, in turn, may have implications both for those who employ Web citations and for those involved in Web document collection development." (Wallace Koehler - Information Research 9.2)

Posted on January 20, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

A Few Thoughts on Cognitive Overload

"Cognitive overload is a brute fact of modern life. It is not going to disappear. In almost every facet of our work life, and in more and more of our domestic life, the jobs we need to do and the activity spaces we have in which to perform those jobs are ecologies saturated with overload. As technology increases the omnipresence of information, both of the pushed and pulled sort, the consequence for the workplace, so far, is that we are more overwhelmed. There is little reason to suppose this trend to change." (David Kirsh - Dept. of Cogsci, UCSD)

Posted on January 19, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

From Brick to Click: Bridging the Divide 3/7: eCommerce and Experience Design

"The overarching lesson when considering experience design in the context of eCommerce is that we need to abandon the flatland of our screen." (Dirk Knemeyer- Thread, Inc.)

Posted on January 18, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Web design: Never let an ad agency near your website

"The average advertising agency fundamentally doesn't get the Web. Saatchi & Saatchi, BBDO Worldwide, J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy are great advertising agencies. When it comes to managing their own websites, however, they are rank amateurs. They bring their print and TV thinking to the Web with embarrassing results." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on January 18, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Auditory Information Design

"The prospect of computer applications making 'noises' is disconcerting to some. Yet the soundscape of the real world does not usually bother us. Perhaps we only notice a nuisance? This thesis is an approach for designing sounds that are useful information rather than distracting 'noise'." (Stephen Barrass 1998 - The Australian National University)

Posted on January 13, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Designing for Limited Resources

"Good online experience design must accommodate real-world limitations." (Laura S. Quinn - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on January 13, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

From Brick to Click - Bridging the Divide 2/7: Effective Virtual Salespeople

"(...) it really comes back to the human touch. Making the interaction as personal and attentive as possible. Creating and locating content in a way that questions and concerns are answered even before they are asked, to simulate the value that an in-store salesperson brings." (Dirk Knemeyer - Thread Inc.)

Posted on January 12, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

From Brick to Click - Bridging the Divide 1/7: Understanding eCommerce

"We have only barely begun to take advantage of the opportunity presented by eCommerce. This is despite the power of broadband connection and the seemingly ubiquitous presence of personal web-enabled devices. Despite visionary and innovative eCommerce companies. Despite the best efforts of traditional companies to best leverage and even transition over to an eCommerce-centered model." (Dirk Knemeyer - Thread Inc.)

Posted on January 12, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Web content management predictions for 2004

"This is the year when web content comes of age. Organizations will slowly stop viewing content as some cost that needs to be managed. Instead, they will begin to see content as an asset that can drive profits and productivity. A new role will emerge within many organizations: the publisher/editor." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on January 12, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Design of Community-Building

"This article will speak to the issue that there are certain design considerations which are critical for successful, long-lasting community building on the web that may have no importance or may have lesser importance in a non-community-oriented web site." (Sandra Maddox - Lazarus)

Posted on January 10, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

On the economy of Web links: Simulating the exchange process

"In the modern Web economy, hyperlinks have already attained monetary value as incoming links to a Web site can increase its visibility on major search engines. Thus links can be viewed as investment instruments that can be the subject of an exchange process. In this study we build a simple model performed by rational agents, whereby links can be bought and sold. Through simulation we achieve consistent economic behaviour of the artificial Web community and provide analysis of its micro– and macro–level parameters. In our simulations we take the link economy to its extreme, where a significant number of links are exchanged, concluding that it will lead to a winner take all situation." (Boris Galitsky and Mark Levene - First Monday 9.1)

Posted on January 08, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

What is Web Design?

"A compilation of issues, process and practice in design for connected interactive experiences." (Review by Shelley Evenson - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on January 08, 2004 | Permalink

What is Information Design?

"While I am greatly generalizing to drive my point, I advocate that visual communication work is conceived and designed according to the good principles of Information Design listed above and not according to the visual taste and preference of anyone." (Robin Good - Master New Media)

Posted on January 03, 2004 | Permalink

Consumers go adrift in sea of unfiltered data: Longer we're connected, the more we create

"Digital cameras let us snap more shots cheaply and spontaneously. But instead of keeping the best for posterity, we often clutter our computers by saving all, good or bad." (Anick Jesdanun - Seattle Post-Intelligencer) - courtesy of jakob nielsen

Posted on January 03, 2004 | Permalink

Information Design Journal 11:1

Theme: Information design for air transport (Karel van der Waarde & Piet Westendorp eds. - John Benjamin Publishing Company)

Posted on December 19, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Spit-not-so, or What's in the Layout?

"Many tasks involve the processing of information from different sources. Some information needed resides in the memory of the person. Other information is in physical things: dials, screens even the position of objects. Physical (and similarly virtual) objects act as memory aids." (Paul Curzon - Usability News)

Posted on December 19, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Information Design: the Popular Communication experience

"From this point of view, I suggest that in figuring out 'where Information Design has come from', we can usefully look beyond the usual suspects: it's not only self-identified ID 'believers' who have contributed good ideas about how to communicate clearly, effectively and appropriately." (Conrad Taylor - Ideography) - courtesy of beth mazur

Posted on December 16, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Avoid Santa Claus approach to content management

"The Santa Claus approach to content management creates a content management software wish list. It believes in the magic of technology to sweep away any and every problem. Typically, those who believe in Santa don't believe in defining their processes, or figuring out just why they need a website in the first place." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on December 15, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

Buckets: Smart objects for digital libraries

"Buckets are an aggregative, intelligent construct for publishing in DLs allow the decoupling of information content from information storage and retrieval. Buckets exist within the Smart Objects and Dumb Archives model for DLs in that we 'push down' many of the functionalities and responsibilities traditionally associated with archives (making the archives 'dumber') into the buckets (making them 'smarter'). Some of the responsibilities imbued to buckets are the enforcement of their terms and conditions, and maintenance and display of their contents." (Michael L. Nelson) - courtesy of usablehelp

Posted on December 11, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

The humanism of media ecology: Keynote address delivered at the inaugural media ecology association convention

"As far as I can tell, the new media have made us into a nation of information junkies; that is to say, our 170-year efforts have turned information into a form of garbage. My own answer to the question concerning access to information is that, at least for now, the speed, volume, and variety of available information serve as a distraction and a moral deficit; we are deluded into thinking that the serious social problems of our time would be solved if only we had more information, and still more information." (Neil Postman - Media Ecology Association) - courtesy of vanderwal

Posted on December 09, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

There are only four things that people do on the web

"Begin thinking of your website as the means to meet the needs and desires of people. Understand the motivations that bring people to the web. Help them learn and feel and connect and trade. Plan your site to successfully provide all four of those things for the people you want to move." (Dirk Knemeyer - Thread Inc.)

Posted on December 08, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack

The intranet gets serious: If you can't measure it, you can't manage it - Part 4/4

"Intranets don't self-organize. Without planned, centralized information architectures and clearly defined published processes, they become unproductive. Intranets often have applications that either don't work properly, are too difficult to learn, or have no clear business benefit. Applications, like content, must be able to establish a clear return on investment." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted on December 07, 2003 | Permalink | TrackBack