Great Infonomists
awards great thinking and innovation in the field of information science.
Nick Finck was laid off today. I've long admired his work on digital-web.com and I think anyone hiring him would be very happy.
Information Design Using Card Sorting -- or IA using Card Sorting if you prefer-- this is a solid introduction to the very useful technique of card sorting.
thanks iawiki
Lately I've been thinking about card sorting in relationship to menu design for features. One can sort features (tool, what have you) into groups depending on user expertise, tasks, user types... and so on. I've done this in the past by making squiggly diagrams (probably in the affinity diagram family), and I did feature card sorting on the snapfish project long ago... has anyone else tried this? Succeses? Failures?
The word of the day came in my email inbox and I thought, how apropos
"kilkenny cats (kil-KEN-ee kats) noun
People who fight relentlessly till their end.
[From a pair of proverbial cats in Kilkenny who fought till only their tails
were left.]
Greg Evan, my response to you bounced. I think you must have mis-entered your email address. please try again...
Flexible Search and Navigation using Faceted Metada is required reading. My gosh, it's swell. Completely thought through ideas, clearly explained, jargonless, insightful... okay, I dug it.
a cartoon about graphic designers, found on the always swell giantant.com/antenna.
From Trust: it's about good experience over time, David Walker writes:
"The Cheskin/Studio Archetype study's most important conclusion was that trust deepens or retreats based on experience. "Trustworthiness is about experience over time," concluded the report.
Specifically, the eCommerce Trust Study claimed that trust sprang from:
Thoughts? How much does good design affect trust? How much does bad design affect trust?
Double issue of ALA, with a search engine in Perl, and a backward compatible stylesheet switcher. "So what?" you say.
I've been personally waiting for this styleswitcher not so I can "skin" my site, but so I can offer a large type version. I've long suspected (from what I've seen in usability tests) that the great majority of people who need to make their fonts bigger have no idea how to. The stylesheet switcher could be used by a designer/coder to create a stylesheet where all the 10pt fonts were replaced with 14pts, and be indicated by a simple "large type version" button in a corner.
Matt Jones, man of the best tagline ever (IMO) points out an excellent post by another Matt on conversation interfaces, then elaborates upon it..
I think a good wiki has to have a champion. Wikis may support multiple authors, but someone has to put in the initial work of putting up enough content to make it worthwhile to add to, and then keep the stray additions in line, make sure the whole thing makes sense.
Easy Topic Maps is such a wiki. It's interesting, well organized and laid out, and full of good info.