So my husband and I are watching wild wild west, and there is a scene where the two heros are facing an evil villian who uses magnets to use flying saucers to assinate america's finest scientists and they are about to die if they step ourside an electromagnetic fence, and my husband turns to me and asks "were they cultivating corn in the late 1800's?"
geeze.
Favorite email to Boxes and Arrows
"Hello...We are glad we found you!
We have a project that will require large quantities of either 3" tubes or 3" triangular box which will be 96" in length. Do you make this? If you do, please email me with prices/lead time on either of the above with quantities..."
Finally, a business model for us!
ASIS-T IA Summit 2003 online registration is working. If you are like me and hate to lick a stamp (ew) this is your moment.
First five people who say "I signed up after seeing your post on EH" to me in Portland will get a shot of tequilla on my dime.
Love Amazon? Check out Rashmi's post to better understand your loved one...
'... it is incorrect to think that Recommender Systems cannot have an agenda, or less of an agenda than categorization. Recommender Systems are explicitly designed to encourage people to buy. ... Apart from other things, they also classify YOU. And they classify you without any knowledge or choice on your part. "
I rarely link to comments, but this one is sweet... empiricists acheive their best work after 35.
InformIT.com : Articles > Blueprints for the Web: Organization for the Masses an excerpt/article on card sorting. Registration is required, but free.
Need to know at a glance if a film features beehives, Backne or killer bunnies? Check out Beck's Incredible Film fest: The Icons
Just saw Dog Day Afternoon . wow. I had no idea... it was amazing.
How did Pacino become such a caricture of himself? This early work is so impressive.
I'm beginning to theorize that designers and usability researchers can start to quickly evaluate designs with their gut, once they have seen enough usability tests. Watching test after test builds up a body of experence that can result in pattern matching of interface and behavior. This results in situations where a designer (or researcher) looking at a design and feeling uneasy-- they might not know why it won't or will work, but they "know."
In fact I think the gut is more accurate than a rule.
How to Think With Your Gut lends credence to this theory.
Kite Aerial Photography by Scott Haefner: Panoramas is pretty amazing.
It may just be hype, but I don't think so...despite the stock valuation I felt really warm when I read
"Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel told Reuters the company was more concerned with the quality of its user experience than the question of whether it partners with cable operators or telephone companies in other regions of the country. "
That's the kind of comapny I'd be proud to work for.. wait a minute... I do.
Andi sent me Fly UI
"I have seen one of the finest instances of user interface design ever, and I saw it in the men's room at Schipol airport in Amsterdam."
from benry blog
"I spent part of this week discussing with a variety of people the different between User Profiles and Personas. The terms, while often used interchangeably, it turns out are actually quite different and refer to different parts of the process in determining 'who' you are designing for. "
He pinged me for my definition, and it raised a lot of interesting questions for me about what is it you need to know about your audience to assure effective design. I hope one day Cooper finally writes a book detailing their persona process... there is obviously a market for it. Inmates is a tease-- it suggests what is possible but doesn't tell you how; and chapter 7 in Blueprints is an introduction to that how. But really, the techniques of personas and scenarios are rich and complex enough that they deserve a full fledged book.
"Good design starts before the first pixel has been pushed. Successful designers have learned to manage their organizations and demonstrate the business value of usable design. This presentation will give you proven techniques to simplify internal politics, increase the resources available to you, and deliver your best designs."
I'm really pleased to see more courses on how to be effective at our job on a social and polital level, rather than only courses on craft. While there will always be inarticulate genuises in design, it also takes salesmen to assure what they have to offer will be valued.
At Challis's urging, I've reread UX Roles & Titles: Trend or Profession. Other than pain at reading such a tiny font (god I'm old. old old old. I'm old.) which may have lead to free-floating crankiness, I've pulled out a bunch of goodness-- in particular I'd like to point to:
"Web Designer may seem like an overgeneralization to those of us practicing in this space. However the same may be said of those practicing as doctors, lawyers and engineers. Each works within a profession, yet has an area of specialization and may fill different roles at different times. One example is as follows:
Doctor (pediatrics, oncology, internal medicine, orthopedics)
...."
Which is a great model for us to consider. Many folks say this *or* that, IA or ED, design or graphic design, with out considering the range of special and general skills one may need to do one's job.
The professions are not only not diametrically opposed, but's not even hierarchal. Design professions are intertwined, and variable, depending on medium and nature of the work (like doctors--small company vs large, small town generalist, big city specialist).
As for being a trend, hey, if we keep at all this IA business, maybe we can work up to a full fledged profession. After all, dentists used to let blood, right?
OJR article: Understanding Information Architecture
"he is an Information Architect, a member of a discipline that has a reputation for being a preserve of the hipper-than-thou." or nerdier than thou, depending on who you talk to.
Jesse just happens to be one of the hip ones.
Challis Hodge notes IA's popularity as an UX profession.
Mapping Websites is a dang inspiring book. I'm sad to hear it's gone out of print (a rumor-- is it wrong, I hope? Amazon says so...) Anyhow, you can get the section we probably care most for Web Site Planning Diagrams online.
All of the first edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web seems to be online on some guys site.
A side note: don't judge the polar bear on this edition (which is darn good, don't get me wrong) It's just that the second edition blows the doors off the first.
Checking out HallHTML.com :: Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web I realized the reviews are Amazon reviews. But no name is attached. Same for wordboost and anybook4less. Do people know their words will be out there without their names attached? I assume Amazon leases the reviews, and makes a bit of money off it. We sign those releases too quickly... not sure why I am disturbed so much, yet I am... "customer reviews" ... whose customers?
For some times now I've been saying information wants to be free, but people like to be paid. Print VersionThe Seven Deadly Sins of Free Content: Spears & Daggers is one of the most passionate arguments against free content.
Boxes and Arrows is still free. I suppose our sin is pride, so we ignore our costs and keep spitting the dang thing out.
Speaking of free content, how have I missed blogcritics for so long. I dig it.
I first was introduced to a Charette while working with Scenic Design. The creative director has architecture training,and used this technique often.. it's well suited to the web.
"A Charette is an intense effort to solve any architectural problem within a limited time.... There are two main advantages to working in the context of a charette. The first is that a charette operates in a highly collaborative atmosphere. Instead of an architect taking ideas and plans and going away to develop them on his or her own, a charette allows for the participation of everyone involved with the project, resulting in a highly charged and creative atmosphere. The inclusion of many points of view results in well-rounded and realistic proposals, with everyone satisfied that they were able to contribute. Secondly, Charettes are fast, and relatively inexpensive."
We've just started one at Yahoo! yesterday, and today as I read mr jones again, and find he is too. Perhaps we'll have to compare notes after.
from the inbox, Thomas asks: "I've been meaning to ask but have held my peace until ten minutes ago. What was the idea (or "IA") behind your checker-board layout (home)? It's disorienting. As far as personal sites go, I suppose its creative license. Still..."
You know, I did it for two reasons.
1. I could. I was reading a mark newhouse article and suddenly I got the idea of how to use some of his code in a radically different way. (well, not so radical, but in a way I hadn't seen before). This was the simplest expression of it.
2. After sketching it out in illustrator, I liked the design. I'd never seen anything like it. And personal sites should be places for expiramentation. I'm flying my freak-flag.
It proved easy to build, easy to maintain. I've never had a decent homepage-- this one is actually better than some of the dogs that have graced.com before. I have a new version of it in my head that will be less disorienting, more usable and probably just better except I have no time to flesh it out and build it.
So if I ever get a lazy rainy saturday, I'll have a new homepage. Until now, enjoy the tilt-o-wheel!
From SearchDay - To Or is Human - 9 April 2002
"Perhaps no other "advanced" search technique causes more trouble than the incorrect use of the Boolean OR operator. Here's why this simple little world can wreak havoc on your search results."
If you have more ideas than time or talent, you need LazyWeb
After seeing the California Quarter Design - Poll, all I can say is "Is there a designer in the house?"
After reading Consumer WebWatch: How Consumers and Experts Rate Credibility on the Web, it seems if you you want to be trusted, get design and IA right.
Just in time to inform our discussions of information design, The History of Visualisation
As I nursed my cup of coffee this morning, I looked through the photos I look over the past year. 2002 was full of things I love dearly.
I'm sharing ten of them with you....
(click a picture to get a better, bigger view.)
I woke up in 2003 obtuse.
Philippe's really getting into kite flying and attaching cameras to those kites. He just sent me Kite Photography in 1906, featuring pictures of san francisco just after the earthquake taken from a kite carrying a 46-pound panoramic camera.
Okay, here's today's question: who are the practicing "experience designers"? What are their job duties? What are their methods? This skill sets?
The passionate conversation on information architecture and information design, as well as a discussion on sigia about how you can design for information (and experiences) but you can't design them because they are help in the recipient, has got me thinking about experience design.
I've never participated in one of the ED summits (usually too broke or busy or sometimes both) so I've only been exposed to ED via the mailing list's sporadic discussions and nathan's book which is long on concepts and short on explanations (a book I very much like, in the way I like poems and books of paintings).
The AIGA experience design site offers a short explaination:
Reading through the longer paper, it seems ED is more design and product strategy.
So-- business strategy, organization phych/dev, HCI and design. These folks gotten be triple phd's all... or have amazing hubis.... or be part of crack teams of experts... or am I missing something still? I feel like I am, because most of the smartest favoritest people I know are involved in ED and I still don't really get exactly what it is and why it matters (and this post will probably invite some of them to come over and kick my rear-- or at least debate me over too many bottles of cheap wine).
Jesse's book also provides an "experience design" approach, but he seems if not opposed, tangential to the AIGA efforts-- it is about their last bullet point primarily. Which would lead me to another question; just what is hate relationship of these two developing--- er-- efforts. How are user experience design and experience design different. Are they?
And I get how Jesse's user experience design plays out in the world, but I have trouble seeing how ED does. Or am I trying to make a practice out of a philosophy?
Digging deeper, I discover "The AIGA Experience Design Community brings together all types of experience design practitioners to focus on larger issues of business value and collaborative practice and methods .... AIGA uses the term "experience design" to describe a community of practice - not a single profession. Designing effective experiences requires many different types of professionals with a broad range of knowledge. The community currently consists of design strategists and planners; brand strategists; user and usability researchers; information architects; information and graphic designers; and interface, interaction, and software designers." which makes it sound very much like it might be a management/management consulting kind of thing.
And finally, reading "What has the AIGA Experience Design Community accomplished so far? ", it seems like it is a place for different related professions to talk to each other, mostly. Maybe they could solve the problem of what the aspects of ED are, and how they can be named, so we have a standard for communication. And the what is IA conversations will finally end.
Ha!
