Digital Web Magazine - IAnything Goes: Soft Skills for Information Architecture Though it's targeting IA's, this article is really for anyone doing design. Our job is highly political, in a way engineering can often avoid, because of our frequent role as a service and because design is so much more tangible than other disciplines. Jeff gives a bunch of great advice including

These Tools are great for any kind of designer... there is nothing particularly IA about them. Really useful stuff includes document templates, process map posters and other tools to help you in your practice.

check it out!

We (as in me and a team of amazing designers not we as in invisible corporate entity) just relaunched Yahoo! Shopping.

I'm pretty exciting. We've got the comprehensiveness of a froogle with the comparison power of a dealtime and we're working to reviews like amazon (we need more) including much-needed merchant reviews.

Plus I think it's got a simple crisp look, a slight updating of the classic Yahoo! style.

Search rocks, browse does a cool thing where we blend hierarchal classification into facets where appropriate (not unique, admittedly, amazon and a few others do it too)

And guess what? A sitemap on every page.

Check it out, leave feedback on our beta-baby!

I just read Purple Cow, which took me all of half a day. It's fast, easy, and a bit over-exuberant, but most importantly to you dear reader, it says that old marketing is dead and the secret to success is unique products and the secret to unique products is design. It even has little slogans to photocopy in the back, including one that says "Design Rules."

I feel a design renaissance coming on.

Anyhow, it's one of those books you buy for your CEO, or head of marketing, or product manager. Go evangelize, the profession needs it. And deserves it.

Paris=Eiffel Tower as we all know


I finally went up the damn thing, and it was very nice indeed.

Also of some interest

doors to strange places

Heads on platters

Beautiful Metro stations

A distinct lack of ewan mcgregor

nice knockers

Segways in the rain

This last one was particularly odd and delightful. I was coming out of the Louvre and saw them pass, like gorillas in the mist, larger, graceful, slow and lumbering. Ah, Segway, you strange monster, I thought you extinct yet you live to wander the Paris streets at twilight....

I'll be giving a talk at UIE 8 in Boston this October.

And I've been given a chance to offer you, my faithful readers, a discount. Read on!

* Conference attendees will receive a special discount rate if they sign up for the
conference using this promotion code CW01.

If you sign up using this promo code, CW01, you will receive $60 off each single
day registration; $300 discount for all four days.
(Note: This offer cannot be combined with any other promotions offered.)

So come, save, enjoy!

I'm excited about this talk. Tom Wailes, a coworker here at Yahoo! will be assisting me with the talk. He has a background on content management and anthropology and brings a rich body of experience to the talk. If you've read the book, Tom alone brightens the mix. Plus I plan to dive a bit deeper into a couple section.

Anyhow, hope to see you there!

Love love love this error...

I feel my heart filling with pity for this poor, innocent malformed request.

I'm getting deja-blog, but I'm going for it anyhow:

An Atlas of Cyberspaces - Web Site Maps

anthony morales is completely right. Netflix put lipstick on a pig.

I still love it though. Oh, Netflix, darling, hire an IA!

BTW, the submit sidebar addresses another Netflix annoyance.. because of button gravity I'm constantly hitting the update awaiting releases when i mean to hit update queue. sigh. not fixed in le redesign, btw.

"Submit Button Guidelines

Place the Submit button at the end of the form, at the bottom. There is a quirky user behavior called button gravity¹¹ that causes users to scroll to the bottom of the form to find the Submit button, like a dropped apple heading toward the ground. Take advantage of this; place submit where people will look for it.

Tell people if they can’t back out. If this is the last button they have to push to buy the 1969 copy of Murder and the Married Virgin on Abe’s Rare Books site, for gosh sakes, warn them. If they are about to delete e-mail from those heady, premarriage dating days that they’ve been hiding on a private web mail account, warn them. Submitting a form should never be a horrible surprise. If you can’t provide an undo, let people know there is no turning back.

Give people a button. Many sites now use JavaScript to submit the form for you. You select an item from a drop-down list and you are whisked away to a page. This is bad news for a couple of reasons. A percentage of users turn off JavaScript because they consider it a security risk.¹² It’s not a huge number, but it may be enough to cause trouble if you don’t provide a button. Also, as I stated earlier, many users “slip” on drop-down lists. Using JavaScript to autosubmit means that not only do you have to reselect your choice, you now have to hit the Back button first. Remove the submit button only after careful consideration of your audience.

Call it something other than “submit.” “Submit” is what the invading aliens say shortly before “Take me to your leader.” Label it with the function of the button. If it logs a user in, call it "Log In". If it registers a user, call it "Register". If it submits the credit card for a purchase, call it "Buy Now". Be literal.

11. Jared M. Spool et al., 1999, Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide, Morgan- Kaufmann Publishers, pp. 79–81.
12. Go ask your friendly neighborhood engineer about it. I bet she’s got JavaScript turned off as well. "

In my day, I've been an

egreeter
hottie
carbonite
yahoo

just occured to me how funny it is, the naming of employees in our biz....

who have you been?

Beyond the Whiteboard makes me sad Rettig's wall ppt is no longer online.

But walls afford thinking well. And it's always good to buy the biggest whiteboard they offer, or perhaps whiteboard paint.