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greymatter is dead
MT and greymatter both exploded due to a diskquota limit exceeded mid-build. teh difference is, MT recovered, grey has not-- that's to the help of hero Ben. So trott off tot heir site, get MT, donate so you help support them as they add new features (and save your butt when you blow up the thing) and if you want Eh, go the front page. it's all there.... messy, but there....
speaking of good uses of the web....
Secret Santa is a small pleasant thing you can do for yourself and others.
ooh! ooh! another goodie!marketing prof's is full of goodies today. from No Thanks, I Don't Want Any Personalization a user says "I lie. And, I don't feel guilt or remorse. When it comes to giving out personal information online, I have the morality of Satan's spawn. Sometimes I'm Candice and sometimes I go by my soap opera diva name, Ms. Styles. I usually live in Beverly Hills because I know the zip code is 90210. When asked about income, I am a student who makes $0 to $12,000 a year. Lying online is not wrong. It's survival." I have seen this is test after test after test. people give bogus information unless they think it will be useful to them, such as when entering contensts or when buying. otherwise, they don't bother. it's part laziness, part suspicion. i know one user who puts _@_.com in all email form fields. Just enough to validate.... give me liquid!
while liquid design is important in websites, it is 6 gazillion times more important in html email. I can't read this. you must justify everything.Brand Metrics: Your Key to Measuring Return on Brand Investment "Brand metrics help companies strategically grow their brands by
follow the breadcrumbs
to the sneak peek treat
egressmarc takeno writes: "Hi, Just wondering what your take is on Amazon's lack of "exit" indications on any of its pages. It takes a bit of figuring out that you need to go back to the home page and click on "If you're not Marc Takeno, _click here_". Most people can figure it out, but then again... a lot of people can't. I know it's to keep people in the Amazon cookie loop, but I think they should make it more obvious where you can click to exit if you're on a nonsecure computer, such as a lab or public access term. Just my opinion. I asked him if I could reprint his note, because i think the question of exiting pages and exit behavior is an interesting one. thoughts, kids? monday laugh
tech support calls from hell thanks david!
sometimes a small notionMoving WebWord > Understanding Design Misfits is an good paper to read to get some thinking going on why design goes peculiar. I'm not sure if it was quite fully thought out enough to be a paper-- it feels more like a long blog-- but that doesn't mean that some of the core ideas aren't excellent. Personally I wrote the headings of a few of the more powerful notions on my whiteboard so I can evaluate against these criteria.. is the design insensitive? vestigal? over-adapted...? i see a pattern emerging
IAWiki's been slowing down lately (other than folks filling in their bios) but a new addition makes it worth a visit... gems in the notesMongrel or Hybrid: The Role of Design in the Internet Age "Mr. Glaze: Yes, graphic designers, who have a sense that "I do something very mysterious and complex that you can't do, and you couldn't possibly understand what I do, and therefore you need to orbit around me." That has always existed in the design community. I think from my standpoint, I won't tolerate it within my organization. I don't hire people that have that point of view.
yahoo caresYahoo! Feedback is a survey where you tell Yahoo how much you love pop-unders. now go.... (thanks, Jeff Lash!) Stop innovating right now and clean your roomThe Bottom Line in Web Design: Know Your Customer "Web site designers at e-commerce companies may be feeling repressed these days because growing customer demand for site usability is limiting designers' freedom to employ the beloved bell-and-whistle." and if that doesn't start a conversation, I don't know what would. ny times grammar issues
next!Technology Review - The Next Computer Interface "The desktop is dead," declares David Gelernter.
new kid on the block
David Bloxsom's resume/portfolio site includes some very tasty case studies. FYI, He's also one of the B&A kids.... incestous repetitive articulation of navel gazing and yet....
matt jones beautifully and brilliantly trots out once again our quest for identity. and it is good. (i'm probably going to hell for linking to a post that started out on my site, thus creating a black hole of cross links, but whatever...) Anyone attend?
Just stumbled over the PDC 2000 - the Participatory Design Conference, and wondered if anyone had attended, and how it was. It looks pretty dang cool!
ya think?
How non-programmers use documentation. Short, simple and from what I've seen in testing, quite accurate. it doesn't get much better than this... or does it?Designing for the Bottom Line (Web Techniques, Dec 2001) "The easiest ROI arguments are those that come with dollar figures attached, often referred to as hard ROI. For example, when IBM carried out a wholesale redesign of the IBM.com site in 1999, online sales rose by 400 percent the following week. That's easy math." In these increasingly troubled times, we are forced more than ever before to justify ourselves. it's time for us to learn from usability and figure out how to fight with numbers. After all, if usability says "sales improved 400% by fixing usability problems" the odds are good the information architecture was altered (as well as interface design, etc.) A little backtracking of cases in old copies of Interact, a thorough read of Cost Justifying Usability and we should be able to say, once the information architecture was restructured, customer service calls were reduced by 50%, resulting in a net savings or 40,000 in a two month period. or something like that.
older, but interesting still"USABILITY IS THE PRIME consideration in the creation of a site's information architecture. Information architecture concerns itself not only with the structure of text but with text-related tools that contribute to a site's usability-- navigation, searching, and browsing systems, labeling and indexing systems, and the words writers use in their copy. " sign of the timesMark Eastman Photography: Visible Signs a lovely thing, pointed at by antenna Social NetworksIt's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age "We discuss our ethnographic research on personal social networks in the workplace, arguing that traditional institutional resources are being replaced by resources that workers mine from their own networks. Social networks are key sources of labor and information in a rapidly transforming economy characterized by less institutional stability and fewer reliable corporate resources. The personal social network is fast becoming the only sensible alternative to the traditional "org chart" for many everyday transactions in today's economy." User and Use
Usage Modes that Work Together (Web Techniques, Dec 2001) is an article that helps slice up the view of the homogenous web user. marketing for marketers
John Zapolski pointed out Why Marketing Gets No Respect. We would think marketing would have no problem selling their ideas, but it turns out they are plagued with much the same sort of troubles we have. the art of the dys-reviewAmazon.com: buying info: Jeffy's Lookin at Me! "Voyeurs are not hard to please, July 3, 2001 See also: thanks to the members of the CBP list, esp John Levine and Barry Press. Too funny. the beginning of thinkingUnderstanding the Web as Media is an elegant draft of an essay that is still more important and insightful than most of the sleakly polished writing about the nature of the web that's out there. "We were trying so furiously to make the medium do what we wanted it to do, few of us stopped to ask, "What is the web good for? What can the web do that other media can't do? What can the web NOT do that other media CAN do?" In other words, what are the unique media characteristics of the web? What are its inherent strengths and weaknesses? How does the web "fit in" with existing media?" The web is an immature medium, but lately we've seen uses of it that reflect its unique nature-- napster, wikis, blogs... A list I'm on recently rehashed the old argument what is IA with its attendent arguments about what medium it's suited to. I said "My ultimate loyalty is to the web. This new medium should no longer be a and I mean it. As architects, we must first understand our building materials. The ground we build on. The nature of the lot. The qualities of the neighboring structures. The use of the structure by the peoples who will inhabit it. And finally we must puzzle out how to delight, how to innovate, how to make our new structure soar in people's imaginations and inspire a new series of spaces that are more useful, more precious to their inhabitants than anything that has gone before. It's not "beautiful or usable," it's what if we did it right....
amusement
Steve's Primer of Practical Persuasion and Influence is a well writen clever guide to the fine art of getting people to do wha tyou want them to. Evil taxonomy and fast-food classificationIn The Speed of Information Architecture, Peter Morville once again chastises us to slow down. He then continues on to introduce different sort of classification techniques is lovely clear terms, weighing their effectivness, and then points out the "slow" methods are the effective ones. Once again, the early bird gets the worm... but who wants to eat worms? Slow and steady wins the race. good tutorialFunctional Spec Tutorial :: What and Why "By creating a blueprint of the application first, time and productivity are saved during the development stage. " Just what I always say! Extremely useful article full of good *practical* ideas and justifications for why you do it.
Everybody smiling, UCday!User Centered Design Class taught by Jess McMullin, Supah-geeenius. pdf. Also, Lillian Svec's role of IA in experience design ppt. before the axe fell
This was the experience design family tree. Who's on the tree now? Has it been pruned, grafted on to...?
time to band together
Community Infrastructure for Information Architects is the birth of a crazy idea-- so crazy it just might work. So many professional organizations are irrelevent to our lives. Lou is one man I'd bet on to change that.... Selling IA, learning from MBAs
Something we as IA's don't often do enough of-- considering politics and human behavior outside of our design techniques. But we should be very good at making change happen within organizations... after all, we are good at getting customers through check out, or to the article they were looking for. maybe it's time we pointed our brains at this problem with the same systematic analysis we give to an interface or taxonomy. Finally an interesting note in the Radical Change article: it mentions strategic losing of your temper as a tool. This strikes me as something more easily played out as an innie, but nonetheless. I was watching Maltese Falcon again last night, and got to my favorite scene-- Bogart is verbally fencing with Sydney Greenstreet-- both want the other to reveal what he knows, both don't want to give up his own knowledge in exchange. The conversation runs along the lines of "I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously, unless you keep in practice. Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk." -- Greenstreet as Gutman In other words, the conversation goes round and round. Sound like you talking to your manager? Finally Bogart leaps up furiously, throws his glass down shattering it and accuses Greenstreet of wasting his time. He grabs his coat and hat and storms out. In the hall we see him grinning broadly... it was all a sham. Though his hands are shaking with the stress of the gambit. If done judiciously, a show of genuine emotion can be effective in cutting through cycles of pointless repetition. maybe it's a flare of temper, maybe it's just a heart-to-heart, where you tell your employer you are deeply frustrated. And maybe your hands will shake after, like Bogart's... but maybe, like Bogart, you can break the cycle of repetition and inertia. Anyhow, good articles, check 'em out.
control subject
Madman Madhu Menon gets to be Amazon's guinea pig for a new search design. I have to say this is one of the smartest things Amazon does... testing new interfaces on small segments of thier population allows them to tweak. However, not telling folks they are a small expirmental group seems a bit cruel: witness madman's confusion.
one more timeTripped over this review of Information Architecture for the Web and this passage reverberated with me "It is odd that Rosenfeld and Morville seize the title of architect, because the central claim of the architect's profession is the very breadth of concern that Information Architecture lacks. Architects have always competed with craftsmen, construction firms, and engineers; what architects offer is an original and coherent vision that inspires and entire Web site or building. Beyond the supervisory power of the job title, Rosenfeld and Morville aren't very interested in architecture. " At the risk of opening up an old can of worms, I have to say that this small passage suggests to me that a slightly broader definition is truer than "Information architecture involves the design of organization and navigation systems to help people find and manage information more successfully." What does it take to truly be an architect of information? you and usegood slogan from an interesting lesson on users and personas Know the user. |
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A sign of the moral decrepitude of american/ our lousy schools and the horrible stress the way has put us through? or just a typo? 
