Mark sent a link around the office to Enterprise Search Center, saying “This is a new site dedicated to corporate search technologies. Should be more and more useful as more articles are contributed.”
May 2006 Archives
Did you know the W3C has a standard for taxonomies and other classification schemes (Simple Knowledge Organisation System)?
Neither did I. But apparently, Jay Fienberg did, since he just mentioned it on the IA Institute mailing list. I doubt it would be of any use in communicating with clients, but I wonder if it might be useful for delivering machine-readable hierarchies to site developers?
Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users writes about how Good usability is like “water flowing downhill”:
I’ve talked about this many times before; my horse trainer’s mantra is, “Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard” - but the opposite is everywhere. It’s ridiculously easy for me to screw up the settings on my digital devices. The API methods that intuivitely feel right turn out to be dead wrong. I click the button I think will do X, and instead I get… WTF?
A month or so ago Dan sent me a link to Gliffy.com, an Ajax-y OpenLazslo-driven browser-based collaborative diagramming tool that could conceivably give Visio a run for its money (someday). Even with its limited initial feature set it makes fairly crisp looking diagrams with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
Knowledging Across Life’s Curriculum has a brief review of Gliffy, and (of course?) Gliffy has a blog as well.
One thing I have to say is that I hate the product’s logo and its web page looks a bit clunky too. The whole brand presentation would benefit from a makeover by a good designer.
Paul Bissex has released Jabberwocky 2.0. Of course it’s still in beta (unlike Flickr, which has recently upgraded to gamma).
ColorBlender is a cool Ajax-y service that suggests an entire palette of colors for you based on a dominant color that you enter (using RGB sliders). I’d still prefer a great visual designer come up with color ideas, but if you were on a budget and if you didn’t know the first thing about how colors complement each other, push forward, recede back, are cool or warm, etc., you could do worse than consulting this tool to put together a pleasing palette for a website.
Prototype is “a JavaScript framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications,” sporting an “easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around.”
Ruby on Rails features integrated Prototype support, the famous script.aculo.us library is built on Prototype (but I curse Joshua Schachter for ever starting that ridi.culo.us URL trend), Rico offers Ajax components and effects built on Prototype, and so on.
Subject says it all. (Here’s some of the thinking that went into the blog launch.)
At the Blue Flavor blog, Nick Finck casts another vote for making XHTML wireframes. I have to admit I find this idea appealing. Granted (and he grants this himself), it may not be the right approach for every client, but the prospect of creating blueprints and schematics that don’t get thrown away after they’re approved but that actually help give the web developers a leg up, is mighty appealing:
So why? Why would we want to do XHTML wireframes? Wouldn’t it take more time to do them in XHTML than it would in Visio or something? Well, yes and no. Yes, you would have to code the XHTML, but that would need to be done at some point anyway. Yes it may seem like it’s slower to create wireframes in XHTML but once you have done your first website using this method a lot of the same markup can be repurposed especially when it comes to navigation and various methods of displaying information on a page like multi-column lists and so forth. In the end it’s actually more efficient to be building wireframes in XHTML and even navigation schemas because you can see exactly how it works and you only spend the energy necessary to create it once, not twice (once in Visio and once in XHTML).
(via Thomas Vander Wal)
And if you are doing “traditional”* Visio wireframes for a rich web application, this article at Boxes and Arrows has some suggestions about how to narrate the interactive sequence in a slide presentation to your client.
- Yes, I realize it’s ridiculous to talk about traditions for a medium that is only 15 years old.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which published continually - on the web only at times - throughout the Katrina and Rita hurricanes last year, has posted a Flash animation showing how New Orleans flooded.
Leisa Reichelt, a Digital Experience Architect, writes Why you shouldn’t start IA with a Content Inventory at her blog, disambiguity. This has spurred an interesting debate in blogs and mailing lists, with a response at Donna Maurer’s blog and further discussion elsewhere (read the comments on the blogs for more).
Naturally, once the rhetoric has died down the debate ends up a bit in the usual “it depends” fog, but any argument against exhaustively tedious work deserves a second look, from my perspective.
My sister emailed me the other day to say she hadn’t heard from me for a while. She reads my bloggingses, so that’s a sure sign that I’ve been radio silent for a while.
I’m fine.
I’ve been traveling a lot and working hard and I’ve had some computer troubles with my Mac laptop at home and no time at the office for blogging, not even on the company blog that I write most of.
I was in New Orleans last weekend for JazzFest and have some photos to post (crummy cellphone photos, though - for good ones, see Briggs’ good photos posted at Flickr). I had a great time as usual but, man, has that city taken a beating! It was heart wrenching.
In the latest go-round with the gremlin in my Mac, it appeared that my carefully backed up months worth of personal data since my previous paranoid backup had vanished from the external hard drive I’d backed it all up to. But my friend MichaelZ suggested I run Disk Warrior on the Lacie drive and sure enough the missing folder reappeared! A rare happy ending in the realm of data loss.
I’ve learned my lesson, sort of, from last year’s loss of about six months of personal information. More and more of the stuff I care about is stored “out there” instead of here. It’s still vulnerable, of course, but it’s somewhat more professionally maintained with redundant backups and such.
Still, when your computer is failing intermittantly, as mine’s been doing, you stop trusting it so much and you stop using it so much, and that’s at least a part of why I haven’t been blogging regularly.
Right now I’m paying bills. It doesn’t sound fun, but getting it done will complete my “to do’s” for the weekend (more or less) and that will feel good. It may even still be light out and a little cooler with some time for another swing in the hammock before the next work week comes crashing down on me.
Rosenfeld and Morville have posted the results of their first two surveys toward a new edition of their seminal Polar Bear Book.
(My responses to the first survey were noted in this entry here at Extra! Extra!)
Bryce Johnson has posted a video recording (in two formats) of Jess McMullin’s session from the IA Summit, Game Changing: How You Can Transform Client Mindsets Through Play:
One of the sessions I saw was Jess McMullinÕs ÒGame Changing: How You Can Transform Client Mindsets Through PlayÓ and we recorded it. Since Jess has released his slides (and Heather has released the family pictures) we decided to try to edit together a little movie of his session. Now the audio is not the greatest, but we did our best, and you can download a 20meg Windows Media file or a 28meg QuickTime file. You should also check out JessÕs business design site for more great stuff like this.
So I’m slogging through Enterzone fixing vandalized pages from the last few rounds of hackery and I come across the abortive stub of what looks like an attempt to start a blog back in 1998 called unvironmental news. I’ve added the entry into this my modren online journal, as its own entry dated April 8, 1998, just as I plan to eventually port over breathing room and the Daily Barbie.
Yahoo! has launched Yahoo Tech (I’m only willing to type the exclamation point once per sentence at most! oops), a site consisting of “Reviews, help, and how-to advice for buying and using personal electronics.” One interesting touch from a user-experience design perspective is their use of tech advisor personas to offer advice tailored to your specific context. Yes, yes, of course they’ve got tag clouds (or, actually in this case, product category clouds), too.
(via Austin Govella).
