Jim Goldstein was up in Alaska in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge recently and brought back these photographs.
He says, “A conservative friend asked me, ‘Is ANWR as really as ugly as they say it is? This alarmed me a great deal after having one of the best photo trips I’ve taken to date. The beauty of ANWR is almost unparalleled.”
We talk about what screen resolution to design for a lot of the time, and the compatability cops are always trying to keep us mired in the past, man, but now usability (and hairstyle) guru Jakob Nielsen gives us permission to optimize for 1024 x 768 (Screen Resolution and Page Layout (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)).
Of course his own site, with its lack of margins or gutters, is hellacious on the eyes at high resolutions. The scanning length of his lines of copy alone is enough to try the patience of a saint.
Postdated edition:
The Iconfactory (via Digg, or reddit, or something)
Beth Koloski, editorial assistant for the third edition of the Polar Bear book has posted an invitation to take another survey:
To gather information for the next edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville have been surveying the IA community. The third survey, Software for IA, is now open. It consists of five questions, and we estimate it will take five to ten minutes to complete. This survey closes on August 1, 2006. The first survey covers trends in the field over the past five years, and the second provides general feedback on the second edition. Future survey results will be posted on the IAI site as well. Results from the first two surveys are up on the IA Institute website.
Here are the questions:
I was going to post a link to this press release Socialtext Releases First Commercial Open Source Wiki | Socialtext Enterprise Wiki, when Dan pointed me to this CNet round-up of business-wiki related news. Looks like the idea is getting some traction in the business world. (One of our clients just pre-launched a wiki in stealth mode so its end-users can share tips on using their products. We’ll link to it when the time is right.)
Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Socialtext press release:
Socialtext also shared its Public Roadmap to help guide the developer community for the next three months. The roadmap includes a source code repository, Debian, Red Hat, SOAP and REST APIs, usability enhancements, and additional DBMS management beyond Postgres, starting with MySQL. The release at the end of this period, code-named Palladium, will mark the open availability of the first enterprise grade, corporate backed, Wiki to enthusiasts and commercial users alike.
Full disclosure: I’m friendly with a couple of the principals of SocialText.
A recent discussion on the IAI list got onto the subject of business process modeling, and the frustrations some folks have had with Rational Rose.
Two recommendations for current tools were Processworks from Wizdom (uses the IDEF model), and IBM’s free Task Modeler (an Eclipse-based tool for modelling the user experience, (and for making DITA maps).
For more info on DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) see DITA markup, DITA map structure, and an IBM DeveloperWorks article on Design patterns for information architecture with DITA map domains.
Seattle edition:
Scott Abel, Content Management Strategist at The Content Wrangler, Inc. alerted the community to a free webinar on Cutting Edge Web Content Management, July 26, 2006 at 2PM EST, to be presented by Ann Rockley, The Rockley Group:
Developing and delivering dynamic, personalized content via the Web for superior customer service. Mountains of content. Multiple websites in multiple languages. How do you ensure that you aren’t recreating content and that the right content is delivered to the right person? A unified content strategy will enable you to save your content in a single place for distribution to anywhere - the Web, email, a cell phone or PDA, etc. Anywhere - as defined by your customer. In short, personalizing your content will drive revenue and improve service to customers and business partners. Identifying the issue is easy enough, how do you do it? In this presentation, you’ll learn how to unify your content strategy to support dynamic publishing across multiple channels to fulfill the ideal of true one-to-one marketing. While the focus will be on the Web as a delivery channel, the discussion will include the need to deliver content via other distribution channels.
In response to a recent post by Thomas Vander Wal, in which he said, “One approach, which seems to be growing in popularity is [to build] sites that work and Ajax and scripting to augment and improve simplicity,” Austin Govella replied, writing
The term of art for this is “progressive enhancement”. Often in contrast to the idea of graceful degradation:
- Progressive Enhancement: Paving the Way for Future Web Design
- SXSW presentation with Nick Finck and Steve Champeon
- Article in Wikipedia
- The view from css-discuss
- Yahoo’s graded-browser support shows it in context
Dan Klyn assembled a set of guided navigation UI widgets at his Wildly Appropriate blog back in January, introducing them by writing, “For a good long while now I’ve been meaning to create a spreadsheet or Flickr set or something which could serve as a systematic and comprehensive roundup of the UI widgets that folks have designed for use with systems where users can perform asynchronous browse refinement un-selecting.” It’s a useful overview of the various ways different interface designs solve these similar problems.
Dan’s favorite blog, Signal vs. Noise, recently addressed the interface problem caused by giving people too many choices. I’ve also heard this problem referred to as “analysis paralysis.” The interface designer, in the view of 37 Signals (the owners of the SvN blog), needs to ask as a sort of “benevolent dictator” to deliver a satisfactory user experience.
Shiv Singh, who writes AARF’s Workplace Blog, points to a report on intranet best practices his enterprise solutions group just published. Downloading the full report requires registration, or you can listen to a three-part podcast summarizing the findings. Details can be found in Singh’s Corporate Intranets Best Practices post on his blog.
I meant to post this a while back. In response to an ongoing blog-driven conversation about content inventories, Lou Rosenfeld wrote about the inherent limitations to a traditional content inventory, in that it represents a snapshot in time of what is, often, a moving target. Instead, he proposes the idea of a rolling content inventory:
That’s why I’m increasingly recommending pursuing a rolling content inventory. Instead of a snapshot, as all those silly IA books suggest, inventory your content on an ongoing basis. Put another way, a content inventory is an process, not a deliverable. Put yet another way, content inventory shouldn’t be something that you allocate the first two weeks of your redesign to; allocate 10% or 15% of your job to it instead.
David Hinojosa has got a project called Stock Artist that offers a simulation (for now) of a rationalize the art market.
I’m not sure I fully understand the concept, but this appears to be the nut of it:
The central nucleus of Stockartist is the “transformed art piece’s concept.” This concept consists in dividing the value of one work, or a group of them into little pieces called “stock-art.” The stock-arts have two characteristics: they represent one part of the value of the “transformed art piece” and they are themselves art works. In other words, the stock-arts are at the same time art works and an instrument of investment that besides of representing their own value, they represent other’s. The stock-arts share some common physical characteristics as: maximum weight, maximum size, security codes, etc, and they contain unique characteristics imposed by their creator.
Here we go again. Big list this week. Many stolen from the usual suspects:
Adrian Chong posted to iaslash a set of links to writings by Christopher Fahey about the “Smoke & Mirrors” of user research: Design vs. Science, Research as a Design Tool, Research as a Political Tool.
Chong says:
As designers look towards user research for the objective truth, Christopher questions the motives behind the research. He follows with a series of articles, the first of which discuss user research as a pseudo science pointing to absolutes that do not exist. He continues the discussion stating that tools such as eye tracking provide results that are already apparent to good UI designers. His latest article explains that a value of user research is often to cut through the politics and convince stakeholders to make good design decisions.
His next article promises to be good too. (I’ll bowdlerize the title to “Research as b.s.”)
Recently the IA Institute list was discussing faceted search interfaces and Rashmi Sinha wrote “Now you can build your very own faceted metadata navigation system based on Flamenco Download (thank Marti Hearst, not me. I have not worked on Flamenco in a little while).”
Flamenco was developed at SIMS (UC Berkeley). Sinha, who was involved with it a while back, says, “The interface is somewhat busy, but it supports more complex information finding tasks very well (we did a lot of testing with architects using an architectural image database).”
If you’re like me, “faceted metadata” is confusing enough without tying it to “navigation system,” in which case viewing a live example may help.
If you want to know more, Sinha also posted links to two articles for further reading.
Adrian Chan asks Is attention over time not identity? while suggestiing, semifacetiously, that Creative Commons and AttentionTrust should merge.
Is what I make, and what I pay attention to, over time, not, basically, my identity? That’s how an Amazon would look at it. The consistency of my choices over time is, well, it’s what I like, and therefore to any commercial enterprise, it’s who I am (as far as they care). Perhaps we could use a CC/AT/ID mashupcamp. Call it EgoCamp?
Yahoo has pulled it’s trip planner out of beta. This site is a really interesting mashup of internal Yahoo products. It uses Maps, Flickr, Travel Content and 360 for blogging. Too bad they didn’t use the cool FLEX interface for maps.
A client asked my opinion of the best b2b sites out there. I’m not good at answering questions like that, especially not on the spot. Perhaps I’m too much of a relativist. So I checked some old notes and polled my colleagues and here are some that stood out:
I’d love to hear more suggestions.
Brief I’m-on-the-road edition:
Today Visa launched their redesigned Visa Europe site. Extractable was heavily involved in the building of this site (though not the design). This included some of our most advanced CSS/XHTML work ever, TeamSite templates, app development and daily support with a international client.
Eric Scheid, from the IA Institute, announces Oz-IA 2006, a first-ever Australian IA conference, to be held in Sydney:
As well as conveniently following on from this year’s Web Directions conference), this event is scheduled for the same weekend as the EURO IA conference. Keith Instone has already suggested a live link between the two conferences. The retreat is planned to be a semi-formal series of practical sessions on information architecture and related topics, aimed at practicing IAs and those within the broader industry interested in expanding their knowledge of the theory and practice. There’s some great local and international speakers to get the thoughts moving, including Mark Bernstein, Thomas Vander Wal, Dan Saffer, Donna Maurer, David Sless, Steve Baty, and James Robertson. There will be case study presentations; detailed how-to sessions; and general ‘where are we going’ discussions. We will also be organising some group participation sessions and even leaving a slot or two open for some self-organised sessions And there’ll be opportunities a-plenty to meet and mingle with peers and uber-IAs from Australia and around the world. It’s a weekend retreat, so you can relax and discuss the joys, tribulations, and tricks of information architecture with like-minded individuals. More information will be forthcoming in the next few weeks & months, so pencil in those dates, subscribe to the RSS or Atom news feeds, or sign up for email announcements. If you’re in Australia, you shouldn’t miss it. If you want to visit, this is a great reason to do so.
Hmm, I’ve never been to Australia. Maybe it’s time I went.
Today I added links to some of the IA, UX, and design sites I read regularly, many of which I’ve gleaned links and content from in the past. They are listed in the blog’s sidebar under the heading “Blogroll” and contain many blogs, and a few web magazine and link aggregators.
