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another ui pattern resource
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Tidwell’s seminal book based on her common ground site and earlier paper
January 2007 Archives
Here’s three ideas for products that will make you millions if you can figure out how to manufacture and sell them:
- Self-disentangling (or non-tangling) iPod earbud cords
- Ear grease cleaner for mobile phones
- A remote that mutes the TV as it turns on its power.
Send me a thank you note when you make your first million.
I got tired of the old design and wanted to take advantage of some of the new-er features of the blog software I’m using, so I’ve temporarily redone the design with one of their canned themes. Soon I’ll start tweaking the typography and colors and spacing and such and adding back in some of the features stranded in the old design.
Peterme fights the good fight in Experience design is not about brands at the AP blog, defending “experience” jargon from the grasping advertising types.
John Battelle’s Searchblog: The Blog Merchandising Problem, or, Blogs, V 2.0 (2.1? 3.0?)… (via Jay Fienberg)
The great power of blogs has always been simplicity, but are we ready to go to the next step?
Rodney Koeneke hears it came from Junglee, a Bollywood film from 1961.
Unsurprisingly, Ze Frank is going all Hollywood in the near future.
Last year at SXSW (at least I think it was last year, and not 2005), I ended up going out to dinner with my Austin guru, some folks from WorldChanging, and I think David Pescovitz or maybe I just chatted with him at some party later on, and a very tall witty guy who I felt like I should know but didn’t, who was talking about the work he was doing mainly giving talks on creativity.
It was much later (that night) that I realized this was Ze Frank, the Ze Frank. Probably because he is so much taller than I, the angle on his face was different from his usual bug-eyed unblinking full frontal in his videos and more recently on The Show.
I’m kind of glad I didn’t recognize him and go all fanboy. Instead I probably acted aloof, and that’s cool, right? After all, did he really want another person saying, “Hey, I got your How to Dance animated gif forwarded to me back in the day. I’ve been a big fan for yea long!”
Meanwhile, he is a creative force of nature who should make me feel envious and insecure but who instead inspires me not to get hooked on brain crack and I’m not surprised he is about to cross over to the mainstream and I’m sure he’ll knock him dead in Hollywood town.
Todd Warfel shared an interesting deliverable, The Task Analysis Grid, a sort of visual substitute for a requirements document, saying
Personally, I’ve yet to come across a requirements document that is usable and doesn’t take a couple of days to get everyone on the same page. So, we use something different - a task analysis grid….
Each column starts out with a scenario, describes a task and is followed by all the sub-tasks necessary to complete the task. The sub tasks are colour-coded and prioritized from 1 (must haves) to 4 (some day in the future).
This is one of our most successful artifacts during the design process (next to personas and wireframes). A client once said that this artifact “takes our 60 page requirements document and distills it down to one page.”
[E]ssentially, this single document allows anyone looking at it to see the entire scope of a project, figure out what’s in this release (1) as well as what we’re planning for future releases (2, 3, and 4). It’s an extremely effective artifact for getting everyone on the same page.
Mostly a note to myself: When I get a moment free I’m going to follow these instructions from OpenDNS: Instructions for faster DNS on your mobile. Seems at least worth a try.
Back in 1994, Richard Frankel and I (along with Briggs Nisbet and Martha Conway), launched a hypertext webzine called Enterzone. At first it ran on a server under Rich’s desk at Berkeley and its address (now obsolete), was enterzone.berkeley.edu. Eventually we got the ezone.org domain and moved it there.
One of the features of that site was a collection of interesting links. At first we just linked to other e-zines, or other e-zines we liked, or other interesting creative sites, but along the way we added another set of links called “unclassifieds.”
Then one day Rich sent me a link to a site at akebono.stanford.edu/~yahoo which already had a big headstart on us in gathering and organizing interesting links. We agreed that the guys doing that site (David Filo and Jerry Yang), had the link-collecting thing under control so we decided to abandon our half-assed attempt to index the Internet by hand.
Yahoo apparently stood for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Organized Oracle”, although it clearly harked back to the “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth” characters in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
That first website of ours launched both Rich and me into new careers. He was a sysadmin at the time studying archaeology and creative writing. I was an author of computer primers, former editor, and part-time painter.
For a while we ran a little consulting firm together, helping small silicon valley firms get on the Internet, setting up their email servers and their first web sites. Rich made the leap first, from that partnership to a startup in the web advertising world called NetGravity. By now, websites like Yahoo were buying and selling ads in huge quantities and companies that provided ad infrastructure and tracking tools were in high demand.
Rich started out doing tech support at NetGravity but quickly rose to a position of responsibility, and then NetGravity was swallowed up by DoubleClick and Rich took on a new position there. Ultimately he moved on to Yahoo itself, where he is a senior director of product marketing now.
I kept writing, became a literary agent for a while, kept making websites, started writing an online journal, helped an e-book startup acquire authors, saw all my art-y friends from the early days of the web explosion take jobs in the field, and then finally joined a web consulting startup with big ideas called Groundswell in 2000.
I rode that baby down through the whole dotcom crash, through seven official waves of layoffs down to an asset sale featured me, ten or so other good folks, some computers, ongoing engagements with Sprint and Visa, and some Aeron chairs. At Groundswell I was a content strategist but at the successor firm, Enterpulse, I was rechristened an information architect.
Times were still tough and I was finally laid off myself in spring of ‘02. That hurt, even though it was a decision I’d have made myself if the roles had been reversed. We just didn’t have enough IA work to keep me around. I was working on the first of a series of Dreamweaver books then, so fortunately I had something to do. I also got heavily into blogging, which online journaling had kind of evolved into, launching the now fairly moribund Radio Free Blogistan and continuing to migrate the personal blog to new platforms and domain, ending up here.
I consulted with some startups, did some freelance IA work, got involved in politics, wrote The Power of Many, and then rejoined the world of the employed in June of ‘05 as a senior information architect at Extractable, a dynamic interactive agency in San Mateo.
About a year ago I became the director of strategy there, ultimately consulting with such interesting firms as FedEx, Kodak, Charles Schwab, Safeway, Sun, SanDisk and HTC, among others. I spoke at SXSW several times and presented a poster at the IA Summit. I joined BayCHI and was elected to the board of directors of the Information Architecture Institute. Extractable has been growing at an exhilarating pace.
Now, nearly thirteen years after Rich sent me that url, I am also drinking the Yahoo kool-aid. I start my new job there today. I’ll be working for Erin Malone, one of the founder of the IA Institute and one of the founders and first editor of Boxes and Arrows. I’ll be joining her Platform Design group in the Platform Products group. Specifically, I’ll be “curating” the pattern library, and contributing to related initiatives.
Wish me luck. More on this as I get my bearings.
Adina Levin sent me a head’s up (discussed on her blog: BookBlog: Dianne Feinstein wants to ban mp3) about the resurrection of the PERFORM act (why am I not surprised Lieberman is a co-sponsor?):
Hi, all. Don’t know if you’ve seen this, but Senator Feinstein has just re-introduced the PERFORM act, a bill that makes it illegal to record music from the internet and bans the use of mp3 by online music services (!). The EFF has information and a handy action alert. Please sign it, pass it on, and blog it.
I did it. It’s kind of funny sending Feinstein a letter asking her to oppose her own bill! But it also got sent automatically to Boxer too, who may be somewhat less likely to ignore it. I may mail it as well as I hear emails are often ignored. (EFF also faxes your letter for you.)
In the past I’d have blogged this at Edgewise so here’s an example of the sort of blog-consolidation I was talking about earlier.
In March I’ll be moderating a panel at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas, called “Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online.”
Confirmed panelists include George Kelly, Kaliya Hamlin, Ted Nadeau, and Mary Hodder.
I’m anticipating a lively dialogue tackling how we project and define our identities online, what it means to be present when you are physically remote, and how reputations are earned and maintained in an attention economy.
Come on down and join the conversation.
While I’ve been neglecting this and many other of my Mediajunkie blogs in the past year and a half (excuse: full-time work, baybee), I have actually been blogging. While at Extractable I launched a spearheaded a user-experience focused blog called Extra! Extra! and wrote something for it nearly every workday for about a year.
Actually, my commitment was to make sure something was written in it every day, and about 10 to 15% of the time other Extractable folks wrote great content for the blog as well. I just backed it up and made sure there was always something fresh.
Anyway, I am making a job change now. I am currently taking a week off and next week I will start a new job, more about which in due time, so yesterday I used Eric Pierce’s WPexport plugin for WordPress tp expprt all the entries, remove the ones that weren’t mine and then export them into this here blog (wake up!).
I added that link just now because all of this is context-dependent. For example, this entry will be echoes at X-POLLEN (aka xian’s running monolog) and then when it says “this here blog” it will actually be lying (well, sort of, because recent imported entries will also show up there). I mention that because as I imported the entries I noticed that many of them are written from a “we’re here at Extractable” perspective that will probably sound funny in this blog. In fact I removed the posts bragging about site launches - most of which were written by others anyway - and a few other entries that were really company-specific.
I thought about whether the posts belong here or elsewhere (say, at RFB or The Power of Many) or even whether I should launch a new web/user-experience related blog, but that way lies madness. As I’ve written recently, I am now on the consolidation tip and I am going to start either retiring blogs and/or folding their content into this one, so people will know where to point to me and look for my latest stuff, etc.
So I just created a new master “user rexperience” category here and then replicated all the Extra! Extra! categories under it, though I think the exporter lost multiple categories and assigned only one to each entry, but oh well. So this blog is going to become less of a personal journal and more of an omnibus of whatever I’m currently thinking about. I may not need the monolog anymore, either. Have to think that through. My brain hurts. And this is supposed to be my day off.
The IA Summit proposal review board recently approved a presentation I proposed on “Mobile IA” using as a case study the mobile website we developed for HTC America. There’s a lot of interest in the IA community about developing for new interfaces as the Web increasing goes mobile, into our media centers, and so on. I’m very proud of the work we’ve been doing for HTC and am pleased to be able to showcase it in Las Vegas in March.
A while back I wanted to comment on Elton’s entry, Information Architecture updated to 3.0, and draw on a post to the IxDA list by Jay Fienberg, talking about the Venn diagrams that might show how the various user experience roles and practices tend to overlap. It seems that each type of practitioner has a tendency to see their own specialty as central and the other practices as peripheral. This isn’t limited to UX folks. You can encounter this with developers and visual designers as well.
One thing I really love about Extractable is the collaborative nature of the people here. No one seems to exhibit the sort of hubris that says “my practice is central - the rest of you need to follow my lead.” Instead there’s a true recognition that a fine user experience (based on a sensitive information architecture, incorporating engaging and immersive visual and interactive design, driven by a stable and responsive application) can only emerge from a process that enables a multidisciplinary team to collaborate as equals.
So, back to Jay’s point. He was responding to a list post by David Fiorito (itself in response to a thread following about the IA 3.0 blog entry by Peter Morville linked in Elton’s piece), in which David said, “Imagine a Venn diagram - one circle is IxD, one IA, and one ID,” as well as, “usability is the means by which we validate IA, IxD, and ID.”
Jay responded (and now I’m going to quote him in full because, well because I don’t think he’ll mind):
I’d add to that Venn diagram:I’m thinking of a Venn diagram that represents possible approaches to dealing with “information challenges” (starting at a level or two up from requirements and objectives / needs*). The areas of overlap in the diagram represent approaches shared by many or all of the disciplines. These common approaches tend to be sufficient for smaller challenges, e.g., there are zillions of web designers who design simple sites, and whose design encompasses IA, IxD, ID, and graphic art. But, each discipline has special approaches that are unique to itself. These unique approaches are either important or essential for dealing with bigger information challenges. I recently worked on a project that had at least one person doing each role of: IA, taxonomy, IxD, visual design, and usability. We also could have used a dedicated content strategist and a dedicated content manager. And, some time from a dedicated ID would have been nice too. We needed each person to do things that the others could not do - or, would not ever get to do, given the range and priority of issues. * Jesse James Garrett’s “The Elements of User Experience” diagram still stands as a pretty good model for of all of this stuff. We might imagine this Venn diagram we’re talking about as a flattened version of Jesse’s diagram. Note that Jesse is probably smarter than all of us for looking at this in two dimensions rather than one - the IA / IxD dichotomy seems like a very minor division in the total scope of factors accounted for in Jesse diagram!
- content strategy / management
- visual design / graphic arts
- taxonomy
I’ll follow up by noting that Morville has his own honeycomb diagram that places findability in among usability, accessibility and other -bilities. Another famous IA Peter, Peter Boersma, has also popularized the concept of T-shaped people to help explain the sort of well rounded people who often end up architecting information, designing interactions, making interfaces easier to use and so on. They may tend to have a specialty (the “leg” of the T) but they are also broad and have some familiarity with and interest in a series of other “pillar” disciplines (the crossbar of the T - it’s easier to visualize with Peter’s diagrams).
I expect to see these conceptual discussions continue, perhaps at one degree of abstraction (we are all diagram people after all), where instead of practices competing for centrality we’ll see models of how the practices relate to each other competing for supremacy. Good times.
A while back Erik Guttman posted an item to IxDA list discussing the role user research plays in product design:
I have repeatedly attempted to explain how user research can serve to identify, prioritize and clarify product requirements. I have difficulty for a variety of reasons.
- people confuse or fail to see the distinction between inbound marketing research activities with user research
- people fail to distinguish between customers and users
- people do not understand the qualitative methods used to perform user research
- people often confuse user research with usability studies
To clarify these relationships, he created this user research context map, and he’s interested in getting feedback on the subject.
Information Architects Japan has put together and posted an intriguing diagram in the style of a subway map showing many of the key “Web 2.0” players and how they’re related to each other, with subway lines connecting them labeled Main Sites, Hype, Advertisements, Social Networks, Marketing, Blogs, Technology, Content, Usability, Design Openness, Acquisitions, Democracy, and Humor.
The talented Lisa Williams has launched Placeblogger: PressThink: Check out Placeblogger.com. It’s About All Those Hyperlocal News Sites Springing Up…
…via George, who pointed out the article in Poynter wherein it is written
[…] Today, Lisa Williams debuted Placeblogger, an online resource that lists and showcases placeblogs — so far 713 from around the U.S., with a few scattered elsewhere around the globe. What’s a placeblog? Williams defines it as “an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time. It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution. It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism. It’s about the lived experience of a place.” Her own community site for Watertown, Mass, H20town, is an example of a placeblog. […]
(emphasis added), noting that I (or really Adrian Chan) had once speculated on this site that identity might in some sense, at least online, be equated with “attention over time.”
(George will be on my “Every Breath You Take” panel at South by Southwest this year and we’ll be talking about identity online, as well as attention, privacy, trust, and presence. Got to remember to add the “see me speak at SXSW” badge sometime soon.)
Read this, Experience prototyping, a PDF of a paper from the Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems in 2000 (sponsored by SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction):
In this paper, we describe “Experience Prototyping” as a form of prototyping that enables design team members, users and clients to gain first-hand appreciation of existing or future conditions through active engagement with prototypes. We use examples from commercial design projects to illustrate the value of such prototypes in three critical design activities: understanding existing experiences, exploring design ideas and in communicating design concepts.
