All posts from
April 2003

The Semantic Blog

Added on 22 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“When the mainstream trade press first started writing about XML, one of the key benefits invariably cited was precise search. You don’t hear much about that any more. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, the wrong idea, but XML-savvy search requires an investment in data preparation that virtually nobody was or is willing to make.” (Jon Udell – XML.com)

Site Navigation: Keeping It Under Control

Added on 22 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“Navigation is the section of the page that controls what appears in this content area. The beauty of this is that the page content is malleable. The architecture is not, and should represent a strong, extensible foundation that will last at least ten years. It’s like building out floors in an office building. You can change the functionality of the floors as needed without changing the structure of the building.” (Indi Young – Adaptive Path)

Trust by Design

Added on 22 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“I’ve become a big fan of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and the Web Credibility Project. Their studies regarding how people evaluate a web site’s credibility show the critical importance of information design and structure. Users trust sites that are well-designed and well-organized. Poor navigation is the key element that decreases earned web credibility.” (Peter Morville – Semantic Studios)

Branding & the User Interface – Part 1: Brand Basics

Added on 15 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“What is brand? More than just a corporate logo, ‘brand’ is that tangible – and intangible – something that makes your product jump off the shelf and keep consumers and customers coming back for more. This article is the first in a series that describes concrete aspects of branding, sheds light on how interaction design and brand are related, and provides a primer for talking about the religion that is brand.” (Nate Fortin – Cooper)

Towards a General Relation Browser: A GUI for Information Architects

Added on 11 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“The paper presents the case of ongoing efforts to develop and test generalizable user interfaces that provide interactive overviews for large-scale Web sites, portals, and other partitions of Web space. The interfaces are called Relation Browsers (RB) because they help people explore the relationships across different attribute sets, thus enabling understanding the scope and extent of the corpus through active exploration of different ‘slices’ defined by different attribute value juxtapositions. The RB concept is illustrated through discussion of six iterations over a five year period that included laboratory usability studies, a field test, and implementations with a variety of data management problems. The current application to design concepts in a digital government setting is discussed, and the concept of the RB as the basis for an interface server is presented.” (Gary Marchionini and Ben Brunk – Journal of Digital Information 4.1)