All posts from
September 2003

Soft Skills for Information Architecture

Added on 29 September 2003 Peter Bogaards
“While much of oneís success or failure depends on the skills specific to information architecture – like diagramming, documenting, organizing – an even greater indicator is soft skills: dealing with conflict, negotiating, and communicating. These soft skills are important in any profession or job role, but are of high importance in information architecture, which requires applying them in sometimes unconventional ways.” (Jeff Lash – Digital Web Magazine)

Enterprise IA Roadmap

Added on 26 September 2003 Peter Bogaards
“(…) that describes which aspects of the enterprise’s architecture should be developed and when. My goal is to show that there are certain aspects of a site’s architecture that are worth tackling right away for quick wins, others that you’ll get around to later, and others that you might never reach in a distributed, highly politicized enterprise environment.” (Louis Rosenfeld)

IDEO Method Cards

Added on 24 September 2003 Peter Bogaards
“Key to IDEO’s success as a design and innovation firm are the insights we derive from understanding people and their experiences, behaviors, perceptions, and needs. IDEO Method Cards show 51 of the methods we use to inspire great design and keep people at the center of our design process. Each card describes one method and includes a brief story about how and when to use it. The cards are divided into the four categories listed below making it easy to reference, browse, sort and share the cards.” (IDEO) – courtesy of elearningpost

Profiles in IT: Andrew Dillon

Added on 23 September 2003 Peter Bogaards
“The essence of information organization is not a computer science issue. It’s a cognitive issue. Understanding how people think and reason, and organizing information in a user-centric way so that it provides real value to a human–these are the pillars of the classic library and information science approach.” (IT@UT)

IA Tools

Added on 23 September 2003 Peter Bogaards
“(…) document templates, process map posters and other tools to help you in your practice. The documents, which have been donated by various people in the organization, have been found to be useful at one time or another. Items can be used in combination or alone as needed.” (AIfIA) – courtesy of victor lombardi

The ZUI Demo

Added on 22 September 2003 Peter Bogaards
“Zooming is an important part of THE and this simple demo illustrates some of the ways that zooming solves the navigation problems posed by our present system of links, tabs, and other click-and-go-there interfaces.” (Jef Raskin – THE) – courtesy of brad lauster

The Business Value of Web Standards

Added on 19 September 2003 Peter Bogaards
“These aren’t formulas for determining the ROI of migrating to standards, but they are some pretty good financial justifications. ‘It’s what all the cool sites are doing’ shouldn’t be your only point when arguing for a switch to XHTML and CSS. The economic benefits of standardization are tangible. Once we can quantify them, businesses will begin realize the true promise of the Web – interoperable content freely shared.” (Jeffrey Veen – Adaptive Path) – courtesy of lawrence lee

A Taxonomy of User-Interface Metaphors PDF logo

Added on 17 September 2003 Peter Bogaards
“Although metaphor is a commonly used device in the design of user-interfaces, it is not rigorously understood, and most guidance stops at the recommendation of its use. In this paper, we seek to provide a systematic taxonomy of user-interface metaphors, based on and extending the framework of Lakoff and Johnson. We then suggest that some usability heuristics emerge directly from analysis of the taxonomy. We conclude that the taxonomy and heuristics may provide appreciable benefits in user-interface design and evaluation, and address some of the criticisms of metaphor use that have been made.” (Pippin Barr, Robert Biddle & James Noble)

Website Accessibility And The Private Sector: Disability Stakeholders Cannot Tolerate 2% Access!

Added on 17 September 2003 Peter Bogaards
“(…) various Federal laws and Regulations (e.g. Section 508) have placed considerable pressure on web designers of all government entities and firms seeking to do business with the Federal government to make their websites fully accessible. To minimize the possibility of being sued, all web designers for firms, large and small, private or public, for-profit or not-for-profit must deal with this issue of web accessibility.” (Ronald E. Milliman) – courtesy of digital web magazine