InfoDesign: Hand-picked since 1997

All posts from

November 2003

Understanding brand experience: The future of communication

Added on 27 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“Brand Experience is a holistic approach to the design of a strong brand. It requires cross-organizational strategy and the well-planned integration of many different disciplines, from visual design to marketing to writing to information architecture to usability and beyond.” (Dirk Knemeyer – AIGA Houston Dec. 4, 2003)

Events

The connectivity sonar: Detecting site functionality by structural patterns

Added on 26 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“(…) this research argues that sites of similar role exhibit similar structural patterns, as the functionality of a site naturally induces a typical hyperlinked structure and typical connectivity patterns to and from the rest of the Web.” (Einat Amitay et al. – Journal of Digital Information/Theme: Hypermedia systems)

Patterns

The connectivity sonar: Detecting site functionality by structural patterns

Added on 26 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

Patterns

The importance of documentation: Discover what’s missing in today’s documentation efforts, and why it’s gone

Added on 25 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“As documentation decreases in quality, users stop turning to it. As users stop turning to it, companies stop trying to maintain it – why bother, if the users won’t read it? This line of reasoning is dooming the future of documentation to failure. Documentation is important and needs to be taken seriously.” (Peter Seebach – IBM developerWorks) – courtesy of lawrence lee

Technical communication

2003 Dublin Core conference: Supporting communities of discourse and practice – Metadata research & applications

Added on 25 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“Overall the conference showed lots of enthusiasm in the use of standardized metadata for future inter-operability between institutions such as libraries, government agencies, and corporations. It was interesting to hear various DC people acknowledge that they needed more awareness of how DC was being used in non-traditional settings and ways, such as in corporations, with hardware, and in conjunction with other standards. It will be exciting to see how Dublin Core metadata and other metadata standards start to share a common ground with the information architecture community.” (Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan and Sarah Rice – Boxes and Arrows)

Metadata

Executive dashboards

Added on 25 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“An executive dashboard is an intranet for a select group of users. These users tend to be executives—VPs and above, the people who are the main decision-makers in the company.” (Alex Kirtland – Boxes and Arrows)

The CAA: A wicked good design technique

Added on 25 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“Card sorting, which involves writing the content on index cards and asking users to sort them into logical piles, with the piles becoming the architecture of the site, tells us how to organize content. CAA is similar, except there aren’t any cards.” (Jared Spool – UIE Roadshow)

Information architecture

Two sigma: Usability and six sigma quality assurance

Added on 24 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“On average across many test tasks, users fail 35% of the time when using websites. This is 100,000 times worse than six sigma’s requirement, but Web usability can still benefit from a six sigma quality approach.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

Usability

Rapid navigation in online documents

Added on 24 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“(…) to make electronically delivered documents far easier and more practical and faster to work with, by expanding beyond the “help topics” design paradigm. This site covers information structuring; rapid navigation; and designing Help, Web pages, and documents.” (About hypertext navigation) – courtesy of victor lombardi

Navigation

The intranet gets serious: Making knowledge sharing work – Part 2/4

Added on 23 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“The intranet is beginning to restructure the organization in more ways than one. Content is now an asset, and the people who manage it need to treat it as such. Managing editors, and their team, understand how technology can facilitate effective publishing, collaboration and self-service focused application development.” (Gerry McGovern)

Information design

2003 about, with and for speakers

Added on 23 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“For easy reference, we have posted notes from every 2003 About, With and For speaker session.” (about, with and for – Institute of Design) – courtesy of peter merholz

Information design

A presentation architecture for individualized content

Added on 21 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“A current trend in the WWW is the generation of individualized web pages. Individualization as meant as in this article covers the complete range from inserting small pieces of text (such as the user’s name) to composing the complete text of a page depending on properties of the user.” (Alberto Gonzáles Palomo et al. – AH2003 Proceedings)

Adaptation

Live help systems: An approach to intelligent help for web information systems

Added on 21 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“Since the creation of the World-Wide Web we have seen a great growth in the complexity of Web sites. There has also been a large expansion in number of Web sites and in amount of usage. As a consequence, more and more Web site users are having problems accomplishing their tasks, and it is increasingly important to provide them with support.” (Johan Aberg – Adaptive Hypertext & Hypermedia)

Technical communication

Eliciting and describing users’ models of computer systems

Added on 21 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“The topic of this thesis is users’ models: the representations users may form of the computer system which they are interacting with. It has been proposed that user interfaces which support the construction of appropriate users’ models facilitate learning and use of computer systems.” (Angela Sasse) – courtesy of iawiki

EIDC newsletter

Added on 18 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“The European Information Development Conference is the first European high quality event for professionals dealing with multilingual product information such as technical writers, web designers, documentation and information managers, translators, vendors. It provides an excellent platform for information and knowledge exchange between experts from the industry, researchers, education experts, service providers and free-lancers.” (TCeurope)

Technical communication

uzCardSort

Added on 18 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“Card Sorting is a methodology for assessing mental/conceptual models by asking users to categorize a list of terms. uzCardSort is open source (…)” (Andy Edmonds – mozdev) – courtesy of louis rosenfeld

WordprocessingML schemas from Microsoft published

Added on 18 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“(…) the xml schemas for Microsoft Office Word 2003 (WordprocessingML) along with documentation.” (Infostructurebase) – courtesy of langemark

Technology

Ethnography: A wiki

Added on 18 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“Ethnography isÝa fascinating technique toÝdo research onÝhuman behaviour.” (Peter Van Dijck) – courtesy of column two

The intranet gets serious: part 1/4

Added on 17 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“Finally, organizations are getting serious about how they manage their intranets. The intranet is now moving out of an evolutionary, experimental phase into a more systematic, managed phase. It is being seen as an asset, a driver of productivity. However, return on investment measurement for the intranet still requires a lot of work.” (Gerry McGovern)

Information design

The expert user is dead

Added on 17 November 2003 Peter Bogaards

“The expert user is dead, not because we no longer need sophisticated tools to find informationóemphatically we doóbut because we can no longer get away with designing for expert users only.” (Leo Klein – Library Journal)