The Geography of Cyberspace Directory
“Does Cyberspace have a geography? What do we know about the nature, shape, size, distribution and geography of the Internet, the World-Wide Web and Cyberspace?” (Cyber Geography)
All posts from
March 2004
Structure and Style in Use Cases for User Interface Design
“Various styles for writing use cases are presented with examples and discussions of their relative advantages and disadvantages, particularly their consequences for user interface design and software usability. Essential use cases, a variant employed within usage-centered design, are contrasted with conventional use cases and scenarios. For the most efficient support of user interface design and particularly for large, complex projects, a highly-structured form of use case has evolved. New narrative elements and relationships among use cases are introduced. These include means for expressing partial or flexible ordering of interaction, relationships with business rules, as well as a clarification of the often misunderstood concept of extension that recognizes two distinct forms: synchronous and asynchronous extensions.” (Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.) – courtesy of guuui
How to design for the tunnel reader
“People may initially scan read on the Web; their eyes moving quickly across a page. However, when they find the keywords they are interested in, they tend to tunnel read. What this means is that they focus on a specific set of content. They basically don’t see anything else on your website.” (Gerry McGovern)
User Experience in India: State of the Profession 2004
“Overall, the survey reveals the picture of a profession that is rapidly maturing. Many practitioners have more than four years experience. Some institutes are playing a key role in educating students in the field. Practitioners have knowledge of many of the techniques and methods of the field. Practitioners face a number of constraints in their work which seem very similar to those faced by practitioners in other countries and regions. In short, User Experience in India has arrived!” (Uzanto Consulting)
Emotional about design
“Visceral design is what nature does. (…) Behavioural design is all about use. (…) Reflective design is about the meaning of things.” (Guardian Unlimited) – courtesy of lawrence lee
MSN Personas
“We try to understand an audience through numbers, charts and graphs, but often times we lose sight of the people who represent these statistics. The MSN audience is comprised of a broad range of users at different stages in their life, who use MSN in their own unique way. To help better define the people behind the numbers, MSN has created personas for some key audience segments.” (MSN Advertising) – courtesy of brett lider
Optimizing Your Chances with Accessibility
Effectively increasing search engine ranking with W3C Accessibility guidelines and Section 508 (Brandon Olejniczak – Digital Web Magazine)
Taxonomy and Metadata Strategies for Effective Content Management
“There is a lot of mumbo-jumbo like the word ‘taxonomy’ that is being thrown around to describe how to manage so-called unstructured content like business documents, web site pages, and old fashioned technical reports and articles. On the one hand, we want to remember what we already know about how to create a useful core catalog record to describe a content object so it can be found again later when needed. On the other hand, there are some bad habits and obsolete ideas like inverted file indexes that we need to get beyond. This talk is about what we have seen in dozens of applied information management projects over the past few years, and how you can take advantage of what you already know to solve big problems like these in your own organizations.” (Joseph Busch – Potomac Valley Chapter of ASIS&T)
Supporting enterprise knowledge management with weblogs: A weblog services roadmap
“Presentation at the Computers in Libraries conference.” (Michael Angeles)
Content Management for Information Architecture
Video of presentations at the Fifth IA Summit 2004 – including Poster Sessions and the presentation of Jared Spool (CMSReview) – courtesy of columntwo
Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning, and Deep Re-Use
“Xanalogical literary structure is a unique symmetrical connective system for text (and other separable media elements), with two complementary forms of connection that achieve these functions — survivable deep linkage (content links) and recognizable, visible re-use (transclusion). Both of these are easily implemented by a document model using content lists which reference stabilized media.” (Theodor Holm Nelson – ACM Computing Surveys Hypertext and Hypermedia Symposium)
Faceted Access: A review of the literature
“The purpose of this paper is to define what is meant by facet analysis, and to review briefly the history of facet analysis within the context of other types of subject analysis in libraries and within the context of information retrieval research.” (Amanda Maple)
Ranganathan’s Colon Classification: A selected and annotated bibliography
“Classification schemes can be described as enumerative (Library of Congress Classification), hierarchical (Dewey Decimal Classification) and analytico-synthetic or faceted (Colon Classification).” (Nicole Aerts, Jan Green and Lorna McAdam)
Understanding visual communication
“They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Indeed, some pictures are better at conveying some things than words. Still, not all pictures are created equal, and the power of visual communication is sometimes misunderstood, if not misused. Pictures are no panacea; some words may well convey concepts better than a thousand pictures, too.” (Jean-luc Doumont – STC Belgium)
The complexity principle
“Overly complex interfaces significantly impact usability and must be avoided. While there are plenty of studies researching this issue and plenty of data to point to how complexity hurts a product, in order to truly address the root of problem, designers must understand where complexity originates.” (Design by Fire)
How to make links work for your website
“Quality links from external websites will help get more of the right people to your website. Well written links within your website will ensure your readers can act in a way you want them to. Linking is about driving action. It’s about getting the right people to the right content as quickly as possible.” (Gerry McGovern)
Fundamental concepts of reuse 
“Content reuse is fundamental to a successful unified content strategy. This chapter defines content reuse and the benefits of its use.It explores how other industries have employed reuse for decades to improve their processes and the quality of their products.” (Ann Rockley – The Rockley Group)
Experience Design and the Design of Experience
“(…) we enter the era of what I’m calling Experience Design. A quick scan of our sociocultural landscape suggests that, in terms of artistic practices, mass entertainment, sports, and emerging technologies of pleasure, productive forces are increasingly targeting experience itself – that evanescent flux of sensation and perception that is, in some sense, all we have and all we are.” (Erik Davis – techgnosis) – courtesy of brad lauster
IA Summit 2004 Presentation Handouts
Materials from the Fifth Annual ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit: Breaking New Ground / 27-29 February, 2004 – Austin, Texas (IA Summit 2004)
The Risks of Discounted Qualitative Studies
“The discerning usability analyst should employ a mix of both qualitative and quantitative methods when discovering usability problems. The risks of relying heavily on a qualitative approach can lead to a severe misdiagnosis especially when usability problems are difficult to detect. This article is a response to Nielsen’s ‘The Risk of Quantitative Studies’ and shows how the problems voters had with the ‘butterfly-ballot’ in the Florida 2000 election would not have been detected with popular discounted qualitative methods. The problems with relying on one-size-fits all usability guidelines such as ‘testing with only five users’ and the inherent bias of pay-for-hire guru’s are also discussed.” (Jeff Sauro – measuring usability)