Findability.Org
“Ambient findability describes a world in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.” (Peter Morville – FAQ Findability)
All posts from
May 2004
Aaron Marcus: The InfoDesign interview
“Aaron Marcus is a visionary thinker, designer, and writer, well-respected in international professional communities associated with Web, user interface, human factors, graphic design, publishing, and desktop software application development.” (Dirk Knemeyer – InfoDesign: Understanding by Design)
Lorem Ipsum Generator
“116 words of the original 16th century Lipsum plus 384 additional words, carefully chosen from Cicero’s very own ‘De Finibus’, bonded by superior scripting and utmost linguistic accuracy guarantee for the web’s most random … ah, randomness – 500 times sheer bliss for the typographically inclined. Ipso facto.” (Lorem Ipsum) – courtesy of marek moehling
Serious Games Summit 2004
“The Serious Games Initiative is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy. (…) This is the page to add your notes and slides from the 2004 Serious Games Summit 2004.” (Serious Games Initiative) – courtesy of jeroen van mastrigt
STC 51st Annual Conference 2004
Uploaded Session Materials – “This page contains links to materials provided by the conference presenters.” (Society for Technical Communication) – courtesy of beth mazur
The Power of Design
“IDEO redefined good design by creating experiences, not just products. Now it’s changing the way companies innovate.” (Business Week)
Navigating Innovation: Understanding the KaosPilots
“Organizations today are the people and all the relationships and emotions between people. Projects are living networks of people. That’s a huge change from times past when you looked at organizations as machines.” (Garry VanPatter – NextD Journal 4.1)
Separation: The Web Designer’s Dilemma
“With all the discussion about separating presentation from content (and structure), it’s easy to lose track of the goal. So let’s step back, define our terms, and take a look at why it matters.” (Michael Cohen – A List Apart)
Learn how to implement an effective web style guide
“A style guide helps you quickly and cost-effectively publish content that is of a consistent quality. It is particularly important when there are lots of editors and authors involved in the publishing process. A good style guide takes a lot of time and effort to create. Unless its implementation is policed, it will not achieve its objectives.” (Gerry McGovern)
Designing products for offshore development
“One of the most significant realities about offshore developers is that they will build exactly what you tell them to build. This is both good and bad news.” (Dave Cronin – Cooper Newsletter)
The Transformation of an Industry
“We started out as a Web publication focused strictly on the front-end design aspects of Web sites. Over the years that focus has shifted, not because our readership had changed, but because the Web had changed. Building Web sites was no longer just about presentation and cool GUIs, it was about good usability, solid architecture, convenient accessibility and compliant code, as well as transparent design.” – congrats to Nick and the team with the new transformation. (Nick Finck, Paul Scrivens & D. Keith Robinson – Digital Web Magazine)
SVG and Typography: Characters
“(…) we explore some time-honored practices of typographic excellence.” (Fabio Arciniegas A. – XML.com)
Ten questions for Nick Finck
“Structure is the foundation in which good design is built. Just like a house, you wouldn’t build it without blueprints and laying the foundation first. Structure is perhaps the most important thing that goes into a web site. Without structure the site is just a pile of broken 2x4s and sealed off doorways. In technical terms, structure is everything from the conceptual wireframes, to the tangible markup and coding.” (Web Standards Group)
Using Section 508 to Improve Internet Access to Information for Everybody
Society of Technical Communication’s 51st Annual Conference – “The presentation is for a short format progressive session, where I gave the presentation three times in an hour and a half to three different groups.” (Thomas Vander Wal)
Flexing Paper’s Muscles
“Paul Curzon of the Interaction Design Centre at Middlesex University looks at what paper is still good for and the blend of technologies useful for the writing process.” (Usability News)
In search of better search results
“Clearly, the rate of improvement in delivering high quality search results isn’t keeping up with Moore’s Law in terms of doubling every couple of years. In fact, the ‘law of search results’ could be expressed as an inverse to the growth in the size and complexity of the data.” (Dan Farber – ZDNet)
What they didn’t teach me in Design & Usability school – Part 2/2
“If you write usability reports, how much do you understand about whom you are designing usability reports for? Have you ever applied user centered design principles to usability reports themselves? Why or why not? My guess is that you haven’t, and if you did, the results would surprise you. What you’re providing is probably not quite what your team (aka your second set of users) needs from you. What they are looking for is probably at odds with what you want them to look for, and the usability report becomes some kind of philosophical battleground. Generally, the authors of the reports lose.” (Scott Berkun) – courtesy of columntwo
Web-User Satisfaction on the Upswing
“Site visitors are more likely to finish Web tasks successfully, but site searches are still troublesome, according to a recent survey.” (Dennis O’Reilly – PC World) – courtesy of lawrence lee
The new frontier of search
“If you want to find information fast, you need search and retrieval technology. That is not news to people who have been interfacing with IT tools for the last decade. Even laypeople are familiar with recreational search engines, like AltaVista, used for exploring the Internet. Early on in its development, search made inroads into vertical markets like financial services and as an adjunct functionality embedded in KM and document management products.” (John Harney – KMWorld) – courtesy of elearningpost
Web content management a process, not a project
“Then something is new, we need to approach it in an exploratory manner. We need to experiment and try things out. And so it has been with the Web. That period is now over. We need to move from seeing our websites as a series of projects, to managing them as a well-planned process.” (Gerry McGovern)