Guidelines for Visualizing Links
“Textual links should be colored and underlined to achieve the best perceived affordance of clickability, though there are a few exceptions to these guidelines.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
All posts from
May 2004
‘Aristotle’ (The Knowledge Web)
“With the knowledge web, humanity’s accumulated store of information will become more accessible, more manageable, and more useful. Anyone who wants to learn will be able to find the best and the most meaningful explanations of what they want to know. Anyone with something to teach will have a way to reach those who what to learn. Teachers will move beyond their present role as dispensers of information and become guides, mentors, facilitators, and authors. The knowledge web will make us all smarter. The knowledge web is an idea whose time has come.” (W. Daniel Hillis – Edge The Third Culture)
AH2003: Workshop on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems
“The research area of adaptive hypermedia originates from the coming together of the areas of hypertext and hypermedia, user modeling and Web-based information systems, all of which have embraced the topic of adaptation.” (Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia)
Focus on the Student: How to Use Learning Objectives to Improve Learning
“If information architecture is a fairly new field, then the practice of teaching information architecture is even newer. Often instructors are experienced information architects who have little to no teacher training, and they must teach students with a wide range of experience and learning goals. Learning objectives are one tool that can make information architecture courses easier for teachers and more rewarding for students.” (Wendy Cown – Boxes and Arrows)
Understanding Organizational Stakeholders for Design Success
“User-centered design professionals pay special emphasis to one type of stakeholder—the users of the system-arguing that user experience needs to be carefully crafted to satisfy user needs. While understanding user needs and goals is certainly necessary, it is often not sufficient for producing a successful design. Apart from an understanding of user needs and perspective, design needs to incorporate the goals and perspective of other stakeholders in order to get their buy-in and be considered a success in the corporate workplace.” (Jonathan Boutelie – Boxes and Arrows)
How Much Interaction is Too Much?
“I’ve been doing usability testing for almost 20 years. Although I haven’t been exposed to that many other facilitators, the ones I had seen facilitated very much like I did, which also seemed to be very much ‘by the book’. Here, was someone with a very different approach.” (Clifford Anderson – STC Usability SIG Newsletter)
Enterprise Information Architecture: Don’t Do ECM Without It
“Two questions resound throughout the content industry: Why do Enterprise Content Management (ECM) projects take so long to implement? And why do they fail with such alarming frequency? While all enterprise-level IT projects prove to be difficult and risky undertakings, a deeper examination of the ECM challenge in particular will reveal an endemic inattention to – or at best belated appreciation of – its critical corollary: the need for Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA).” (Tony Byrne – EContentMag) – courtesy of stig andersen
Intranets and knowledge sharing
“Much has been made of the emphasis on people and process in knowledge management. While it is certainly true that knowledge management is not a technology issue, effort must still be spent in providing a suitable environment to facilitate knowledge capture and sharing.” (James Robertson – KM Column)
Digital Convergence: Insight into the future of Web design
“As digital products continue to converge, the Web will increasingly become just one component of more complicated products.” (Dirk Knemeyer – Digital Web Magazine)
Muriel Cooper’s Visible Wisdom
“(…) a designer and educator who charted new territory for design in the changing landscape of electronic communication.” (Janet Abrams – AIGA) – courtesy of william drenttel
IA in the WSJ
“The article starts off by citing Greg Storey’s work to redesign the infamous Bin Laden President’s Daily Brief. It then moves on to describe what Information Architecture/Design is and how it can make a difference in understanding information and in the bottom-line for a business. IA/ID also is mentioned in the decision-making process for the Columbia disaster, and Tufte gets to rail a bit against Powerpoint. Tufte also dismisses Mr. Storey’s redesign of the PDB (way to exhibit solidarity, Ed). The article then moves onto another favorite pundit, Nielsen, and he gets to quote his $71B in lost productvity sound-bite.” (every breath death defying) – courtesy of victor lombardi
Sharing Digital Resources: Web-Wise 2004
“Selected papers from the Fifth Annual Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World, sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services and the university of Illinois at Chicago, 3-5 March 2004, Chicago.” (First Monday) – courtesy of beth mazur
An Information Architecture Perspective on Personalization 
Chapter from ‘Designing Personalized User Experiences in eCommerce‘
“The framework laid out here for understanding the design implications of personalization does not answer any questions, however – it just raises awareness of how little we already know about users’ expectations from personalization. In fact, the web and its early navigation metaphor are still young and we do not understand it well enough yet.” (Keith Instone)
“The framework laid out here for understanding the design implications of personalization does not answer any questions, however – it just raises awareness of how little we already know about users’ expectations from personalization. In fact, the web and its early navigation metaphor are still young and we do not understand it well enough yet.” (Keith Instone)
GEL Conference Write-ups
“Some of the sessions at Good Experience Live 2004 were difficult to transcribe because of the mode of presentation. The following sessions, while not fully documented, were still worthwhile, communicating useful ideas and advice.” (Heath Row – Fast Company) – courtesy of vanderwal
Here is a How to Topic Maps, Sir!
“There is a great deal of philosophy involved in working with Topic Maps. Not in the sense of arguing for extentionalism or purport a theory of when cats die in boxes, but in the sense of epistemology, the philosophy of learning. It is about how we perceive things, how human cognition works, about how we label things, how we categorise and find our way in the vast information layer between our brains and our tools.” (Alexander Johannesen) – courtesy of column two
Planning: The Key to Successful CMS Implementation
“The Semantic Web is an on-going large-scale effort to improve the current architecture of the World Wide Web by adding a semantic infrastructure to web resources that can be used for sophisticated data-oriented applications. As its basis, we identify metadata, or information about information, that unambiguously specify machine-understandable facts about web resources.” (Judy Glick-Smith – The Rockley Report)
Metadata on the Web: On the integration of RDF and TopicMaps
“The Semantic Web is an on-going large-scale effort to improve the current architecture of the World Wide Web by adding a semantic infrastructure to web resources that can be used for sophisticated data-oriented applications. As its basis, we identify metadata, or information about information, that unambiguously specify machine-understandable facts about web resources.” (Paolo Ciancarini et al. – Extreme Markup Languages 2003)
Change the Color of Visited Links
“People get lost and move in circles when websites use the same link color for visited and new destinations. To reduce navigational confusion, select different colors for the two types of links.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Web content management: a lot of great progress
“Every day there is tremendous work being done on the Web. Talented, dedicated people are working with limited resources and support to achieve brilliant results. If you’re one of those people struggling to achieve the recognition you need, take a moment to take a bow.” (Gerry McGovern)
Peter Morville: The InfoDesign profile
“Each month, InfoDesign profiles a thought leader in the design industry, focusing on people who are identified with or show strong sensibilities to the design of information and experiences. This month, Peter Morville is our ‘victim’.” (InfoDesign: Understanding by Design)
