All posts from
September 2004

Making Your Content Management System Work for You: An Interview with Jeffrey Veen

“(…) I find that businesses don’t treat their web site as a publication, especially those organizations developing standard content, such as product and service descriptions. Instead, they view their site as a software project — a product that undergoes a development process and needs to be ‘released’.” (Christine Perfetti – User Interface 9 Conference)

Panadol 24 Pack: New instructions for consumers

“This case history demonstrates how information design research and practice can bring about useful social change on a large scale. It is a lightly edited version of a report prepared for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in August 2002 following our work on redeveloping the consumer instructions for Panadol, the most widely used paracetemol analgesic in Australia.” (David SlessCommunication Research Institute of Australia)

BayDUX

“The emerging field of user experience (UX) design is inherently interdisciplinary and synthesizes the methods, techniques, and wisdom of many design disciplines. UXnet (User Experience Network) is a new organization whose mission is fostering cooperation and collaboration among the many organizations that serve the international user experience design community. BayDUX is a coalition of San Francisco Bay Area professional organizations that grew out of our joint participation in the DUX2003 (Designing for User Experiences) conference. Since UXnet and BayDUX share a common purpose, BayDUX is now the local presence for UXnet in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our co-chairs also serve as UXnet Local Ambassadors.” (About BayDUX)

The Pattern Which Connects

“How we perceive our experiences, indeed how we learn to think, are significantly shaped by years of education. These patterns of perceiving and thinking are deeply influenced by the underlying structure of education, or the assumptions embedded in the design of curriculum, instruction and evaluation. And this underlying structure originates largely in analysis, or the breaking down of information into a variety of parts we refer to as subjects, disciplines, courses and the like.” (Brian AlgerExperience Designer Network)

Culture and Websites

“Internationalization has become a very popular topic around web design. Designers are becoming more aware of the global scale of websites and are taking into account different language character sets, date formats and currencies. The more subtle effects of culture, however, are less evident. In an attempt to study these factors, Aaron Marcus and Emilie W. Gould discuss how Hofstede’s cultural dimensions of power-distance (PD), individual vs. collectivism (IC), masculinity vs. femininity (MAS) and uncertainty avoidance (UA) and long term vs. short term orientation (LTO) may apply to global web sites. As an exercise, I looked at several corporate and consumer websites that might illustrate – or perhaps contradict – the patterns Marcus and Gould described.” (Kevin Cheng – OK/Cancel) – courtesy of chris mcevoy

Information as thing

“Three meanings of ‘information’ are distinguished: ‘Information-as-process’; ‘information-as-knowledge’; and ‘information-as-thing’, the attributive use of ‘information’ to denote things regarded as informative. The nature and characteristics of ‘information-as-thing’ are discussed, using an indirect approach (‘What things are informative?’). Varieties of ‘information-as-thing’ include data, text, documents, objects, and events. On this view ‘information’ includes but extends beyond communication. Whatever information storage and retrieval systems store and retrieve is necessarily ‘information-as-thing’.” (Michael K. Buckland)

Digital Libraries and User Needs: Negotiating the Future

“The purpose of this special issue is to consider the spectrum of approaches being used by different libraries and service providers as they negotiate the future with their user communities. At a time when a digital information future is increasingly certain, this timely and much needed collection of articles explores, documents and reflects on the theories, practices, and experiments focusing on digital library users.” (Anita Coleman et al. – Journal of Digital Information 5.3)

Splitting Books Open: Trends in Traditional and Online Technical Documentation

“While technical publishers strive to adapt to new online media and formats, online efforts at self-education by computer users are becoming a form of true grassroots documentation. This talk discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each side — traditional books and user self-education — and suggests how they may converge. It offers suggestions for improving the educational effects of mailing lists, computing project web sites, and other community documentation.” (Andy Oram – O’Reilly Open Source)

Twin Media: Hypertext Structure Under Pressure

“This essay explores issues that arise in composing a long argumentative hypertext that is connected with a book on the same subject. (…) Although the situation of the hypertext being discussed is somewhat unique, in fact hypertext structure is always under pressure from print habits of reading and writing, especially in scholarly writing, so the issues discussed here are widely relevant.” (David Kolb)