All posts from
January 2005

Concept Cars

Added on 31 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“But good design is a lot more than style. Good design includes substance: function, comfort, pleasure, safety, economy, environmental friendliness, and a lot more besides. A concept car should be an opportunity to explore all of these directions.” (Donald Norman) – courtesy of usability views

Art 491: Information Design Course

Added on 27 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“(..) designed to give you experience in participating on an interdisciplinary project research, design and development team to produce solutions that address real-world issues and clients. Information design focuses on the communication of complex ideas with clarity, precision, and efficiency (usable). Methodologies and technologies for efficient and effective information transfer are changing rapidly and will play a fundamental, and continual, role in your future. Products of information design range from computer (and other machines) interfaces, forms and documents (online or paper), wayfinding systems in 3D space (real or virtual), to maps, charts, diagrams, graphs and business presentations. Whatever your content area of specialty, you will be involved with the design and transfer of information the rest of your life.” (Information Design Group – University of Idaho)

Modeling User Workflows for Rich Internet Applications

Added on 27 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“As Rich Internet Applications become more advanced, the tasks, problems, and processes they address become increasingly complex, making it more important than ever to accurately model user workflows. Early Internet applications were often narrowly focused in scope, and the steps were relatively simple and sequential, for example, purchasing items through simple e-commerce, reserving hotel rooms, or renting cars. But as productivity applications move toward a web-based distribution model, the tasks become more complicated.” (David Hogue – Macromedia) – courtesy of jane wells

Patterns in Unstructured Data: Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization

Added on 27 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
A Presentation to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – “As of early 2002, there were just over two billion web pages listed in the Google search engine index, widely taken to be the most comprehensive. No one knows how many more web pages there are on the Internet, or the total number of documents available over the public network, but there is no question that the number is enormous and growing quickly. Every one of those web pages has come into existence within the past ten years. There are web sites covering every conceivable topic at every level of detail and expertise, and information ranging from numerical tables to personal diaries to public discussions. Never before have so many people had access to so much diverse information.” (Clara Yu et al. – US National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education) – courtesy of frank cronk

Formal Taxonomies for the U.S. Government

Added on 27 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“For federal agencies trying to learn how to implement taxonomies, most examples in portals and on public websites are informal taxonomies where neither the nodes nor the associations between them are formally defined. Examples of such taxonomies can be found on yahoo.com, froogle.com, and dmoz.org. Such informal taxonomies are only useful for browsing and not for automated techniques like query expansion, rule execution, taxonomy integration, faceted classification, and inference. This article will examine the requirements of formal taxonomies and provide examples of each construct.” (Michael Daconta – xml.com)

Taxonomies and classification schemas within the BBC

Added on 26 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
Martin Belam presentation at IP Lezing in Amsterdam – “The conference was very well attended, with around 350 delegates – and I enjoyed meeting some really nice people, both before and after the event. The presentation is available to download – PowerPoint presentation, 3.8M – but it is a very large file. As usual much of the worth is in the notes, not the pictures in the slides themselves.” (Martin Belam – currybetdotnet)

Investing in Usability: Testing versus Training

Added on 26 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“(…) usability professionals use their budgets to run usability studies. That is, when given money, they immediately start setting up usability programs to solve particular problems. This shouldn’t surprise anyone because many usability professionals think the value of usability is derived entirely from the results produced through usability tests. Most people think usability is synonymous with usability testing. It isn’t, and this misconception frustrates me.” (John S. Rhodes – Boxes and Arrows)

IA Summit Program

Added on 26 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“Information architecture is more widely applied than ever. Decisionmakers now accept IA as critical to well-designed electronic information spaces. Practitioners use IA approaches and methodologies, and routinely include IAs on cross-disciplinary teams. There is a growing demand for IAs and greater pressure on managers and non-IA practitioners to understand IA principles. To support these needs, this year’s Summit focuses on key topics, cutting-edge issues, and core competencies.” – Pre-Conference Program, Main Conference Program and Poster Sessions (ASIS&T 2005 Information Architecture Summit)

Towards collaboration between information seeking and information retrieval

Added on 24 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“For many years researchers in library and information science have borrowed theory from other fields to provide insight into our research findings. We are moving from this borrowed theory approach to creating a conceptual framework that has been tested, refined and adapted specifically for application in our field. The conceptual framework has developed rapidly during the past ten years with early signs of application in other fields.” – Papers presented at the 5th Information Seeking in Context Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 1-3 September, 2004 (Carol C. Kuhlthau – Information Research, January 2005)

Fifth Annual Weblog Awards

Added on 24 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“Bloggies are a set of 30 publicly-chosen awards given to weblog writers and those related to weblogs. This is the fifth ceremony, with previous winners listed on their respective sites: 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. Everyone’s invited to take part in the awarding process, so read below to find out how you can nominate and vote for your favorite blogs!”

Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL

Added on 20 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“On the web, CSS is the style sheet language of choice. However, the usefulness of CSS is not limited to screens. If you want to transfer web content — be it XML or HTML — onto paper, there are good reasons to use CSS. The language is radically simpler than that of XSL, and it is suitable both on-screen and on paper. This means that you probably don’t have to write a stylesheet at all but can reuse an existing one.” (Håkon Wium Lie and Michael Day – xml.com)