Seb’s Open Research on the IA Summit 2005
“I am at the Information Architecture Summit, blogging the sessions I’m attending.”
(Sébastien Paquet)
All posts from
March 2005
Making Personas More Powerful: Details to Drive Strategic and Tactical Design
“How can something that feels so right be so wrong? Personas ought to be one of the defining techniques in user-focused design. Lots of professionals create them, yet too often the personas end up being too vague to guide a product’s focus. They often lack the detail to be useful in guiding low-level design trade-offs. And, as typically done, personas have been too narrowly focused. They often aren’t helpful in identifying the information a user needs or creates. Nor do they have much to say about the sensory and emotional aspects of user experience—the sorts of factors that cause consumers to lust after products like Apple’s iPod.” (turok – LiveJournal)
Get linked to get found in search engines
“Search optimization is about getting links. The more links you get to your website, the more likely you are to get into the first page of search engine results.” (Gerry McGovern)
Tags Turning Web Chaos into Categories
“In the quest to organize the Web’s information, an emerging approach is putting the power to categorize everything from links to digital photos into the hands of users.” (Matt Hicks – eWeek) – courtesy of lawrence lee
Towards a Toolkit for Interaction Design
“I begin with a definition, and illustrate my approach to partitioning the terrain of interaction design using five conceptual ‘lenses’. In so doing, I cover most of what I see as the theoretical roots of interaction design. I then turn to the role of theory in interaction design, and suggest that a good way to begin is to assemble a toolkit of concepts for interaction design that consists of appropriately sized theoretical constructs.” (Tom Erickson) – courtesy of elearningpost
The IA of Things: Twenty Years Of Lessons Learned
IA Summit 2005 Presentation – “It’s the dawn of an age where interactive functionality and information is available and intertwined everywhere. The past two decades have been a pre-dawn period where products, software, environments, functionality, and interaction with information have gradually converged. What lessons have been learned within a single consulting design career during this period, pursuing from the beginning, convergence in these areas?” (James Leftwich) – courtesy of functioning form
The Bloggies 2005: And the winners are…
“The Bloggies are a set of 30 publicly-chosen awards given to weblog writers and those related to weblogs. This is the fifth ceremony (…)”
Animation
“Animation permits the representation of change, including time in the visual equation. In this issue, we review the basic variables of animation and the profit we can extract from its use.” (Juan C. Dürsteler – InfoVis!)
Lower-Literacy Users
“Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Search optimization, not search engine optimization
“Search optimization focuses on how people search. Search engine optimization focuses on how search engines work. Search optimization sees quality web content as its foundation stone.” (Gerry McGovern)
WWW@10 Videos: The Dream and the Reality
“Keynote speeches from the 10th Anniversary of the World Wide Web. September 30 through October 2, 2004 – Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology – Terre Haute, Indiana, USA” (WWW@10 Conference)
d.school: Stanford Institute of Design
“We believe great innovators and leaders need to be great design thinkers. We have a dream about building a place for design at Stanford. We want to build a place where design thinking is the glue that binds people together, a place we call the d.school. We want the d.school to be a place for Stanford students and faculty in engineering, medicine, business, the humanities, and education to learn design thinking and work together to solve big problems in a human centered way. We want it to be a place where people from big companies, start-ups, schools, nonprofits, government, and anyone else who realizes the power of design thinking, can join our multidisciplinary teaching, prototyping, and research.” (Stanford University)
First and Second Law of Simplicity
“(1) A complex system of many functions can be simplified by carefully grouping related functions. (2) The positive emotional response derived from a simplicity experience has less to do with utility, and more to do with saving time.” (John Maeda – Simplicity)
IA Summit Folksonomies Panel
“I thought the panel went well overall. Enough friction to keep the discussion interesting, smart presentations from the panelists, and good questions from the audience helped keep things rolling.” (Gene Smith – Atomiq)
Rapid Contextual Design: A How-To Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design
Book Excerpt – “Today companies want to infuse more user data into their processes. But if we analyze the ‘right’ way to do customer-centered design for any project we may be dismayed at the time and resources it takes. And, companies are also resistant to changing their own development processes. So what to do?” (Karen Holtzblatt et al. – ACM Ubiquity)
IA Summit 2005 Blog
Weblog of the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit 2005: Crossing Borders (IA Summit 2005)
Information Aesthetics
“Form follows data – Artistic ambient information visualization design weblog.” (Andrew Vande Moere)
mSpace: Exploring the New Web
“mSpace helps people build knowledge from exploring those relationships. mSpace does this by offering several powerful tools for organizing an information space to suit a person’s interest: slicing, sorting, swapping, infoViews and preview cues.” (M.C. Schraefel) – courtesy of nooface
Getting Your Design Built
“Kim Goodwin spoke about a subject that is of great importance to all digital product designers—getting buy-in for our designs and ensuring that they get built. First, she enumerated various reasons why a product might not get built as designed or even get built at all—some of which are beyond our control—like shifting corporate priorities. However, the substance of her talk was about the many things that we can do to help set the proper scope for our projects and get buy-in for our designs.” (Pabini Gabriel-Petit – BayDUX)
Intranets: strategy first, usability second
“More and more intranet teams are buying into the need for usability. However, usability is not a strategy, and without a clear strategy, usability can become a pointless, wasteful and counter-productive exercise.” (Gerry McGovern)
