Search engine optimization: Beyond search keywords
“The words people type into a search box are not always the words they like to read when they click on the search result.” (Gerry McGovern)
All posts from
April 2006
Designing for Everyware: An interview with Adam Greenfield
“‘Everyware’ is information processing that has been removed from the context of the personal computer and distributed everywhere in the built environment.” (Liz Danzico – Voice AIGA Journal of Design)
Does information need architects?
“(…) the dividing line among information architects is real. One group tends more toward control and using expertise to create a structure that should work the same way for every user. The other tends more toward flexibility and enabling user interaction to determine the structure of the site and the content of the answers. (…) I would think it’s a good time to proudly state ‘I am an information architect, dammit!'” (David Weinberger – KMWorld)
UXD: User eXperience Design
A weblog from Pathfinder: “(…) a hybrid shop, expert in both User Experience Design and Applications Development.” (About UXD)
Defining the Problem with Tom Chi
“(…) designers are often able to reframe business ‘problems’ to better communicate existing and potential relationships (and outcomes) between the market, customer goals, and product ecosystems. To further illustrate this point, I’ve asked a few seasoned designers that have successfully defined or re-defined business strategies to share their experiences defining problems.” (Luke Wroblewski – Functioning Form)
Dimensions of Usability: Defining the Conversation, Driving the Process
“Have you ever wondered if your colleagues or clients really understand usability? Too often, standards or guidelines substitute for really engaging our business, technical and design colleagues in a discussion of what usability means. By looking at usability from five dimensions, we can create a consensus around usability goals and use that definition to provide the basis for planning user centered design activities.” (Whitney Quesenbery – uigarden)
How Much Effort Does It Take to Create a Great User Experience?
“The purpose of this article is to provide you with a way to measure the level of effort required to successfully complete a project in respect to user experience. This is a powerful merging of project management, user experience, requirements and best practices. And, it is simple enough for a little monkey to use. More accurately, it is simple enough for me to use.” (John Rhodes – Apogee)
Opening Plenary of CHI2006: Scott Cook (Intuit)
“This plenary is the story of why customer connectivity is hugely important – Cook insists this means not doing surveys which can reinforce the company’s existing mindset, but to get out into the customer’s actual space – to get out the old ideas and let new ideas come in.” (CHI 2006)
Moving up the wisdom hierarchy
“And fortunately, even those focused on information architecture and information design often consider knowledge and understanding as well as information.” (Kathy Sierra – Creating Passionate Users)
Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 1-4
“As their usability approach matures, organizations typically progress through the same sequence of stages, from initial hostility to widespread reliance on user research.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Transliterature: A Humanist Format for Re-Usable Documents and Media
“This work derives from a simple question we asked long ago: ‘How can computer documents – shown interactively on screens, stored on disk, transmitted electronically – improve on paper?’ Our answer was: ‘Keep every quotation connected to its original source.’ We are still fighting for this idea, and the great powers it will give authors and readers. (Others would later ask a very different question: ‘How can computers SIMULATE paper?’ – the wrong question, we believe, whose mistaken pursuit has brought us to the present grim document world.)” (Theodor Holm Nelson)
Defining ‘Taxonomy’
“There are three basic characteristics of a taxonomy for knowledge management, and to be any good at its job, it needs to fulfil all three functions: 1. A taxonomy is a form of classification scheme. 2. Taxonomies are semantic. 3. A taxonomy is a kind of knowledge map.” (Patrick Lambe – Green Chameleon) – courtesy of columntwo
The Experience of… Experience
“Different traditions have different ways of categorizing experience. For the spiritual and the formally religious, it’s the peregrinations of the soul. Professionals of a more scientific bent situate experience in the same realm as perception and cognition, physical and psychic processes built into human beings and other living things that are, even to the scientistis, frankly still a mystery. Then there are the opportunists who take experience for granted and forge ahead with the project of altering minds by tripping people out with ‘new’ and ‘better’ experiences (at least in their own estimation).” (Bob Jakobson – Total Experience)
Card Sorting: A book in progress
“Card sorting is a technique that is used to gather user input to design the information architecture of a site. The technique is easy to prepare and run, and great fun. But sometimes the results can be hard to interpret and it is not always clear how to use them to design the IA.” (Donna Maurer – Rosenfeld Media)
The six species of Information Architect
“(…) before you all go berko and abuse me for sterotyping your ‘species’ I don’t think that anyone who works as an IA for any period of time can actually remain strictly within the confines of their species. I think you’re always coloured by it, but I think the more you do and the better you get, the more you respect the other species and what they bring to the collective table. And the more you tend to extend your skills and refine your approach to take in some of these traits and build them into your personal repertoire.” (Leisa Reichelt – disambiguity) – courtesy of webword
Learning, Doing, Selling: 2006 IA Summit Wrapup
Overview and Pre-conference sessions, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday – “(…) IAs adore long conversations about ideas. Perhaps that’s why the Summit continues to be one of the most intellectually challenging of the practitioners’ conferences.” (Boxes and Arrows)
swipr
“(…) a toolset that allows information architects to create an integrated and interactive deliverable from standard Visio files.” (About swipr) – congrats jacco!
The First 100 Days: Observations of a Nouveau Blogger
“An expert who blogs is more interesting than a blogger who experts.” (Guy Kawasaki – Signum sine tinnitu)
Visualising Time
“Visualising time or, best said, visualising the events that occur in time, is not so usual a topic. There aren’t so many visual metaphors associated to it either. We take a look at them here.” (Juan C. Dürsteler – Inf@Vis!)
F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
“Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
