All posts from
November 2006

Cautions Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens

Added on 29 November 2006 Peter Bogaards
DRAFT: Chapter 1 of ‘The Design of Future Things’ – “As our technology becomes more powerful, more in control, its failure at collaboration and communication becomes ever more critical. Collaboration requires interaction and communication. It means explaining and giving reasons. Trust is a tenuous relationship, formed through experience and understanding. With automatic, so-called intelligent devices, trust is sometimes conferred undeservedly.” (Donald A. Norman) – courtesy of michelvuijlsteke

Enterprise Information Architecture: A Semantic and Organizational Foundation

Added on 29 November 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Two key elements distinguish an enterprise IA from a basic IA. The first is the role an EIA plays in the design, development, and maintenance of an enterprise’s semantic infrastructure. The second is the scope and type of projects an EIA can be involved in as they develop applications that use and build on this semantic infrastructure.” (Tom Reamy – Boxes and Arrows)

Information Architecture Is Not Dead … But It Might Be Stuck

Added on 28 November 2006 Peter Bogaards
“(…) information architecture is stuck. While this implies a problem with the practice, I’m going to suggest that it really has more to do with the practitioners. The practitioners are stuck and the conversation is not evolving. Not enough of us are getting uncomfortable and knocking down fences to reach out to other people from other fields and engaging in meaningful conversation about design and business problems. The conversation is stuck and we need to evolve.” (Scott Weisbrod – Experience Planner)

A Polar Bear for Christmas

Added on 28 November 2006 Peter Bogaards
“We have done our best to balance old and new. We have addressed emerging technologies while maintaining a focus on fundamentals. And, we have tried to emphasize goals and approaches over specific tactics or technologies. In this way, we hope to provide not only knowledge about information architecture, but a framework that will enable you to learn and unlearn over an extended period of time.” (Peter Morville – findability) – chapeau lou and peter

Presentations and the ‘Laws of Simplicity’

Added on 28 November 2006 Peter Bogaards
“John Maeda’s book, The Laws of Simplicity, is a good quick read. I love the clear presentation of the ideas in the book and the fact that the author imposed a limit of 100 pages for himself, an idea consistent with his Third Law: ‘Savings in time feels like simplicity’. This book is not the final word on the topic of, of course, and in fact more is to come soon on the topic by MIT press.” (Garr Reynolds – Presentation Zen)

Creating Pleasurable Interfaces

Added on 26 November 2006 Peter Bogaards
Notes and presentation slides – “A special thanks to everyone who made it out to either of these events. As was probably evident, this is a topic I’m somewhat passionate about. And, as is true of any subject dealing with emotions, beauty or pleasure, this is a rich and somewhat subjective discussion. My User Experience Hierarchy of Needs model forms the skeleton of my presentation. Think of it as ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ except for interfaces.” (Stephen P. Anderson – poetpainter)

An empirical examination of Wikipedia’s credibility

Added on 25 November 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Wikipedia is an free, online encyclopaedia which anyone can add content to or edit the existing content of. The idea behind Wikipedia is that members of the general public can add their own personal knowledge, anonymously if they wish. Wikipedia then evolves over time into a comprehensive knowledge base on all things. Its popularity has never been questioned, although its authority has. By its own admission, Wikipedia contains errors. A number of people have tested Wikipedia’s accuracy using destructive methods, i.e. deliberately inserting errors.” (First Monday 11.11)

Improving User Workflows with Single-Page User Interfaces

Added on 21 November 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Over the last two years, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have been a hot topic of discussion. While the sheen has already begun to wear off the buzzword Ajax a bit among Web application designers, RIAs are bigger than ever with our clients and their customers. Everyone seems to love slider-based filtering, drag and drop, fisheye menus, and auto-completion for input fields. Web application designs that include none of these typical Ajax features are not well received. Sometimes, one gets the feeling that Web developers implement richness just for the sake of making a Web site and the company that commissions it look cool. Obviously, user experience design should be about a lot more than creating cool controls.” (Joost Willemsen – UXmatters)

Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy

Added on 20 November 2006 Peter Bogaards
“People have been trying to classify and organize information for thousands of years. There are many examples of cataloged items in ancient repositories, including items in the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Taxonomy arose as an attempt to organize information about plants and animals in the physical world, and Aristotle is often considered the father of classification or taxonomy. In his Categories, he names Substances (nouns) and determines the nine distinctive things that can be said about a particular thing. How we ultimately name something reflects the category to which we assign it. Through the development of categories, one is trying to answer the question, ‘What is it?’ Taxonomic methodology has also become important in mathematical set theory through discussions of set, class, aggregate, and collection. Neo-Aristotelian realists are as interested today in taxonomy as they are in ontology. Accurate classification is important in most, if not all, disciplines. In today’s networked world of digital information, classification has become very important. One gathers, collects, and shares resources, making the organization of databases and websites crucial. Items that are different or strange can become a barrier to networking. Therefore, with the advent of the Internet, structure and consistency of classification or indexing schemes has taken on a new relevancy.” (Elaine Peterson – D-Lib Magazine November 2006) / Replies by Thomas vanderWal and David Weinberger – courtesy of thomasvanderwal

Digital Divide: The Three Stages

Added on 20 November 2006 Peter Bogaards
“The Internet can be an empowering tool that lets people find good deals, manage vendors, and control their finances and investments. But it can just as easily be an alienating environment where people are cheated. Members of the Internet elite don’t realize the extent to which less-skilled users are left out of many of the advancements they cheer and enjoy. Ultimately, I’m extremely optimistic about the economic divide, which is vanishing rapidly in industrialized countries. The usability divide will take longer to close, but at least we know how to handle it — it’s simply a matter of deciding to do so. I’m very pessimistic about the empowerment divide, however, which I expect will only grow more severe in the future.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

Creative Generalist Q&A: Jane Fulton Suri

Added on 17 November 2006 Peter Bogaards
“By calling it the ’empathic economy’ I’m emphasizing that part of the inspiration and motivation for innovation that comes from creativity sparked by emotional, human, empathic resonance with other people’s conditions, not only the more traditional functional analyses of interdependencies that might be more common.” (Steve Hardy – Creative Generalist) – courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst