“It happens again and again. You spend hours in design meetings debating a point, and then a single word from upper management squashes your decision. Or maybe your design debates just go on for weeks because of office politics. How can you streamline this process? By deriving your conclusions from research instead of just ‘experience’.” (Indy Young – Adaptive Path)

“What’s the single most important thing that could improve the Web? It’s not broadband. It’s better writing. The general quality of writing on the Web is poor. The way you write has a major impact on what people think of you. Avoid these common mistakes and you will achieve more with your website.” (Gerry McGovern)

“The most complicated challenge we face during the design process has nothing to do with design techniques, understanding media or incorporating industry-best practices. It is a question of communication.” (Dirk Knemeyer – Thread)

Journal of Research and Problem Solving in Organizational Communication (Tilburg University)

“One reason for its recent success is that The Netherlands is possibly the most intelligent market for design in the world. Sophisticated public and private sector clients know how to commission and manage design. And most cities and government agencies have procurement policies that enable projects to be awarded to the best design, not just to the cheapest proposal. (…) Connectivity between people and ideas is further hindered by the turf-protecting way professional organizations, and design businesses, are organized. The result is that many designers lack the expertise to tackle the complex and multi-dimensional social questions that confront us.” (John Thackara – In the Bubble) – courtesy of chad thornton

“Websites are very measurable. However, reams of data can be time consuming and confusing. The knack is to know what is really important to measure. This includes the following: reader actions; reader numbers; most and least popular pages; subscribers; external links; search keywords; page size; broken links and malfunctioning processes.” (Gerry McGovern)

“Today, the human experience of the Net stands at a crossroads, paths diverging into the future, and nobody knows which one weíll be on in a year. A lot of people who will read this have the chance to make a difference in the decision. Letís look at the options.” (Tim Bray – Ongoing)

“At the core of NextD is the belief that the traditional model of design leadership needs to be radically reinvented to better adapt to a radically changed marketplace. The ultimate goal of NextD is to help expand designs’ reach.” (NextD)

“The evolution of personal music delivery is directly relevant to the creation of powerful brand experiences. To make strong, genuine connections with our audience, we need to be conscious of the value of rich, multi-sensorial experiences.” (Josh Alkire – Thread)

“Information design is not the same as information architecture; it is not merely an ‘enlightened’ version of graphic design; it is not somehow a niche component in interface or experience design; it is not technical writing. It is a broad and exploratory discipline that encourages research and development, understands that a galaxy of disparate tactics are bound together in creating successful information solutions, endeavors to understand people and the world as thoroughly as possible to enable better design and endeavors to identify and synthesize any discipline that contributes to better understanding.” (Dirk Knemeyer – Boxes and Arrows)

“What’s really important to measure for your website? Firstly, you need to measure how successful you are at creating, editing and publishing content. These are your web content management processes. Secondly, you need to measure reader behavior. There will also be some core website performance issues to measure. This week, I’d like to examine key web content management process measurables.” (Gerry McGovern)

“As of October, 1999, about 200 million people regularly access the Internet. However, this access is still more or less standardized in that almost everyone uses the same means of information retrieval. It is unlikely that 200 million people are so similar in their interests that one standardized way of retrieving information fits all needs. This paper takes a look at about 50 available personalization systems, proposes a classification scheme and discusses the systems w.r.t. to this classification.” (Alexander Pretschner and Susan Gauch)

“Every Web team has its own take on dividing up roles and responsibilities and implementing processes for design and development. Formal titles, job descriptions, and reporting structures can vary widely. But the best teams (…) have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success.” (Jesse James Garrett – Adaptive Path)

“Unless technology developers change their approach (…) their products could suffer a negative response from the public.” (Andrew Lee – e4engineering)

“Frederick W. Taylor, in his book, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), wrote about how waste in activity was a greater problem than material waste. He wrote about planning, organizing, training, management and measurement, as ways to address the problem. Today, we require a new form of Taylorism; one that addresses efficiency in content publishing.” (Gerry McGovern)

“A user-centered design process involves the participation of users from the very first stage of development, and continues to involve users at each step of the process. The goal of user-centered design is to create a product that works for the potential users and is well-designed for that user group. The first step in this process is to identify the target audience and to meet with them.” (University of Washington) – courtesy of beth mazur

“If for three thousand years we’ve relied on rumor and reputation, custom and external data stores and never least explicit signage to organize our urban experiences, the advent of latent, user-generated, unedited, location-based content is something that has the potential to change the way humans do cities, change it utterly and in short order.” (Adam Greenfield – v-2)

“Information Design will continue to grow and evolve and stay a viable profession only if some of its current concerns are met.” (Li Miao and Rodnez R. Small – STC Chapter Dallas Forth-Worth)

“The Internet has changed how organizations manage. Historically, management was focused on ‘walking and talking.’ Today, ‘reading and writing’ are becoming more and more central. This trend is reinforced by a recent META Group study, which found that 80 percent of business people choose email as their primary communication tool.” (Gerry McGovern)

“Ubiquitous computing seeks to embed computers into our everyday lives in such ways as to render them invisible and allow them to be taken for granted, and social and cultural theories of everyday life have always been interested in rendering the invisible visible and exposing the mundane. Despite these related concerns, social and cultural studies have been almost entirely absent in discussions of the design of ubiquitous technologies. This essay seeks to introduce researchers in both fields to each other, and begin to explore the ways in which collaboration might proceed. By exploring mobile and ubiquitous technologies currently being used to augment our experiences of the city, this paper investigates notions of sociality, spatialisation and temporalisation as central to our experiences of everyday life, and therefore of interest to the design of ubiquitous computing.” (Anne Galloway – Purse Lips Square Jaw)