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)
Information Architecture and Findability
“Peter Morville, co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web with Lou Rosenfeld and author of Ambient Findability, presented a very informative day-long lecture on the subject of information architecture (IA). He discussed many basic concepts as well as best practices, so his presentation would appeal to both beginner and intermediate IAs.” (Russell Wilson – UXmatters)
Interaction Design (IxD) Symposium
“The IxD Symposium – an all-day pre-conference seminar – was presented by Dave Heller, Kim Goodwin, Luke Wroblewski, and Frank Ramirez of IxDA (Interaction Design Association). It was well worth the additional cost as each presenter gave practical advice based on real projects.” (Russell Wilson – UXmatters)
IA Summit 2006: Gathering of the Tribe
“During March 23-28, 2006, over 500 people gathered in Vancouver, Canada, for the seventh Information Architecture Summit sponsored by ASIS&T (American Society for Information Science and Technology). The delightfully diverse attendees included not just people with the job title information architect, but also librarians, Web developers, business analysts, user experience designers, and others.” (Laurie Lamar – UXmatters)
My IA Summit 2006 Experience: Part 1/2/3
“The seventh annual ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit—IA Summit 2006 for short—was held at the Hyatt® Regency in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, shown in Figure 1, from March 23 through 27, 2006. Its theme was Learning • Doing • Selling. While I attended the IA Summit Redux in San Francisco at Adaptive Path last year, this was my first IA Summit.” (Pabini Gabriel-Petit – UXmatters)
Mathemagenic
“Mathemagenic means ‘giving birth to learning’. I use this site as my learning diary, so I think this name fits well. So far, this web-site includes only my blog, a reverse-order posting of insights, commentaries, links and a few longer stories. Later it may grow into bigger web-site, but I’m not in a hurry for that. Learning starts small. As a researcher I’m curious to see how blogs could be used for learning and knowledge sharing. So, my blog is an experiment as well. Most of my learning is around learning, e-learning and knowledge management (and weblogs of course).” (Lilia Efimova)
Emotionally-centered design
“We are moving from static pages with their clunky, slow repainting of the page to fluid, dynamic displays, where the movement is a major part of the charm. We are moving from behaviorally effective designs to ones that add emotional engagement.” (Don Norman)
Talking about Tagging
“Seems that not a day goes by without one of my projects discussing tags. As a result, I’ve been keeping with up with the broader conversation about tagging. Here’s what I’ve heard discussed recently.” (Luke Wroblewski – Functioning Form)
Videos in the CHI Video Retrospective Special Collection
“We’ve added 87 videos from the Assocation for Computing Machinery (ACM) annual Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference. These videos were digitized from the CHI conference VHS video proceedings for the years 1996 through 2002, with the exception of the video proceedings for the year 2000. We expect to add videos for the year 2000 and 2003 video proceedings soon.” (The Open Video Project)