InfoDesign: Hand-picked since 1997

Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies

Added on 16 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“We benefit from folksonomies as the both the personal vocabulary and the social aspects help people to find and retain a tether to objects on the web that are an interest to them. Who is doing the tagging is important to understand and how the tags are consumed is an important factor.” (Thomas Vanderwal – Personal InfoCloud)

Metadata

AJAX & Interface Design

Added on 16 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“As AJAX applications become more widespread and users begin to expect more of the rich interactions they enable, some of the over-communicating happening today may not be necessary. Until then, however, it’s necessary to consider the expectations users have and meet them accordingly.” (Luke Wroblewski – Functioning Form)

Technology

Your website needs a call to action

Added on 15 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“The Web is task-focused. The best websites get to the point. They ruthlessly eliminate waffle and happy talk. They focus on helping people complete key tasks as quickly as possible.” (Gerry McGovern)

Information design

The Vision of Good User Experience

Added on 13 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“There has been much discussion among organizations and practitioners lately about the ownership of the user experience. So, who owns it? Or to put it another way, who is responsible for the user experience and who makes it work? (…)” – (David Hawdale)

User experience

Blogpoly

Added on 13 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“It is just a name. It is just a game. It is fun to use the board to lay out the Blogosphere Ecosystem. It helps me to think and learn about blogging culture by transforming the original game into this version. I had to think about which company and enterprise to choose and set up first on the board. The space is limited, so I picked well known names in blogging industry. Besides the private properties, there are two public utilities — the water works and the electric company. (…) There is not much difference for me transforming the game than writing a poem, using similes, metaphors and symbols.” – (littleoslo) courtesy of thomas garrood

Weblogs

O’Reilly and Adaptive Path Team Up for Ajax Summit

Added on 13 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“Ajax breaks the interaction model of the Web. It faces the unique user interface problem of blending the expectations users have of a website with the behavior of a desktop application. This is the consequence of giving the user desktop app powers within their trusty browser.” – (Quinn Norton – O’Reilly Network)

Technology

Thinking and Making

Added on 13 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“Information architecture, user experience design, and the new architecture of business.” (Austin Govella)

Weblogs

The Role of Metaphor in Interaction Design

Added on 12 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“In this paper, I will explore how designers can use metaphors in their work: first in the process of interaction design and secondly within interactive products.” – (Dan Shaffer) – courtesy of elearningpost

Interaction design

Mobile Web Initiative

Added on 11 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

Making Web access from a mobile device as simple, easy and convenient as Web access from a desktop device – “World Wide Web technologies have become the key enablers for access to the Internet through desktop and notebook computing platforms. Web technologies have the potential to play the same role for Internet access from mobile devices. However, today, mobile Web access suffers from interoperability and usability problems that make the Web difficult to use for most mobile phone subscribers. W3C’s ‘Mobile Web Initiative’ (W3C MWI) proposes to address these issues through a concerted effort of key players in the mobile production chain, including authoring tool vendors, content providers, handset manufacturers, browser vendors and mobile operators.” (W3C)

Mobile design

Sailing to the Future: Infographics in the Internet Era

Added on 11 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“This 50-pages document was created for the Multimedia Bootcamp 2005 in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It contains a brief introduction to infographics, its history and rules, and a discussion of several real cases of elmundo.es online special and breaking-news presentations.” (Alberto Cairo) – courtesy of elearningpost

Information graphics

Dirk Knemeyer Presentations

Added on 11 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

Dirk’s presentation slides from User Experience and Usability 2005 (March 3, 2005), SXSW Interactive 2005 (March 14, 2005), DevGroup NW (April 1, 2005), and Blurred Boundaries/Focused Solutions (May 10, 2005) – (Dirk Knemeyer)

User experience

Remote from Reality: The Out-of-Box Home Experience

Added on 10 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“The challenges are considerable and daunting.” (Aaron Marcus – ACM Ubiquity)

Usability

An Interview with Edward R. Tufte

Added on 10 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“Although many may refer to this field as ‘information design’, Tufte, (…) has come to prefer the name ‘analytic design’. That name reflects Tufte’s focus on visual displays that serve as evidence.” (Mark Zachry and Charlotte Thralls – Technical Communication Quaterly) – courtesy of kottke

Interviews

Publish the website you can manage

Added on 10 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“Your job as a web manager must be about a relentless focus on quality. Always put quality first and you will create a website that delivers real and sustainable value.” (Gerry McGovern)

Information design

Mental Models For Search Are Getting Firmer

Added on 8 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“Users now have precise expectations for the behavior of search. Designs that invoke this mental model but work differently are confusing.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)

A History of the GUI

Added on 8 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“Why did computers come to adopt the GUI as their primary mode of interaction, and how did the GUI evolve to be the way it is today? In what follows, I’ll be presenting a brief introduction to the history of the GUI. The topic, as you might expect, is broad, and very deep. This article will touch on the high points, while giving an overview of GUI development.” (Jeremy Reimer – Ars Technica) – courtesy of lucdesk

Web 2.0 for Designers

Added on 5 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into ‘microcontent’ units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.” (Richard MacManus & Joshua Porter – Digital Web Magazine)

Metadata

Up Against Reality: Blogging and the cost of content

Added on 4 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“Blogging offers the enticing prospect of a new journalism which is more participatory, more responsive and essentially open to anyone who has something to say. Yet, the process of creating blogs that are rich with quality journalism is also a commercial challenge; one that will re-shape the blogosphere as we move out of an initial period of amateur enthusiasm to create a more mature and sustainable medium.” (Trevor Cook) – courtesy of mark bernstein

Weblogs

Updated Enterprise IA Roadmap

Added on 4 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“A diagram that helps information architects and other designers make their enterprise’s content easier to find regardless of which department maintains it. The goal is to integrate content from across departmental ‘silos’ in ways that make sense to users.” (Louis Rosenfeld)

Information architecture

You’re It! Tagsonomy: A Blog on Tagging

Added on 3 May 2005 Peter Bogaards

“The advantage of folksonomies isn’t that they’re better than controlled vocabularies, it’s that they’re better than nothing, because controlled vocabularies are not extensible to the majority of cases where tagging is needed.” (Clay Shirky et al.)

Weblogs