PeopleSoft Case Study: Acquisition-driven Information Architecture

Added on 7 February 2004 Peter Bogaards
“In July 2003, PeopleSoft acquired mid-tier enterprise software company JD Edwards. Perhaps the most important business move in PeopleSoft’s history, this acquisition required quick action from the PeopleSoft.com team, which wanted to demonstrate the very real integration of the two companies. PeopleSoft brought in Adaptive Path to ensure a smooth process, and the integrity of the new Web site.” (Adaptive Path)

Jef Raskin, Macintosh inventor, looks to the future of computing

Added on 7 February 2004 Peter Bogaards
“Twenty years ago, Pacifica resident Jef Raskin was a 40-year-old software designer and writer for Apple Computers. He was also a cutting-edge thinker, (he still is, by the way), who imagined a world of connected computers providing infinite bits of information to people sitting at home in front of user-friendly machines. He imagined those machines would be named after his favorite fruit – the Macintosh apple, and that they would have a very simple, graphic interface; designed to be used the way humans think and work, not the way machines do.” (Chris Hunter – Pacifica Tribune) – courtesy of lawrence lee

A New Kind of Science (online version)

Added on 6 February 2004 Peter Bogaards
Immediate access to the complete book (text and images, fully searchable, 30,000+ links, and many enhanced features) – “This book is the culmination of nearly twenty years of work that I have done to develop that new kind of science. I had never expected it would take anything like as long, but I have discovered vastly more than I ever thought possible, and in fact what I have done now touches almost every existing area of science, and quite a bit besides.” (Stephen Wolfram – wolframscience) – Limited registration required

Integrating Reading and Writing of Documents

Added on 5 February 2004 Peter Bogaards
“Computer users have become accustomed to the writing of documents being regarded as a separate activity from the reading of documents. We believe that this division is unnecessary and limits the effectiveness of virtually every computer user. It is time for a rethink of underlying concepts. A key concept for integrating reading with writing is a general mechanism for annotation. This general mechanism can be combined with hyperlinking to create a single unifying super-concept that provides a base for integrating reading and writing. The paper explains the underlying ideas, and describes the results of a small experiment that supported the viability of the super-concept. We believe that the super-concept might possibly provide the foundations for a revolution in thinking about documents, which would benefit everyone.” (P. J. Brown and Heather Brown – Journal of Digital Information)

Writing with Images

Added on 5 February 2004 Peter Bogaards
“The sudden emergence and explosive growth since 1994 of the World Wide Web as a graphics-heavy medium is but the latest of several surges that marked the ‘rise of the visual’ in the twentieth century. Each of these waves was enabled by new technology and each changed the world’ practices before it changed its theories. Photo-offset printing unleashed the first wave of photograph in mass distribution newspapers and illustrated magazines.Then the technology for making moving pictures developed into a world-wide industry. Television opened a main pipe line into the homes of the developed world, and video recorders brought films from the theater into the home as well. A typewriters became computers, sprouting monitors and connected to other computers around the world, the flow of visual information and entertainment reaches into the offices of corporations and bureaucracies around the world.” (University of Washington)

Louis Rosenfeld: The InfoDesign interview

Added on 3 February 2004 Peter Bogaards
“(..) fields like IA and concepts like UX really are new. Certainly the work itself isn’t new, but a conscious understanding of them is. Consciousness is a prerequisite for just about everything else in life. So when we’re feeling our most frustrated with our clients, our bosses, our colleagues and peers, and the economic harshness of recent years, we have to remember that this is all new, that levels of consciousness are rising, things are get tingbetter, and that it remains an extremely exciting time to be working as a designer of any stripe.” (Dirk Knemeyer – InfoDesign: Understanding by Design)

Multimodal Systems

Added on 2 February 2004 Peter Bogaards
“The interface between humans and computers still suffers from many deficiencies. Multimodal systems using multibiometric elements, multimodal interfaces and multisensor systems are beginning to alleviate many of them.” (Juan C. Dürsteler – Inf@Vis!)

How to manage smart people

Added on 31 January 2004 Peter Bogaards
“(…) years at Microsoft, sometimes managing projects, sometimes managing people, but always with a manager above me. I think I’m smart, but many of the people who have worked for me definitely were. Over the years, I’ve experienced many mistakes and successes in both how I was managed, and how I managed others. What follows is a short distillation of some of what I’ve learned. There’s no one way to manage people, but there are some approaches that I think most good managers share.” (Scott Berkun – UIweb) – courtesy of lawrence lee

The typographic contribution to language: Towards a model of typographic genres and their underlying structures

Added on 30 January 2004 Peter Bogaards
“This thesis presents a model which accounts for variations in typographic form in terms of four underlying sources of structure. The first three relate to the three parts of the writer-text-reader relationship: topic structure, representing the expressive intentions of the writer; artefact structure, resulting from the physical constraints of the medium; and access structure, anticipating the needs of the self-organized reader. Few texts exhibit such structures in pure form. Instead, they are evidenced in typographic genres—ordinary language categories such as ‘leaflet’, ‘magazine’, ‘manual’, and so on – which may be defined in terms of their normal (or historical) combination of topic, access and artefact structure.” (Rob Waller PhD. Thesis 1987) – courtesy of karel van der waarde

What is Zzstructure?

Added on 29 January 2004 Peter Bogaards
“Zzstructure is a way of representing the structure of information. Zzstructure is very different, for example the concepts of ‘file’, ‘folder’ and ‘application’ are abandoned. Because of this a bit of fantasy, creativity and an ability to forget previous knowledge is needed in order to understand Zzstructure. A Zzstructure structure consists of cells and dimensions. A cell is the basic unit of information of a Zzstructure structure. Cells containing related information can be connected with each other along dimensions, the number of which is unlimited. A Zzstructure structure is separate from its visualisation (= the way the data is presented on the screen), which means that a Zzstructure structure can have many visualisations designed for different purposes. Even though a Zzstructure structure is separate from its visualisation, a Zzstructure structure is not separate from other Zzstructure structures. Every piece of information stored in a digital device using based on Zzstructure is in the same space: the same cells can be connected on several dimensions created for different structures.” (Gzz)

Indicators for European Content for the Global Networks: Executive Summary pdf logo

Added on 29 January 2004 Peter Bogaards
“We recommend that the EU recognise the importance of developing European focused e-Portals and the addition of a more European focus to international sites and their content. The strong presence of US e-Portals that largely use the English language also has longer-term development implications for those Member States and candidate countries where English is not widely used.” (eContent Strategic Studies)

Universal Principals of Design

Added on 29 January 2004 Peter Bogaards
“(…) a must read book by all kind of designers. The principles of design provided in this book are extremely valuable. This is by far one of the best design books I have ever read. It is organized, well written, concise and a great resource for design references. Not only the book explains each principle carefully, it also provides real world example to help readers visually understand the principle presented.” (VisualGUI.com)

Interface Design Issues #02: Consistency and standards

Added on 29 January 2004 Peter Bogaards
“Consistency is one of the golden rules of interface design. There can be no question about this. It’s important on many levels. When applied effectively in a design, consistency creates a foundation for a user to interact with the product in a predictable manner. Consistency creates usage patterns, offering users the opportunity to succeed in the face of an unknown feature encountered for the first time.” (Andrei Michael Herasimchuk – Design by Fire)