From Christina
Venn Diagram from Louis Rosenfeld and Jess McMullin illustrating what they feel to be the main components of Information Architecture: Users, Content, and Context. This is what I love about IA – they’re not afraid to focus on content, writing, words, arrangements, patterns, structures. Content, content, content, say it three times. So often I feel that usability totally misses the boat on this.

Lou’s take on the diagram is also worth a read, as he and Jess detailed out the diagram in slightly different ways.

Also worth checking out is the Veen diagram.

WebWord Interview with Jared Spool
Spool rehashes UIE’s recent research and comments on the usability profession. He makes the great point that the companies that are doing the best with usability don’t seem to have strong usability communities, but instead have strong usability cultures. A quote he cites: “Good Judgment comes from Experience. Experience comes from Bad Judgment.”

Web Design Patterns
Also from Christina
Well, it looks like someone finally got together a useful, nicely presented collection of web design patterns. Hopefully this will start provoking some good contributions, start growing the collection.

For more on design patterns, check out Thomas Erickson’s Interaction Design Patterns page, which links to the also excellent Amsterdamn Collection of Patterns in User Interface Design, which isn’t web-specific and nicely complements the web design collection.

From WebWord
Straight outta the midwest, it’s the latest quarterly edition of Usability News. 7 new articles, most of which look to be pretty good.

From haddock.org via blackbeltjones

From MetaFilter
Well-written NYTimes article (registration required) about identity on the internet.

From heyotwell.com

Nice use of Alexander’s Pattern Language in a non-architecture, non-HCI way.

From heyotwell.com

Design techniques for static information are well understood, their descriptions and discourse thorough and well-evolved. But these techniques fail when dynamic information is considered. There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing. To approach these problems, this thesis introduces a visualization process titled Organic Information Design. The resulting systems employ simulated organic properties in an interactive, visually refined environment to glean qualitative facts from large bodies of quantitative data generated by dynamic information sources.

Mmm, lots of pretty pictures. The thesis sounds interesting, though I really haven’t really delved into it yet. Must be rough having John Maeda as your thesis advisor and Mitch Resnick as your reader.

I went to BayCHI on Tuesday and saw A Conversation with Bill Moggridge on Interaction Design and Understanding the Universal through Uniqueness by Jane Fulton Suri. Both were from IDEO — Bill is one of the founders. I especially liked what Jane had to say about keeping human issues at the center the process. She advocates using ethnographic methods not just to gather data about users, but to develop empathy and a better emotional understanding of the target user and how they might interact with what your designing.

A couple of those in the audience with an anthropological background had issues with how they’re trying to understand and particularly empathize with users, but in a practical sense I see no problem with it. To me it’s similar to how we adhere to best practices and appropriate procedures while usability testing, but we don’t try to create a perfect experimental (and overly academic) environment when we test users, unless the situation truly calls for it.

Either way, I like that it wasn’t just the typical “follow the user around and take lots of photos” ethnographic approach — they’ve diversified the ways in which they try to understand users in a manner that’s complementary and appropriate.

All things considered, I suggest that a useful way to look at this issue is in terms of the purpose of a usability test. If the purpose is scientific hypothesis testing, or collecting quantitative data for comparison against other products or usability goals, then experimental control, including non-intervention, is of paramount importance. For example, the process of responding to a tester’s questions would clearly invalidate various quantitative measurements, such as task completion time.

However, if the purpose is to gather qualitative data so as to identify significant user interface problems and recommend design solutions, then openly interacting with users in various ways may not only be useful but also sometimes necessary for collecting and understanding the required diagnostic information. In short, because scientific research and formative evaluation may have significantly different goals, quite different standards can apply.

By Howard Tamler. Provides a good overview of the reasoning for/against an increased level of involvement with testers.