IA Areas of Practice
From ChristinaVenn 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 [...]
SURL Usability News -Summer 2001
From WebWordStraight outta the midwest, it’s the latest quarterly edition of Usability News. 7 new articles, most of which look to be pretty good.
Folk Computing: Revisiting Oral Traditions as a Scaffold for Co-Present Communities[.pdf]
From haddock.org via blackbeltjones
Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq
From MetaFilterWell-written NYTimes article (registration required) about identity on the internet.
Patterns of a Conservation Economy: The Pattern Language
From heyotwell.com Nice use of Alexander’s Pattern Language in a non-architecture, non-HCI way.
Organic Information Design
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. [...]
BayCHI and Ethnography
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 [...]
How (much) to Intervene in a Usability Testing Session
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 [...]