brightly colored food

Fabulous — another monthly lecture series I’m gonna feel bad about missing: Bill Moggridge, Henry Petroski….

From Christina
While there’s nothing groundbreaking here, Scott Berkun nicely summarizes some of the critical inflection points within the typical groups that interaction designers work in and some strategies for making your points. Especially relevant for me because some engineer just ignored my excellent search results page design…

Article from Jared Spool and the UIE team. Basically says that you should seriously question using drop-downs, flyout-menus, and any other menuing/navigation system that obscures navigation choices from the user. There are obviously exceptions, but they make a good point - no great information architecture is worthwhile if you can’t see it.

Hmm, still trying to decide what I think about this. I’m all for training, but the whole idea of certification seems a little silly. And yes, they’ve trademarked the term “Usability Analyst”.

Don’t get me wrong - I like HFI’s courses, or at least the idea of them. I’ve tried to sign up for two different courses in the last two months, only to have them both canceled due to lack of enrollment. Maybe the current economic state has more to do with this push for accreditation than anything else….

And sorry I haven’t been posting more. I’ve got a couple of big projects I’m working on - extensive usability testing of Movable Type being one of them. I bet you’d rather have a great weblogging tool than listen to me anyway.

Go check out WebWord or InfoDesign, they’ve got plenty of link goodness over there as usual, most of which I haven’t explored as of late.

I’ve been hanging out with more than my share of Information Architects these days and doing IA-type activities myself. Then I run I across this — must be fate. Collection of position papers/powerpoints collected by Keith Instone from Louis Rosenfeld, Jesse James Garrett, Marti Hearst, Nick Ragouzis, and others. I’ve just skimmed it, but looks pretty interesting.

Had a good time at Carbon IQ’s 2nd Anniversary Party last night. Met some great people, drank good margaritas, and watched slasher flicks (!?). I don’t know what was scarier, the movies or Peter’s new all-white hairstyle. Elan took a poll before his most recent haircut - perhaps Peter should have done the same (P-babe, you know I love you…)

From XBlog

In-depth but not overly academic. Covers types of questionnaires, advantages of each, appropriate usage, and so on. Comes in handy next time someone from marketing wants to “just throw up a quick little web survey” and pass it off as reliable data.

I’m going to be doing some usability testing of Movable Type, the latest and greatest weblogging tool, starting late next week. If you live in San Francisco and would like to be involved, please
- freeware
var linktext = “contact me”;
var email1 = “chad”;
var email2 = “brightlycoloredfood.com”;
document.write(”” + linktext + “”)
//–>
.

From LucDesk
Interview about their upcoming book.

Set of unrelated mini-essays/opinions on cell phone use and innovative service models, rumormongering and amplification on the web, musicians and profit in the age of p2p, and three ways to look at institutions. They’re all worth reading, but skip to the last if you’re going to read just one. Here’s a summary:

Institutional discourses are dispersed across the programs, laws, and buildings into which they are inscribed, and then they are distributed among the many individuals who learn to use them. Institutions operate largely in a distributed fashion through the incentives that motivate their participants to pursue careers within them, and the unfolding career strategies they adopt.

Great article with Christina’s responses to some tough questions from John.