43 Things keeps information design at a basic, yet charming level to show what things are most popular on others’ lists – the typeface just gets bigger. The social dynamics are simple and effective: personal wishes are shared with a specific number of people, but no one’s identity is revealed until a person decides to post a link to their list.

This morning I tried out the Google offering-du-jour: Google Scholar. For the past couple years I’ve used CiteSeer when doing research. It goes one crucial step further than Google Scholar in that it offers a page that lists the abstract, who the article cites, and who the article is cited by. Citations are the primary means for tracking lines of research and getting to know the players in a field, so it’s appropriate that citations are given so much emphasis.

To compare, Google Scholar only lists who a paper is cited by, not who it cites. It also doesn’t group citations together in an easily scannable format. It does have a helpful “Library Search” link though, and appears more scalable &mdash I got a “server busy” error three times while searching CiteSeer.

Anyhow, compare searches for “interaction design” on Scholar and CiteSeer. I found an old classic on Scholar I wanted to comment on, but I’ll save that for another post.

Some decent articles about site redesigns, generally focused on improving usability and sales on the sites.

In other news, I’ve been working like mad on the site redesign of Intuit.com. In the last couple of days I’ve been all about searching. Apple has quite a nice little search on their Support section, using drop-downs to help scope out what a user is searching for. Usable web has plenty of great links to articles on search.

Erin Malone from the always excellent “>DesignWritings mentioned reviews of websites on Design Interact in a post to the SIGIA list. The latest review is of the IHT Website, a personal favorite of mine.

Interface is… by nadav won 2nd place in the 5k, and I can see why — it’s a nice minimalist piece of graphics with just a bit of text. The themes he ponders lend themselves to abstraction, and the result is cohesive, thoughtful, and elegant.