Category: Information Architecture
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I just dont get this whole bo.okmar.king thing.
What ARE these things?? Zeldman’s gang over at Happy Cog have just designed and launched the brand new ma.gnolia, a new social bookmarking tool. Ma.gnolia seems to be something like del.icio.us, of course (as if you can’t tell already by the product’s na.me). And there are other sites, too, like Outfoxed and Stumbleupon, which also…
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Design Patterns: Don’t Reinvent the Widget
Yahoo’s interaction design department has for the last year or two been developing an intranet dedicated to sharing, internally, their interface design conventions and standards (or, to use the current hip jargon, “Design Patterns”) for their internal development teams, to ensure quality and consistency of interface widgets. It’s kind of an IA “style guide” for…
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History Revealed Through Cross-Referencing
There is a great new series on PBS called African American Lives, in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. interviews nine high-profile African Americans (including Oprah Winfrey, Chris Tucker, and Quincy Jones) about their family histories. I’m enjoying both the historical aspects of it and the technological inspirations I get from it. Documents and photographs have…
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Google, Information Liberator?
It occurred to me that of all the different ways that Google makes money, none of them include charging us, the general public, for access to information. There is no “Google Premium”, no “walled gardens”, no subscription or pay-per-view service. All of their revenues come from selling inclusion within that information space, but not access…
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Inventing the Mouse
There’s something about 1950’s and 1960’s black and white video recordings that I find hypnotic and deeply compelling, particularly when they document important or interesting people and events. From the 1969 moon landing to the Eichmann trials, these videos mesmerize me. Every frame has an eerie, spectral glow, making faces and people a little bit…
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An Information Architect will be CEO
There is a post-Information Architecture career growth path emerging in the web industry, with people growing out of the job title “Information Architect” and becoming more powerful players in their companies and in the industry. They are growing into “Product Managers”, “Business Process Consultants”, “Holistic Designers”. Some even start their own companies, becoming “Entrepreneurs”. In…
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Does anyone REALLY understand Fitts’s Law
Most information architects are familiar with Fitts’s Law, which basically governs how to structure the size, position, and shape of links on a screen so that those links are easy for users to click on with their mouse. Fitts’s law states: “The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and…
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Christopher Alexander, Peter Eisenman, Minimalism
In response to a recent post by Ryan Singer at 37signals, I learned a lot about the architect Christopher Alexander. I explored this site about his work and his legacy quite a bit, and was particularly interested in his 1982 debate with Peter Eisenman. The debate repeatedly seemed to boil down to a debate between…
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Radio Buttons & Checkboxes
The political organization Move On is sponsoring a kind of online 2-day “straw poll” (Tuesday and Wednesday) to determine if (and potentially who) they will endorse for the Democratic nomination for the US presidential The design of their online ballot is very interesting… The first column asks you to pick a single candidate, and the…