Category: Information Architecture
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The Holy Grail of Information Architecture
In a recent blog post, Garret Dimon claims to be hot on the trail of something fabulous: I don’t have the details worked out yet, but I’m slowly putting together a vision of how we can really document web applications in a pragmatic way. The primary driver is to create something that people can understand,…
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Usability Foxes Guarding the Henhouse
On the NYC-CHI mailing list today, someone from a big web shop wrote this: My company is dismantling its focus group and usability testing lab, due to a chronic lack of space and clients’ growing reluctance to allow our agency to do testing on our own work. Behavior‘s thinking has always been that it takes…
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Early Adopter vs. Efficient Person
As a UI developer, I want to be an “early adopter” of as many new technologies and gizmos as possible. Even if they’re clunky, non-helpful, efficiency drain tools, I feel like it’s my obligation to be well-informed about the latest gadgets and websites. So I’m often downloading trial versions, and occasionally checking out a friend’s…
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Other People’s ‘Puters
Christmas tree photo by Peggy During the holidays, as many Americans visit and spend time with their extended families, those of us in the web design industry get a chance to do a little user research — with our own loved ones as test subjects. Sure, most of us have watched other people use computers…
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The Best Voting Technology
It seems laughably obvious that this supposedly cutting-edge voting device will feel positively ancient in only a couple of years. It already looks like a cheap peice of crap to me, hardly something worthy of being integral to the American democratic process. And believe it or not, this photo was taken in 2004 — even…
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Class and Web Design, Part 6: Breaking The Class Barrier
(This is Part 6, the final part of this series. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3a, Part 4, and Part 5.) Despite my calls for increased class consciousness, I actually think that class may be less and less important as American culture evolves and as class exploration becomes more fluid…