Category: Information Architecture
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IA Summit 2006: The Science (and Pseudo-Science) of Personas
I attended a fascinating IA Summit presentation by Molecular’s Steve Mulder called “Bringing More Science to Persona Creation“. Lately I’ve been pretty interested in how different companies approach user personas, so this was a must-see for me. I was impressed with Steve’s insights into user persona creation, but this was tempered by a fear that,…
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IA Summit 2006: You’re *both* right!
Information architects reaching a sound compromise. One of the most potent themes emerging from the 2006 IA Summit is that on many issues of IA debate it’s possible for both sides to be correct. That is, that you can combine or connect two or more seemingly different design strategies or technolgoies to form a final,…
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IA Summit 2006: Wireframes I & II
Even as we develop more robust wireframing systems, flat printable wireframes are still easy to draft quickly, and easy for clients to consume. Two wireframe sessions in a row were scheduled on Saturday. It’s hard for me to say much about these panels because I have some pretty strong ideas about how to improve the…
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Travelocity Midnight Madness
This will be my very next phone call. After an exquisite redeye flight on Cathay Pacific, I arrived in Vancouver late on Friday a little after midnight. When I got to my hotel, to my dismay I was told that the hotel was fully booked, and that my Travelocity reservation was for Saturday night, not…
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Going to the IA Summit in Vancouver
Less than two weeks after getting back from SXSW, off I go to another conference! Late tonight I’m flying out to the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in Vancouver. I was actually on a panel at the 2003 Summit in Portland, but the timing of my business work for the past two years prevented me from…
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A Spime is a Species
There’s a debate going on at Adam Greenfield’s V-2.org (and elsewhere) over Bruce Sterling’s neologism “spime”, a term he coined at Etech 2006 to refer to new technological/networked objects that emerge into human consciousness without a name or an apparent history. In 2001 a new mammal was found in China. This cladogram shows where scientists…
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SXSW Confidential, Part 2: They Write Books
Three great new books, all of which came out within the last month or so, were hot topics at SXSW 2006. What’s especially exciting to me is that all three of them are about subjects I am deeply interested in, and all of them are written by people I know and respect. I’m reading all…
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Tagging -2.0?
I was at first impressed with the power of folksonomy-based tagging (in the sense of allowing users to invent their own taxonomies and metadata for information objects). But now I’m not so sure. I just attended a SXSW panel called “Taxonomy 2.0”, with Tom Vander Wal, Prentiss Riddle, Rashmi Sinha, Adina Levin and moderated by…
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Asynchronous Instant Messaging
You’re chatting with someone over an instant messaging app, when this happens: you: How can I help you? foobar: I need some ideas for a Flash nav… Can you send me that link we saw last week? (you then start typing a very long reply, only to see this next question pop up before you’re…
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Old mental models never die…
Log in! (photo from the Computer History Museum) In usability testing with consumers (i.e., non-computer experts), I have noticed that a huge number of people use the expression “log on” to simply mean “go to a web site”. They’ll say that they’ve “logged into Google”, suggesting that they’ve entered a user name and password, when…