February 2002 Archive
Dooce Loses Her Job
Heather Hamilton asks some important questions that every blogger should think about. Where is the line between your work and your blog?
Update (Friday, March 1): She recently followed up on her original post.
Tomorrow’s Architect
Jesse James Garrett posts part 4 ia/recon:
If we are very lucky, responsibility for information architecture will be assigned to someone on these teams. These people may have titles like ‘Web designer’ or ‘content editor’ or ‘project manager’. For all of them, the user experience is just one of a number of issues they must address. And the work they do will constitute the vast majority of the IA on the Web.
The future of information architecture is in their hands, not ours.
I love this guy! I’ll be back later to write more about this…
Clever Scott Andrew
Scott Andrew came up with a really useful tool for finding information related to his blog posts using Google. Another idea this brings to mind (and possibly more useful) is Daypop It!.
Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and University of San Francisco law school clinics.
Pro File: Mac Daddy
If I had a message to send to Apple, I’d say, “You make beautiful boxes and put a beautiful appearance on the interfaces, and let me design something that will make people happier than they’ve ever been using computers. Something so efficient that enterprises will say, ‘Hey, if we buy these we’re going to save money because we’ll get so much productivity.’” That’s my message.
Macworld interview Jef Raskin, the guy who named the Mac. (via EH)
Notes on Visual and Interactive Design
valcasey.com presents Notes on Visual and Interactive Design, a mixed list of design principles. For the nondesigner like me, there’s too much here to take in all at once. Note to self: read a section and then take some time to think about it. Come back for the rest later. It will still be there. (via ia/)
The Mirror Project
My contribution to The Mirror Project. If you’re curious, the mantis was made just for me by Jen de la Cruz. You can see the rest of her dangerous insect scuptures at Beware of Art.
Write a Better Weblog
New from A List Apart: How to Write a Better Weblog by Dennis A. Mahoney. It’s a great article with many simple tips for improving your writing.
The funny thing is that I just bought The Elements of Style about two hours ago, just before I found out about the Mahoney article.
Friday Five
Friday Five: Birthday Blog
- Hey, baby, what’s your sign? Do you think it fits you pretty well? Capricorn. Yes and no. Overall, I think astrology has more sheer entertainment value than anything else.
- What’s the worst birthday gift you’ve ever received? My uncle once gave me a birdhouse. At the time, I think I was in Jr. High, and I was pretty baffled why he would give me such a gift. I would probably appreciate it much more now. Birds are kind of funny creatures.
- 3. What’s the best birthday gift you’ve ever received? Voltron.
- What’s the best way you’ve celebrated your birthday thus far? When I was in 3rd grade I had a birthday party at Showbiz Pizza. It rocked, which the picture from the preceeding link makes evident.
- What are your plans for this weekend? Get The Number Book ready to go, experiment with my new camera, try to finally launch Web Style, maybe see a movie, relax and do some reading.
buy.com Redesign
buy.com redesigned their site last week, at least the second or third major redesign for the company in the past few years. From their press release:
Along with the new look and feel, the site is noticeably faster, providing customers with features such as its new Price Alert tool along with other navigation features to simplify the online buying experience.
That’s all nice and fuzzy, but I haven’t noticed it being much faster, there are already other higher quality services that monitor prices on multiple sites and where are all these new “navigation features to simplify the online buying experience”? The interface is just okay.
The success of Amazon lies in two main areas: their intuitive interface and excellent personalization technology. Until buy.com develops these features, they’ll remain to be “that other store with lower prices.”
Tinderbox
Tinderbox, the personal content management assistant, is now available.
Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant. It stores your notes, ideas, and plans. It can help you organize and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs.
Dreamy. Currently, it’s only available for Macs but the Windows version is “coming soon.”
ia/ stuff
ia/ has a CafePress Store! (Thanks Lou). Show you’re an iaslasher and buy some ia/ stuff today!
Then a Miracle Occurs
Yesterday, Jesse James Garrett released Part 4 of ia/recon: Then a Miracle Occurs. He discusses the lack of credibility, the missing core IA knowledge and a new emphasis on the creative process. Now he’s getting down to it.
I’m especially excited about his remarks on the creative process:
Any method that does not address the creative process is woefully incomplete. Furthermore, if we continue to advocate any approach that relies upon extensive research as the One True Methodology, we risk alienating and excluding the very people whose participation we need to ensure the growth of the discipline.
As a newcomer to the field, I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with all of the research that all the IA/HCI-types point to so often. Sometimes, I want to respond “Yeah, so what?” As Jesse states, research is invaluable to IA, but it’s the fresh creativity that will keep this discipline alive.
Brushstroke Turns One
Congratulations to brushstroke.tv on her one year anniversary! From the Scanner Project to 12 things no one tells you about having a weblog, Brushstroke is always a pleasure. Cheers to Melanie Goux, her upcoming book and many more blogs.
net.flag
The unofficial flag for the Internet opened today. The visitor to net.flag not only views the flag but can change it in a moment to reflect their own nationalist, political, apolitical or territorial agenda. The resulting flag is both an emblem and a micro territory in it’s own right; a place for confrontation, assertion, communication and play.
net.flag was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum.
On XHTML and CSS, Standards Aside
Scott Andrew, co-author of the DHTML Bible, comes up with three reasons why XHTML and CSS are important, without pointing to standards.
Developers like correctness. People expect more from the browser. Web development is the hardest of all.
Object-Based Writing
Hot text: Web Writing That Works, a new book by Jonathan and Lisa Price, looks like a very useful read for anyone who writes text for the Web. Particularly interesting is the idea of object-based writing, which allows for easy personalization and reuse of text. (via Web Reference Update)
Friday Five: Iron Blog
Friday Five: Iron Blog.
- What was the first thing you ever cooked? I can’t be sure but Rice Krispie Treats would be my guess.
- What’s your signature dish? Stuffed mushrooms, although they would probably be classified as my signature appetizer.
- Ever had a cooking disaster? Nothing worth mentioning. I guess that means I need to be much more adventurous with my cooking.
- If skill and money were no object, what would make for your dream meal? A great red wine. Romaine salad served with oven-fresh bread and garlic butter. Eggplant parmesan as the main course. Coffee with Tuaca and Bailey’s for dessert.
- What are you doing this weekend? Driving to my parents tonight with Eric and Hillary. We’re all going skiing at Seven Springs tomorrow and then returning to Columbus Saturday night. The rest of the weekend is up in the air.
Designer Responsibility
I’ve read three things in the last couple of days on the subject of…well, call it the de-quantification of design.
Cheers to those, like Andrew Otwell, who can spot nodal points and reflect on them so eloquently.
Cheers to Matt Jones for the links and letting me know what a nodal point is.
The Iceberg Secret, Revealed
You know how an iceberg is 90% underwater? Well, most software is like that too — there’s a pretty user interface that takes about 10% of the work, and then 90% of the programming work is under the covers. And if you take into account the fact that about half of your time is spent fixing bugs, the UI only takes 5% of the work. And if you limit yourself to the visual part of the UI, the pixels, what you would see in PowerPoint, now we’re talking less than 1%.
That’s not the secret. The secret is that People Who Aren’t Programmers Do Not Understand This.
Is the same true for websites? Right now, I don’t think so. 5 years from now, much more so. 10 years from now, when the Web is an application environment and we know much much more about developing UI’s, definitely.
Navigations and User Experiences
Mary Brodie has a good article over at design interact on developing navigation and user experiences, and how mirroring customers interactions in the offline world can improve that experience. (via ia/)
Dave Winer Doesn’t Get It
Finally, those of us who use tables are part of a mass of people who learned to develop websites that way. It’s impossible to get us to change. If that’s your cause I’m not on board. I’ve got more serious concerns.
Dave, I was part of the mass who learned to develop websites that way too, and I made the change. There are many many others like me. For someone who’s been around as long as you have, it’s surprising to me that you can’t see innovation when it smacks you in the face. Or do we all eventually all become lazy, attention hungry, egotistical jerks?
Where’s Osama?
(via NBS)
Everyday Design
Don Norman, Michael Graves and Henry Petroksi join Talk of the Nation’s Neal Conan to discuss usability.
From paper clips to toasters, to cars and computers… what makes something user friendly.
Intelligent Design Theory
The latest challenge to evolution’s primacy in the nation’s classrooms - the theory of intelligent design, not the old foe creationism - will get a full- scale hearing next month before Ohio Board of Education members, who are in a heated debate over whether established science censors other views about the origins of life.
Critics respond:
Intelligent design is a repackaging of the antievolution movement to try to withstand court challenges by avoiding the C-word.
- Dr. Eugenie Scott
Schema for Organizing Your Life
Jason Kottke needs some advice.
If you had to organize all the stuff that a person comes into contact with, how would you do it?
Boxes and Arrows
Conceptual models, user flow, task analysis, site map, page architecture and (deep breath) decision tables? How is one to make sense of it all? Christina Wodtke of carboniq presents it all in a nice little article on SitePoint. (via WebWord)
Page-Browser Interaction
I’ve always thought that page-browser interaction was a bad idea. The Web browser should only be a viewport for a Web site and work independently of the content that it contains. However, this is pretty clever. (via NBS)
de-construct(ed UI)
Matt Jones points us to London based de-construct which does just that, deconstructs the UI down to a command line interface. Even though it hides the commands (until you start typing), provides minimal architecture, and generally suffers from an unintuitive interface, you’ve gotta give them credit for simply trying it.
Blurb Gallery
Victor Lombardi has a gallary to capture how different sites display headlines and summaries. Neato. (via LucDesk)
SuperStyleSwitcher
A while back Chris Casciano wrote Your CSS Bores Me, which laments about the lack of design in most CSS based web sites. Many web designers argued back, “First of all, CSS has only recently been truly supported by major browsers and secondly, everyone is still learning how to use the thing!” Chris listens and puts his money where his mouth is.
Section 508
Funny yet sad. Section 508 of the 1998 Rehabilitation Act requires that Federal agencies electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 also happens to have it’s own website. It’s too bad that website completely fails the Bobby test for compliance and accessibility. (via scottandrew)
100 People
Allysson Lucca produced a wonderful Flash movie that puts the world into perspective. Flash is required. (via Opensewer)
Activate Your Mind!
“Activate my what?!” I’m proud to annouce that my non-profit corporation, Edheads filed it’s first grant late last week. With the board’s approval, we’ll be beginning our first series of educational activities this summer! KaZam!
New Bookmarklet
Nate Steiner from webgraphics brings us the show divs bookmarklet, so now you can quickly see how page authors develop their layouts. Similar to the show tables bookmarklet. (via ia/ and webgraphics)
Attack of the Killer Conventions
Attack of the Killer Conventions is an nice little article by David Walker that points out emerging web design conventions. If you want to make your site easier to use, he states, follow the conventions laid down by the majority of other sites. Yes, Jakob Nielsen predicted this a long time ago by saying that “users prefer your site to work the same way as all of the other sites they already know.” Of course this is true for many other design disiplines, in that users prefer similiar things to work the same way (books, faucets, doors, etc.), so is this really anything new? (via Noise Between Stations)
ia/recon
Catching up from last week…
Jesse James Garrett attempts to define ia by separating the discipline from the role. He asserts that “precision of expression is absolutely required for any discipline to progress.” This is especially true in times like these, given the current state of the economy. Part 2 to come Tuesday. (via ia/)
Friday Five: Medically Proven
Friday Five: Medically Proven
- Have you ever had braces? Any other teeth trauma? No braces. When I was four, my dad really wanted me to learn how to ride a bike. Like every other kid, I wanted to learn to ride too, but our incredibly steep neighbors’ driveway wasn’t exactly my idea of a first step. To make a long story short, I ended up landing face first into the blacktop driveway. My teeth later abscessed later and had to be removed. (Thanks for the correction Mom!)
- Ever broken any bones? Not broken, only fractured. Fell while rollerskating.
- Ever had stitches? Yes, three times.
- What are the stories behind some of your [physical] scars I don’t think we have time for all of them, but my favorite is the most recent scaring. At the time, I worked as an Outreach Demonstrator for COSI, the local science center in Columbus. While at a Red Roof Inn in Akron, I woke up feeling very tired and under the weather. I thought it was because I didn’t sleep well and proceeded to take a shower. The last thing I remember before I fainted was shampooing my hair. I woke about ten minutes later on the floor of the bathroom with my chin in a small pool of blood. After falling through the shower curtain, I apparently hit my chin pretty hard on the sink. I think it required four or five stitches.
- How do you plan to spend your weekend? Clubbing Friday night; otherwise reading, relaxing and working on top secret projects.
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