KnowledgeWeave

Catriona Cornett has created a interesting new blog with a very specific aim: to catalog inspiring and  thought-provoking quotations in relation to user experience design. Here’s how she describes it: “The idea behind it is pretty simple. I post user experience quotes that display the impact UX has on the world, and put them into images for people to save or print to keep the quote visible and memorable.”

Check it out at: http://www.inspireux.com

Slides for my IA Summit presentation (”Embodying IA“) are now available on Slideshare. I look forward to hearing your feedback!

The Jan./Feb. 2008 issue of American Libraries features an article by the omnipresent Stephen J. Bell on the benefits of taking a design approach to the delivery of library services.  By Googling his name I also came across this interesting handout on “Librarianship by Design” — basically a bibliography of design-related resources for librarians — and the blog Designing Better Libraries.

The American Libraries article provides a handy overview of how libraries might leverage user experience design techniques (and specifically the IDEO method) to ensure that their patrons enjoy happier, or at least less frustrating, library interactions.  I was surprised however that Bell didn’t really pursue the importance of integrating patrons’ online and physical experiences — a key point of emphasis in the MAYA design group’s work on the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which Bell highlights – or spend much time exploring the importance of taking a user experience approach when implementing social software and Web 2.0 technologies, which are all the buzz in the library world these days.   I’d really like to see him tackle those topics in depth, through specific case studies….

Started reading William J. Mitchell’s Placing Words: Symbols, Space and the City over the weekend and am delighted I purchased this book on a whim while Christmas shopping at Borders. This quote alone is almost worth the price of admission ($19.95 in paperback):

“The social and cultural functions of built spaces have become inseparable from the simultaneous operation of multiple communication systems within and among them. Architecture no longer can (if it ever could) be understood as an autonomous medium of mass, space, and light, but now serves as the constructed ground for encountering and extracting meaning from cross-connected flows of aural, textual, and graphic, and digital information through global networks” (page 19 ).

This quote immediately reinforced two thoughts that I’ve had floating around my head for a while. Read More…

Colleague Andrew Hinton forwarded this link to Jakob Nielsen’s recent rant on RIAs and Web 2.0 apps:  http://www.useit.com/alertbox/web-2.htmlGotta love those classic Nielsen overstatements:

• “… on the Web, most people are bozos and not worth listening to.”
• “The most-hyped site right now, Facebook, is the ‘Iron Chef‘ of the Internet. The Iron Chef competition makes for great TV, but has nothing to do with running a restaurant as a successful business.”
• “Marketing managers won’t remain clueless forever. Sooner or later they’ll discover that Web advertising offers almost no ROI.”

Read More…

Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability (O’Reilly Books, 2005) is an engaging, readable survey of the many wayfinding and networking technologies that have reconfigured our cultural landscape over the past decade or so.  Beginning with a meditation on how the “humble keyword” has teamed with the richness of the World Wide Web to deliver a previously unimaginable range of information resources and consumer choices, and proceeding through brief histories of wayfinding and information interaction, Morville hits his stride in central chapters on “intertwingling,” “push and pull” and “the sociosemantic web.”  

Read More…

Dan Brown’s Communicating Design contains a wealth of examples of the ten main types of documentation that can inform a web site design.  Brown begins by describing three key user needs documents (personas, usability test plans, and usability reports), then moves on to discussing strategy documents (competitive analyses, concept models, and content inventories) and ends with a detailed analysis of four types of design documents (site maps, flow charts, wireframes and screen designs).

Read More…

With the advent of RIAs and Web 2.0 applications, are we entering a brave new world of web design & information architecture, or is it the same old same old but with a new face?  Or does it even make sense to ask the question this way?