My nephew is working on a new design for his website – check it out at:

http://www.joblesspunkdesigns.com/psp/

He’s doing some tricky stuff with CSS and Ajax to get the Div that stores the body content for each page to load within a main container Div that controls the outer frame. I’m amazed at how quickly he’s picking this stuff up!

Great article on this topic by Patrick Lynch in the latest issue of A List Apart.  Also check out Lynch’s list of “must haves” for any information design reference library.

Bill Scott, author of Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, recently posted a ton of videos illustrating the design patterns from his book on Flickr.  To get a complete sense of the value of employing design patterns for web sites (or anything else you might design), I recommend reading Scott’s book alongside The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites (2nd Edition) and Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.

David Malouf recently posted the wonderful IxDA booklist he and Will Evans compiled to the IA Institute’s discussion list.  Here are a few other must-reads I would add to their list.

• Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations
• David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous
• Michael Bierut, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design
• Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin
• Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
• Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge
• Jeffrey Kluger, Simplexity

The last four books move beyond the areas of interaction & experience design and into the related realms of visual thinking, physical architecture, decision architecture, and what Kluger dubs “the art of making complex things simple.”   William J. Mitchell’s essays on the intersection of physical architecture and digital information networks (collected in such books as Me++, e-topia, City of Bits and Placing Words) are also worth exploring for anyone interested in understanding how the “endless flow of information” unleashed by the web and related technologies is challenging architects to find new ways to integrate the physical and virtual realms.

Of the books on and Malouf & Evans’ list, Alan Cooper’s About Face 3.0, Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences, and Lidwell/Holden/Butler’s Universal Principles of Design have been regulars on my bedside reading table of late.  I highly recommend all three.

Peter Morville’s Search Patterns is definitely worth checking out, as is dgray_xplane’s Visual Thinking.  I also love this Flickr hack dgray_explane came up with to illustrate a concept for browsing the future.

Catriona Cornett has created an 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.

1) That the Media-Upper Providence library (whose renovation/expansion I’m helping to plan as a board of trustees member), like all libraries these days, needs to engage with broader efforts to adapt public spaces so as to accommodate easy access to the many layers of virtual information being provided by the rapid expansion of digital communications networks. I would argue in fact that the role of libraries should be to actively model various ways of managing the intersection of local/physical context and global/virtual communications. By introducing ever new cross-over points points to their patrons–e.g., by including pointers in their physical signage to help patrons move seamlessly between the Adult Fiction stacks and online book discussions about the novels housed in those stacks–libraries can serve as multivalent portals between the physical and digital realms, empowering members of all classes of society. Rather than signaling a step away from libraries’ traditional role, this strikes me as a true reaffirmation and revivification of that role.

2) The use of the second term in the label “information architecture” is not arbitrary, misleading, or inaccurate, as critics like Mark Bernstein have argued. In fact, it is in many ways quite apt, especially if IAs move beyond (as they should, despite the uproar it will no doubt invoke from the architectural purists) providing schemas for navigating between web-based resources to tackling the challenges mentioned in #1 above–namely, the challenges involved in helping people move more easily and intuitively between physical spaces/resources and virtual ones. Again, this strikes me as being in many ways just an adaptation and extension of the traditional role of librarians, as media-agnostic facilitators of information access.

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.”

The big question for me when it comes to evaluating the adoption of RIA/Web 2.0 features is not so much usability (though that should be a baseline consideration, of course), but whether they positively reinforce or improve upon the existing service model. Which raises the question: How do you identify your site’s or application’s service model? This is not as obvious as it might seem. Saying that a site is an “intranet,” for example, identifies the type of user experience involved, but that’s not the same thing as identifying the service model informing that experience.

To get at the distinction: a public library could follow the traditional service model for libraries by making books, CDs, DVDs, etc. available for check-out and by providing traditional face-to-face reference service, childrens’ storytimes, adult programming etc. Or it could adopt the new “Library 2.0” service model, which leverages Web 2.0 technologies and social networking tools to enable patrons to provide more immediate and continuous feedback to librarians.  This approach enables the librarians to tailor their collection development plans, programs and services to patrons’ current, expressed needs, rather than having to monitor circulation, traffic and program attendance statistics over the course of the year in order to infer later on what those needs might be. The difference here is between a service model that takes a primarily passive approach to making products and resources available (and which requires a lot of guesswork and legwork on the part of the librarians), versus a more proactive and participatory model that invites patrons to help drive the purchasing and decision-making processes.

If you work on a company intranet it might be worth asking whether that site’s service model is a more or less top-down and passive one of “making the resources available to whoever’s interested in them,” or one that lets the users dictate (to whatever degree) what resources and services the site serves up.  If you’re looking to move from the former to the latter model, Web 2.0-style applications are definitely worth considering, given the clear potential they have–as even Nielsen grudgingly admits–for leveraging humans’ natural impulse to engage in social networks.  If you can successfully tie those social networking activities back in to the timely delivery of resources, tools and information on your intranet, then you’re well on your way to improving its service model.