Refactoring is the act of altering code without changing the functionality of the application. The primary use of refactoring is to make the code simpler and easier to understand.
Author: Victor
Geekcorps
Not too long ago I wished for Designers Without Borders, a SWAT team-like organization that would drop designers into third world countries and give them help with technology no one else could offer. Brainheart magazine reports (albeit not online) on something close to this, Geekcorps: A US-based, non-profit organization, we place international technical volunteers in developing nations. We contribute to local IT projects while transferring the technical skills needed to keep projects moving after our volunteers have returned home. Here’s your big chance to go help the Rwandans.
Ordination
To the list of illustrious jobs I’m honored to have been offered I can now add ordination to be a minister. I have a friend who’s a civil celebrant and needs help with a wedding he can’t perform for scheduling reasons. Too bad I’ll be out of town that weekend :)
Wikified
Just installed my own little wiki. Not sure why I hadn’t done that earlier, it’s so simple and easy. I’ll use it to keep notes at work, where capturing and linking them quickly is more important that pretty presentation or sophisticated organization. It’s always a struggle not to resort to paper which traps ideas in places I never refer back to. And with Mac OS X, I can have a server on a laptop with me wherever I go.
IA in a Netshell
If you had to create an introduction to IA in a booklet small enough fit in your wallet, what would you say? Maybe:
- user-centered, looks beyond the party purchasing the design to the end user
- includes research and usability testing (which is not an attempt to trump these disciplines, just explaining IA to the completely unitiatiated)
- complements Business Analysts & similar roles
- emphasizes the user because no other roles do this; acts as user advocate
- how they interact with other roles
- uses interaction design heuristics (not just esthetic or other judgements only)
- research done before reaching “comps”
- complements Graphic Design
- Emerged and borrows from LIS, CS, UCD, HCI, etc.
- …and brings something new, such as navigation of large info environments
- In a world of commodities, great design offers a unique proposition
- Not just web, but (imho) across many digital disciplines
- A descriptioon of the activities and thumbnails of documentation
- Where to go for more info
email to wiki
Interesting that summarizing emails was part of the original design of the UseMod wiki.
Brain: Full
If you’re wondering why I’ve been so quiet it’s because I’m mind melding with Mike Lee.
Behr Color Tools
Behr.com has some great Flash-based color selection tools. Intended for choosing paints, they could be used to choose any kind of color palette.
Visualization of Navigation Patterns on a Web Site using Model Based Clustering
Last night I had some NYC IAs over and we talked about what kind of persona- or scenario-like information could be culled from server logs (Tanya raised the idea in her Info Foraging paper) along with tangents into linguistics and semantic networks. Tanya brought along Visualization of Navigation Patterns on a Web Site using Model Based Clustering, a 2001 work from researchers at the DataLab at University California, Irvine and Microsoft. The clusters of paths alone reveal interesting patterns of site usage that could inform design.
But also imagine following users in real time, watching which pattern they’re exhibiting, and dynamically altering navigation to help them follow that path. Compare this to the Accidental Thesaurus technique (hard-coding search results to popular queries) and the two together start to form another way of designing, of making changes based on actual behavior as opposed to building models based on research, making design guesses, then testing those guesses.
The Global IAs We Need
The results to the recent 2003 AIfIA Information Architecture Salary Survey are out, and the response was mostly from Americans. We know others are out there and we want to reach them. To that end, a group of hard working volunteers are translating seminal IA writings into multiple languages.
The Jamaica House Party Riff We Need
Could listen to this riff pretty much all night. Also on the playlist is Black Eyed Pea’s Where is the Love? and Lumidee’s Never Leave You.
Untitled
Deborah Barber is another interface-designing, information-architecting, Astoria-residing, New York University music technology-majoring blogger. How wonderful are the wonders of this InterNet that she found me.
Untitled
Quote of the day: Rabbi Zusya: “In the world to come I shall not be asked, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I’ll be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’ “
A Content Law We Need
The more generic the system the more generic – and therefore less usable and more bland – the content will be.
For example, text that needs to be used across several websites intended for different purposes and different people will most likely need to be more generic to serve all those needs. Since it’s not customized to any one context or type of reader, it loses it’s voice and specificity. (Yuck)
I need Matt to come up with a name for this.
The Metadata Book We Need
Besides the thesaurus book below, we need a book that addresses metadata design from the LIS, IT, UCD and knowledge representation points of view together: the IA metadata book. I think LIS knowledge is well-established, UCD and usability practice have evolved pretty well in this respect, and knowledge representation is being wrenched from AI circles into practical use, but I don’t see them brought together in a useful way yet.
For example, I’ve realized that there are multiple ways to model the same information, e.g. more or less faceted vs. hierarchical, or level of richness of semantic relationships. The kind of issues that need to be addressed (and I’m just jotting these down quickly for myself you understand) are how to distribute attributes across a hierarchy in a way that both makes for an efficient admin UI and efficient use of inheritance in the system while serving the presentation layer. Also, basic ROI guidelines that guide the sophistication of the modeling, such as when it’s worth the extra work of an ontology’s features vs. accomplishing similar results in simpler ways in the presentation layer using another modeling method.