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.

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 :)

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.

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

Interesting that summarizing emails was part of the original design of the UseMod wiki.

If you’re wondering why I’ve been so quiet it’s because I’m mind melding with Mike Lee.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?’ “

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.

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.