Noise Between Stations

Victor

  • Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School

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    1 min read

    From Michael McDonough, I’m still learning these lessons.

  • How topic maps and ontologies compare to taxonomies and thesauri

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    1 min read

    Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Making sense of it all from Lars Marius Garshol, on my to-read list.

  • Headline! Radio buttons originally controlled radios

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    1 min read

    If you’ve read About Face, you know about how to use radio buttons. But if you haven’t read Tog on Interface, you don’t know how they were invented, or why they’re called that. You really don’t need to, but it’s damn interesting, and while the book is outdated, Tog is funny as hell. Actually, it…

  • History

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    0 min read

  • Cost and Style

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    2 min read

    My post on eBay-as-Flea Market received a bit of attention, including — judging by the referers — some folks from eBay. Later discussions with Tanya and Owen refined these ideas a bit, namely: I was a bit sloppy in my use of the word design. eBay’s design works, though the style of the site —…

  • Handling error messages

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    1 min read

    Julie Stanford and Todd R.Warfel offer a good guidelines for handling error messages.

  • Litmus test for scent/meaning

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    1 min read

    I’ve plowed through the research on information scent, and while they seem to be learning something about how people think about links and navigation, it’s not clear if there’s anything actionable for designers to take away from it. So I continue to think about how to create scent, or really, how to make links meaningful…

  • Shifting information goals

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    1 min read

    Peterme nicely illustrates shifting goals in the information seeking process — complete with screen shots — revealing the complexity of navigation design: ‘My original “goal” was to learn about Ann Willoughby. On reading that page about Ann, my goal shifted…. Shifting and evolving goals are not only common — they are the norm.‘ Someone at…

  • Interface Politics

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    1 min read

    I’m not sure if Christina coined the term, Interface Politics, but it so nicely sums up what it describes I need to steal it.

  • Otwell on Berlin’s Tacheles

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    1 min read

    ‘…entire neighborhoods were made up of the retail equivalent of personal websites…‘

  • BCG Publications

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    1 min read

    BCG Publications (Ivory tower consulting firm), free.

  • Neat Charts

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    1 min read

    Brand attributes

  • Theory: EBay as Flea Market

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    2 min read

    Let’s assume EBay looks the way it does (not great) because not a lot of attention was paid to the design. Now let’s say they had contracted the design to a professional services firm that practices user-centered design. What would the result look like? Most likely something pretty slick. Conventional wisdom – at least with…

  • That’ll keep me off McDonald’s for a while

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    1 min read

    This boy has no neck.

  • Compare Products

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    1 min read

    A quick comparison of ‘compare products’ functions, I’m particularly interested in the use of screen space and comparing several products. Yahoo shopping will let you compare a seemingly unlimited number of products in its columnar layout, so the visual scanning is done by horizontally scrolling. Same deal at NexTag and EspressoPeople. Dealtime also lets you…