Author: Victor

Jen discovered all these sites on “Communities of Practice.” We’re working with a client now who uses the term so much I thought it was simply their own laborious word for “departments.”

Terry Swack, design guru, weighs in on the term “user experience” with oh-so-much badly needed wisdom…

“I think all of us in this profession are guilty of using the term ‘user experience’ much too freely, which is why we have a difficult time talking about it amongst ourselves and to our clients. I would like to see us move away from saying we design ‘user experiences’. While we design many kinds of experiences, we don’t design the *user’s* experience…We can design the interaction (software and hardware), but it is Jim who has the experience! “

Jackpot! I found this article, Author Offers Theory on Gray Matter of Love, in the New York Times last week. When I tried to think about what people “fundamentally want in life” back on May 28th (food,
health,
shelter,
safety,
security, sex), I couldn’t figure out where cultural pursuits fit in. Culture (music, visual arts, literature, etc.) seems natural and has been with us for a long, long time, so I’m felt a need to find a place for it on my list. This article explains that it basically fall under “sex.” A theory that makes sense to me: those who have time to learn the lute must have spare time on their hands, so playing the lute is showing off that you’ve easily secured the food, health, shelter, etc. stuff…

Q. So creativity becomes a “fitness indicator,” a way to strut one’s quality, precisely because it is so wasteful and expensive?

A. Once mate choice identifies a trait as informative about something, that trait is going to be under strong selection to amplify its appearance.

Those who invest the most energy, the most maintenance time, the most genes, into growing the trait, will attract the most mates. One of the book’s main ideas is that the human traits of art, music and creativity are in there by design, as fitness indicators.

After reading Usability Is Like Love, I’m glad to see Joe Clark and friends at content.nu have launched a blog, nublog.

Another new media web site with arrows, courtesy of Brig.

So far I’ve done a lot of traveling this year: a CHI conference in The Netherlands, white water rafting in Oregon, a drive to North Carolina for a wedding. Tomorrow I leave for Hamburg and in another month I’m off to Stockholm. I enjoy it, but I’m never really blown away by being somewhere else. Ironically, the place that most impressed me was the beauty of the Rogue River in Oregon. That must be something that New York City can’t supply.

Trying to think of what people fundamentally want in life, the stuff that makes people tick and is timeless…

food

health

shelter

safety

security

sex

Wondering if anything we do (that’s worth doing) can be thought of in terms of contributing to one of these fundamentals.

Bookmarking the StripCam page, cool-looking freeware cam software for the Mac, in case I want to set up a kitty cam.

The weirdness continues. I wanted to see where the author of the ASIS post was from (see yesterday’s blog), and it’s a web firm here in NYC, and they have arrows on their home page just like us! Ugh! Will arrows be the next swoosh/jumping man/swirl?

It’s such a beautiful day in NYC right now, I want to be on the beach.

Live view of one of the best parts of living in NJ, Diners

Thinking yet more about the two posts below. On the way to work this morning I figured anything we’re discussing on that listserv is from the past. My own methods, and those of my employer, are not based on reusing old methods. We focus on innovation, on “inventing and reinventing” how companies do things. I should feel secure in sharing what I know, confident that tomorrow I’ll invent something better. Perhaps sharing what I know will encourage me to invent something better.

Thinking more about the below post, I am reminded of a book I’m reading about nuclear research before and during World War II. Up until the beginning of the war, there was a code of truthfulness among scientists that said all knowledge must be shared, doing secret research just wasn’t done. The idea was that research furthers the human race and it’s a moral imperative to share it with others. Of course, fighting the Nazis changed all that.

What does nuclear research have to do with information architecture? Not a damn thing. But it struck me as funny that on other email lists of a more general nature, say CHI-WEB, I could contribute without feeling I was in danger of giving away my company’s competitive edge. But the thought of responding to the below post just puts my brain on pause, and that’s where it is now. It shouldn’t really, I don’t have any great proprietary methods that others don’t have (apparently :). The difference comes down to philosophy: where you place your emphasis causes projects to turn out differently, all because you value some things over others.

It’s late and my brain is done, and I’m not sure what I just wrote makes any sense. Good night.

I am so scared. I just read this post on the ASIS listserv and this other information architect descibes a situation that is eerily familiar. I thought our process and techniques were more unique, but reading her email it could have easily been an internal message from someone in my department…

I’ve succesfully gone through task analysis and user profiles with a
client. I’ve generated the typical ia high-level map for analysis phase
with the heirarchical information and nomenclature, etc… Let’s assume
that the functional specifications document is forthcoming with more
detailed specifications, but it doesn’t help the client that much right
now since we are midstream on requirements and they can’t seem to come
up with affiliate or sponsor contracts, or really content until they see
how it is deployed. To solve this, as we are heading into specifications
phase the question of prototyping is in my mind. I would have no problem
representing a prototype of ia information showing clickthroughs from
the high-level to storyboard usually but I want to also incorporate the
user profiled groups (girls 8-11, girls 11-18 and women 18-34). All the
analysis is done and content management will certainly be applied to
this site in order to serve up different templates for each demographic…

Our executives “aggressively establish additional value creation models.” I can stop wondering now :)