The pyrotechnic birthday celebration by and for Central Park, Light Cycle, was awesome. What it lacked in size and shape it made up for in experience as thousands of New Yorkers huddled together in the rain around the reservoir to witness the show. It was wonderful to see fireworks in a new composition, different than the usual July 4th progression.
Category: Unfiled
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IA + CMS @ Seybold
I’ll be in San Francisco Sept 8-10 for Seybold. Give me a shout if you’d like to hang out.
The main purpose of my visit is to speak on the topic of Content Models and Information Architectures along with the lovely Ann Rockley, co-author of Managing Enterprise Content. If you plan to register for the conference, stem the flow of cash by entering the top secret discount code: SPTKXX.
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Breadcrumbs as Outline
Reading about breadcrumbs and wondering if people don’t use them that much because they’re trying too hard to establish a new convention, or pushing a new mental model of going back that’s different than how we think about going back.
Maybe instead of HOME > CATEGORY > PAGE we should try to leverage a sub-genre people already find familiar, like the outline…
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The Blackout of 2003
Michael has the best blackout story I’ve heard yet.
The best blackout idea I’ve heard yet was from a waiter who said, ‘We should do this every year.’ Yes, every Earth Day. If we could plan for it, there’d be no commuters trapped on trains, and we’d keep power going to essential places. But all residential power would go for one day. That would be good.
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Krug Report
Steve Krug last night was his usual humble, humorous self with more than enough advanced common sense to please everyone. He spoke of kayaks (unexpected user behavior that’s not all that bad, like rolling over in a kayak), boxfish, and a missing chapter from the book: Why Your Website Should Be a Mensch. Indeed.
The one revelatory idea I remember was that, regarding accessibility, screen readers need to improve. It can be uncomfortable to think about not accepting full responsibility for improving accessibility, but he has a point: better screen readers will remove a huge burden from everyone else involved.
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Krug Tonight at the New School
Where I’ll be tonight:
Don’t Make Me Think: Steve Krug on Web Design
Tishman Auditorium
The New School, 66 West 12th Street
Wednesday, Aug 27th 6 to 8:30 PMTo RSVP for this event, please email rsvp@usableproducts.com
Please bring photo ID.
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Spiritual Websites
I just started working with a designer who created a site for the Dalai Lama. I hope some of that holiness rubs off.
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The Real Origin of Personas
Alan Cooper, in his new column The Origin of Personas, claims to have developed personas as an original idea. While he qualifies his words (“introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool”, ” the history of Cooper personas” (stress mine)), he cites the first published mention of them was 1998’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.
I learned them from Tog, who discusses their use in his 1992 book Tog on Interfacecuses on the scenario aspect of personas, but the same technique of selecting a small set of prototypical users is there. He in turn cites Laurie Vertelney‘s 1989 CHI paper on Drama and Personality in User Interface Design which Jakob Nielson summarizes for us.
Update: Laurie found this post and writes in:
It seems like we’d been using scenarios for ages to do design work at Apple and at HP Labs before that. (mid-late 80s) I was personally inspired by some of the work at MITs Architecture Machine Group back in the early 80s. It just seemed obvious to me that in order to invent future user interfaces-you have to envision specific “types” of people engaged with the technology you are creating. I’ve been using this technique literally for decades.
So perhaps there were parallel efforts, or maybe some cross-fertilization took place in the Bay Area interaction design scene. In any case, it seems there are still the unwashed masses fiddling with personas and real persona creation has become the domain of the Jedi masters… Interaction designers at Cooper spend weeks of study and months of practice before we consider them to be capable of creating and using personas at a professional level. Many practicing designers have used the brief 25-page description of personas in Inmates as a "Persona How-to" manual, but a complete "How-to" on personas has yet to be written.
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Designer Virus
Challis points out Welchia, a noble virus that repairs damage done by the Blaster virus. Now all we need is a noble virus that infiltrates web servers and fixes crappy navigation.
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Home Page Evolution
Quick, take a look at the unconventional Oracle home page before they roll out the new one.
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Things On Walls
Marc Rettig, fountain of wisdom, elaborates and links to a couple docs about using big analog tools with teams.
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IT & Society on Web Nav
Last Winter the online journal IT & Society quietly published an entire issue on web navigation. It’s somewhat ironic that the issue is one page of abstracts that link to PDFs :-) Still, there’s probably goodness there; I’ll be starting with David R. Danielson’s Transitional Volatility in Web Navigation.
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I’m Starting to Feel That Way About Univers
Owen found a Make It Bigger excerpt, and I love this part: ‘I had rebelled against the Swiss international style because the act of organizing the Helvetica typeface on a grid reminded me of cleaning up my room. Also I viewed Helvetica, the visual language of corporations, as the establishment typeface and therefore somehow responsible for the Vietnam War. ‘
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Product Cross-Dressing
OK, is it me, or does this mobile phone look like a Zippo? Makes one think about how to combine various things we keep in our pockets.
And how about this Porsche SUV and this Hyundai SUV?
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Jeffrey Heer
Heer, part of Peter Pirolli’s research group, has a blog and some interesting projects.
