From Michael McDonough, I’m still learning these lessons.
Category: Unfiled
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How topic maps and ontologies compare to taxonomies and thesauri
Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Making sense of it all from Lars Marius Garshol, on my to-read list.
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Handling error messages
Julie Stanford and Todd R.Warfel offer a good guidelines for handling error messages.
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Interface Politics
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.
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Otwell on Berlin’s Tacheles
‘…entire neighborhoods were made up of the retail equivalent of personal websites…‘
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Compare Products
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 select many items but paginates the results, five per page. Bizrate uses a pop-up alert when you try to select more than three items. MySimon compares prices, not features, and uses rows instead of columns. Canon UK offers three pull-down menus displayed horizontally and each column is populated dynamically (neat, if limited). Turbo Tourney just displays their three products, no interaction needed.
Holy crap, check out the Yahoo Shopping SmartSort. The interaction design – especially the most/least important radio buttons – is a little confusing, but it’s fast and useful. Neatest of all is the copy for each of the items, which changes dynamically, so it can say things a person would say, like
Toshiba Portege 2010 is a subcompact notebook. It is ranked first because it has the best Screen Size compared to the others in your top 10 results. This Notebook Computer is cheaper than Toshiba Portege R100 which is displayed next.
Algorithmically, that’s
Toshiba Portege 2010 is a [productType]. It is ranked [rank] because it has the best [strongestFeatureByUserWeight] compared to the others in your top [resultSetAmount] results. This Notebook Computer is cheaper than [nameOfNextItem] which is displayed next.
Click one of those radio buttons and the results resort and the copy changes accordingly. I’d love to see the look on the programmer’s face when the designer proposed this.
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One Economy
One Economy is an American non-profit organization working to help low-income people access technology, like high-speed Internet access.
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IA Summit Presentations
The downloads are starting to appear on the IA Summit site (thanks Javier). Even after having attended, there’s so much I didn’t get to see, it’s like a shopping spree in a candy store.
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Project Management Reality
Usually a project manager will drop into MS Project and later emerge with the project plan. I saw a nice counter example today where someone acknowledged the uncertainty of a dynamic project situation. ‘We can go off and build what we think you want for the lowest price in the shortest time and plan time to revise it. Or we can do a more conventional project and we’ll place the end date in a four-week time span.‘ Not a hard launch date, but a span of time when they’d probably be finished. Nice.
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The Modified Librarian
Here we will discuss the concept and practice of body modification as it relates to librarians as persons and professionals. Those crazy college kids.
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Every Brett Edifying
Brett – one smart IA – just launched his blog: every breath death defying. We’ll be reading closely.