When inhaling becomes an option I’ll report a bit on the IA Summit. In the meantime here’s some misc. photos and my presentation, Incorporating Navigation Research into a Design Method PDF (800K), PPT (2MB). You’ll want to view the powerpoint version in Notes View to get the story and pictures at the same time. And thanks to Lane Becker for the just-in-time equipment loan at the Summit.
Category: Unfiled
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IA Summit, Thurs
If you’re in Austin for the IA Summit don’t dine alone! Some of us are having dinner at Zax, 312 Barton Springs Rd at 7:30.
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Recently featured at NBS…
Good explainations for something we already knew: Big companies breed small minds.
Even if Mark Hurst is over-simplifying, those pages aren’t long for this world.
Shop for a date at Yahoo! Personals.
And Nathan Shedroff sums up what’s wrong with personas.
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Marketing/Usability Litmus Test
Refining my thinking about how to integrate brand and marketing into IA. My current litmus test is, ‘Do both the company and the customer benefit from the design?‘ That sounds like a statement I think my marketing people will agree with, and is more realistic than only arguing for usability (in most companies). I find that most of the decisions occur at fine levels of design, like when and how to ask for an email address. And that’s when the litmus test is invoked.
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Grey Tuesday
The positioning of Grey Tuesday is interesting, but somewhat flawed. First, this ain’t a censorship issue, it’s a copyright issue. Second, censorship doesn’t work, but copyright does.
Granted, not everyone wants copyright. For those who wish something more flexible, there’s Creative Commons. For those who don’t want to respect copyright, there’s, well, stealing. Stealing is bad. I like Creative Commons, and I dislike narrow minded lawyers, but that doesn’t turn this into something other than a legal issue, so it’s a matter for the courts to rule on this grey area (pun intended) of fair-use. I’m not sure a lot of coordinated stealing is going to influence the judges.
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AP Voltron
This ok/cancel had me in stiches. We need some more East Coast power. Maybe like in Lord of the Rings we can light fires along the Appalachians and summon Krug, Druin, & Quesenbery?
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A Short, Grandiose Theory of Design?
I’m desperately searching for “A Short, Grandiose Theory of Design”, by Jay Doblin from a 1987 issue of the STA Design Journal on Analysis and Intuition. If you have a copy to share you can email me from my bio page.
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Designing the TiVo Remote
Now Preening on the Coffee Table is a story in the NY Times (free registration required). ‘Central to the process, Mr. Newby said, was producing prototypes “early, ugly and often.” Ugly? “There tends to be this conservatism in the design process,” he said. “I encourage young designers to go off and scare me.”
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Booty
Someone is selling old Razorfish paraphernalia on Craigslist. I actually owned much of this stuff at some point, still have a couple of the shirts. The sleave of my MOM3000 (the name of the intranet) shirt says, ‘never in beta‘ which pretty much sums up the exuberance of the time.
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Tracking user’s nav use
Michael describes his work tracking where on the screen users click on navigation.
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Afraid of Emotion
I was in the paper store with James the other day and as I started picking out neutral shades he joked, ‘What, are you afraid of color?‘ Well, yes, a little. I have a hard time picking palettes from scratch, I just have no training there. The blue he picked out made me happy.
When I read about the discussion of emotions in the design community, I wonder how far that will go. Is raising the awareness of emotions & design enough to get the people in charge of products to work differently? Is enlightening them on how to design for emotion all that’s needed?
In many of the companies I’ve worked with people are comfortable with style, but scared of emotions. Especially in politically-correct, lawsuit-prone America, it’s often safer to wring out the emotions and play it safe. And it’s rather difficult to encourage a creative process that embeds emotions in a product when only a small subset of emotions are allowed in the workplace. I suspect we’ll need to do more than just raise awareness, though it’s a great start.
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F.U.C.S.
The woman who sits next to me at work does a lot of shopping online, and is constantly having customer service problems that she tries – often in vain – to resolve over the phone. We imagine a consulting service dedicating to improving fucked up customer service, or F.U.C.S. It would include sophisticated methods like angry voice detection. We would have titles like Lead Unfucker and Prophylactic Application Specialist.
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Medical privacy and the justice department
From today’s MUG:
The Justice Department is demanding patient records from, among other hospitals, Columbia-Presbyterian, Cornell, and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt, for hundreds of women who have had abortions in those hospitals since last November. Since the passage of the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Justice Department wants to know more about what abortions are being performed and why.
But your medical records are confidential, right?
According to yesterday’s front-page story in the Times, Justice Department attorney Sheila M. Gowan argued before Judge Richard Conway Casey (U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York) that “Individuals no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential.”
What the fuck? Were we out of the country the day that happened? We’re not going to make even a stab at privacy any more? Called it off one day, did we? Game over?
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Ben Fineman
Ben’s got a new website with portfolio. We were both early IAs at Razorfish, moving in and out of projects, him continuing my work on bikeshop.com and me taking over on Avaya. He’s finishing up his masters in interaction design at Carnegie Mellon; whoever ends up hiring him will have one great designer.