Noise Between Stations

Information Architecture

  • User Experience Areas Explained

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    1 min read

    Can these disciplines be explained in two sentences? Click for a larger version…

  • Come Do RFP Jedi Mind Tricks, Jan 13

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    If you’re a member of the AIGA and in New York, you might enjoy a fun little breakfast gathering planned for Tuesday, January 13, 2009… Redesigning the RFP response Maybe you’ve gotten one: the RFP that asks for mountains of miraculous work, for no money, delivered in 20 minutes. Or the one for a project…

  • A New Service: Future Practice Webinars

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    1 min read

    We’re pleased as punch to partner with our good friend Lou Rosenfeld at Rosenfeld Media to offer you Future Practice Webinars. Our first two events are Modern Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski and Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy with Indi Young. When we created them we wanted to accomplish two things: Provide…

  • Thoughts on the Euro Information Architecture Summit 2008

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    6 min read

    I’m just back from the Euro IA Summit held in Amsterdam, September 26-27th. Overall it was a good event with many warm, interesting people in attendance. I was considering attending PICNIC as well but as I heard it was “very corporate… lots of white men with PowerPoint” I spent my time with the city instead.…

  • Presenting My Concept Design Work in Amsterdam, September 27

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    I’m happy the concept design research and development I’ve been doing has received some attention, even though I haven’t had much time to share my work. That will start to change next month when I present some tools for generating concepts at the 2008 European Information Architecture Summit in Amsterdam, where I’ve been honored with…

  • We’ll Reach the Semantic Web One Small Step at a Time

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    XFN and FOAF were two small steps in that direction, and Google just built on them with the Social Graph API (watch the friendly little video intro). Any day now we’ll see an application that not only helps us generate XFN and FOAF data, but does so in a way that manages our online identities,…

  • Paul Saffo in SF, Friday, Jan 11

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    3 min read

    If I was in San Francisco, I’d go hear Paul Saffo… “Effective forecasting is not merely possible, but remarkably easy,” he says. “All it takes is a simple shift in perspective and a few common-sense heuristics.” Saffo draws on his study of the history of technology to give unusual perspective on the accelerating wavefront of…

  • What’s Your Favorite Innovation Book?

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    Happy new year my readers and friends. While I once wrote that everything written about innovation is useless (including my own writing), we continue to write about it because writing is thinking, and there’s a lot of problems to think through. The result is some writing that is truly insightful and/or based on hard-won experience,…

  • Structuritis

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    2 min read

    Inflammation is the root cause of many “-itis” diseases. Similarly, we have places where structural design elements become inflamed and painful. In a meeting yesterday I used to the term “landing page-itis” to describe the situation where a website landing page makes sense in one category so landing pages are added in all categories. What…

  • Make Tools: My IA Konferenz Keynote Slides

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    In my keynote talk at the 2007 IA Konferenz in Stuttgart, Germany this month, I argued we need to create fewer artifacts and more tools. We’re already doing this, but it’s easy to get stuck in a make-more-web/mobile-sites rut and that could lead to irrelevance. Here’s the slides… | View | Upload your own By…

  • Innovative Friends: Alex Wright

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    I’m psyched that Alex Wright now calls New York home. He is one of the few thinkers of technology and information that can simultaneously ply his trade during the day and theorize with the best in his spare time. I’m looking forward to his new book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages in which he…

  • BLKN 2.0 Meetup

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    Our lovely borough of Brooklyn now has its own web meetup… Some of the best networking I’ve ever done is while walking my dog, Henry, in Prospect Park. This morning, after I had just met yet one more person who works on web projects, I thought, we all take the train to Manhattan to attend…

  • A Busy Itinerary…

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    I’ve spent the Winter and a better part of the Spring planning and scheming, and I’m ready to get back into the fray in a public way. Here’s where you can catch me in the next few weeks: Getting Good Designs Built is a new session I’ve created, hosted by the New York chapter of…

  • Business Books for Designers

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    1 min read

    My friend Austin wrote me, “I’m putting together a list of recommended books for designers interested in strategy, the business side, and jumping into entrepreneurship. Can you recommend 3-5 books you think are indispensable?” I don’t think there’s a single book that fits that description well, and I’ve wondered if a ‘business for designers’ book…

  • Innovative Friends: Jim’s Navigation Book

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    My friends are doing brilliant things these days and I feel compelled to send out some props. I’ll start with Jim Kalbach, whose book Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience will be out in August, but who apparently can’t stop writing and has started a blog. We haven’t had a book on this topic…