Noise Between Stations

…is our Yiddish word of the day. Pronounced UUN-ge-poch, it means ‘a little too much,‘ as in ‘all the shmuz around my blog was ongepatsht, so I deleted a few things.‘

Back in the day we dreamed about exchanging deliverables so we could stop reinventing the wheel and start standing on each other’s shoulders. It’s odd something so basic as a repository hadn’t been established (I don’t think competitive advantage explains it in our open community). There is a collection of links on the IAwiki, and [...]

One of my favorites.

IDEO’s Method Cards look quite cool. I’m planning a research-and-testing class for newbies at work, and these could be more effective and engaging than slides or a handout.

Privacy Policy and Opt Out: By clicking below you may exercise your right to instruct us not to provide your non-public personal information to non-affiliated third parties, except as permitted by law. [checkbox checked by default] I choose to opt out. Huh? They must not have had my 7th grade teacher who warned us against [...]

Developing Best Practices for Distributed Networks of Sites: Heuristics, Design, and Politics (PDF) by Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path and Carolyn Gibson Smith of PBS sets a great example of improving web design and encouraging certain practices across a large, decentralized organization. One particular aspect I like is that by distributing templates and building examples [...]

You can relive 5 minutes of Thom Haller’s Information Overload: A Love Story (quicktime) which explores multiple and unexpected facets of labels.

Check out the CSS-powered lists.

Some terse notes from the free bits of Seth Godin’s Survival Is Not Enough. I find his prose a bit wordy, but I think he’s trying not only to communicate the ideas but also to inspire. Evolution in business is a theme…‘Extinction is part of the process of creation. Failure is the cornerstone of evolution’ [...]

This Usability.gov page succinctly captures the qualities of different testing methods. I keep encountering people who want to run surveys (to keep the customer at arms length?) instead of one-to-one usability studies. The mnemonic I’ll keep in my head to remember this difference in meetings is behavior vs. opinion, qualitative vs. quantitative.

Mark comments, ‘This is one of the sad things about the computer world right now: everybody knows better, and hardly anybody seems willing to do the work.’ and yet… ‘This is one of the great things about computer science right now: you can walk in off the street, roll up your sleeves, and with a [...]

‘ About five years ago, Farmers moved from this ad-hoc approach to projects to the implementation of a release methodology that ensures monthly delivery of one of three concurrent releases on a 90-day software development lifecycle, for a total of 12 throughout the year. According to Fridenberg, the business and IT arrive at defined deliverables, [...]

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 [...]

Walking through the park today, we saw four or five wedding parties taking photos in one area. I started snapping photos of them, and walking on each corner we turned produced more brides .

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 [...]