Noise Between Stations

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.

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.

Two views on the same idea: Daniel Dennett in How The Mind Works, courtesy of Alex Wright: A flow chart is typically the organizational chart of a committee of homunculi (investigators, librarians, accountants, executives); each box specifies a homunculus by precribing a function without saying how it is accomplished (one says, in effect: put a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Yahoo! has this clever campaign for their personals that I couldn’t help but follow and explore (Not that I’m in the market ­ sorry to disappoint you :). What I saw was pretty amazing, a gallery-like view of many singles… Very cool, because it’s just so browse-friendly. Visually scan for an attractive face, then click [...]

…and then what? What do you give them after they click Send? None of the usual approaches satisfy me. I want to give that person who just took the time to send us email a big smooch, or some sort of instant gratification, a coupon for free ice cream, a free report, something of beauty [...]

Mark Hurst warns of a content-centric view in The Page Paradigm, making the point that ‘Web developers often waste time worrying about “where content should live”‘ which is so true. Designers often become hyper-focused on the content and navigation and forget about the user’s goals and the flow they go through to get there (can [...]

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?

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.

Come visit, I never see you anymore!

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.”

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.

Michael describes his work tracking where on the screen users click on navigation.