Noise Between Stations

Month: September 2008

  • Thoughts on the Euro Information Architecture Summit 2008

    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. Hearing a speech is slightly better than reading it or watching it online, but only slightly.

    The Summit kicked off with a talk from Adam Greenfield called “Why I’m Not an Information Architect and You Shouldn’t Be Either.” Where the community used to be filled with electricity — taking on great new challenges — he lamented it’s now focused on creating wireframes for websites. This doesn’t feel like the field that will create Bruce Sterling’s Spimes. Adam’s focus lately has been Ubicomp, and he talked about how “power and grandeur lie beneath the user interface, in the API” and that “IT has dissolved into behavior” like the swipe of an RFID-enabled train card.

    There’s a lot to react to there. I agree the field is not nearly as exciting as it was seven years ago, and this state makes a lot of us that are comfortable with innovation wonder what communities we should mix in and what IA should be (see Matt Milan’s thoughts for another perspective). At the moment I’m trying to pull back and see information architecture as a new but somewhat established field. Invention used to be necessary of everyone, but now it’s only needed from a few. Compare it to an established field like electrical engineering. At the beginning there was a lot invention, but now we know enough to simply do it. Today, some engineers continue to push the envelope with the design of microprocessors while others specify the wiring in the next model of speaker phone. I would expect IA to settle into the same spread.

    Ruud Ruissaard of Informaat discussed the current state of content management which can be summarized by satisfaction rates around 37%. He advocated for a more holistic approach to address systems and processes and management. I have to think CMS will go the way of portals, with everyone realizing there’s a lack of flexibility in large installed systems. Instead, let’s move content to the cloud and pull it out with flexible APIs.
    (more…)

  • Small Project Management Things I Want to Remember to Do For Every Project

    1. Keep status meetings to .5 hour, but do them every week
    2. Establish a natural way for the team to share what everyone is doing — eating together, or tasks we all do together — while protecting personal time to think and work individually
    3. Set up a team mailing list and liberally copy everyone on everything; make it easy to filter
    4. Have one place for everyone to go to see what is the next action
    5. Folders to set up

      6. – 1. Discover
      – 2. Define
      – 3. Design
      – 4. Develop
      – 5. Deploy

      – archive
      – assets
      – financial
      – project management
      — agendas
      — status reports
      — proposals & SOWs

    6. For important meetings, supply each member of the team with

      7. – explicitly stated objectives
      – the agenda
      – a list of attendees and their roles
      – maps and necessary logistics
      – a list of tasks needed to prep for the meeting

  • No-Click is the New Click

    I’m bummed I’ll miss Dan Saffer’s talk tonight on Tap is the New Click (though happy I’ll finally get to try Five Points as I take a client out to dinner).

    But on that topic, I just came across some examples of interaction design that do away with the click altogether. It’s radical enough to require serious re-learning for most people, but a significant enough time-saver that some of these gestures will inevitably catch on.

    http://www.dontclick.it/ is a fantastic experiment in click-less browser-based interaction

    And there’s three similar concepts for swipe-based text entry out now:

    Swype

    Shapewriter

    SlideIT

  • Four New Business and Design Classes at Smart Experience

    You need a great design to please your customers, and a great business model to pay for the design, so we’re offering classes on both topics to help user experience practitioners, managers, and entrepreneurs thrive in New York City.

    For 10% off any class, enter the code NBS when registering. If you plan to attend with friends or colleagues, contact me for a bigger discount: victor (at) smartexperience.org.

  • A Schedule for Planning a Presentation

    I tend to think and think and think and think and, at the last minute, throw together slides that represent what I want to say. This time I resolved to be more prepared. Here’s my deadlines:

    1. Aug 29 – Make schedule; list all potential points I could make; filter points to ones I should make
    2. Sept 3 – Outline talk
    3. Sept 6 – Collect/make audio/visuals
    4. Sept 13 – Complete draft of presentation
    5. Sept 19 – Revise draft
    6. Sept 21 – Rehearse presentation
    7. Sept 22 – Leave for Amsterdam

    In reality, the outline talk and collect/make audio/visuals steps are happening together, which is feeling like a nice way to craft my story for a conference. Establishing intermittent deadlines gets my ass motivated, and knowing I have time to iterate assures me I can get the quality to where I want it.

    See also How To Tell A Story.