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Handpicked News For Internet Developers - Since 1999 |
Archives For Info Architecture
Louis Rosenfeld Updates His IA Roadmap
Lou finally found some time to update his Enterprise Architecure Roadmap. Apparently he made time for it since he is redesigning his EIA course. He says:
"Below are some basic about using the Roadmap. There is a lot crammed into those little boxes though; I'll be glad to elaborate in this Bloug entry, and hope to learn more from you so that the next version might be even better ..."
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User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline
Peter Merholz: User experience should not be just about interactive systems -- it's a quality that reflects the sum total of a person's experiences with any product, service, organization. When I walk into a store, I'm having a "user experience." When I call an airline to make a reservation, I'm having a "user experience." And innumerable elements contribute to affect that quality of experience.
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IA: Architecting Our Profession
In my experience, this is the reason that projects fail in information architecture and interaction design: it seems that many companies and individuals are not insuring that they use a process which suits them. There is not enough rationing of responsibility to contractors, and therefore no appropriate delegation to specialists who can develop an appropriate model of IA for each situation. This means that there is definitely not enough reliance on the information architect as a professional who can cope with the details and design challenges of creating a complex system, both for the process and for the interface. This is the main reason IAs are unable to blueprint systems that survive the passing of time or the pressures of an evolving market, in other words, there is a round-peg in a square-hole problem here which needs to be addressed. As IAs, we aren’t playing the role of architect, artist, or even of the contractor, but the role of design team member, using common techniques on specialized problems.
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Spruced-Up Site Maps
In the summer of 2003, while redesigning the University of Lethbridge Faculty of Management site, I reworked our site map using the practices I’d learned while studying web standards and related issues. As a result, the site map turned into a nested set of clean, streamlined, semantic unordered lists.
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Interaction Design Meets Online Real Estate
Understanding the importance of supporting a task, an activity, an experience, is therefore fundamental to develop useful, and successful Internet applications. This is the task and responsibility of Interaction Design, a discipline for wich we will hear a lot more about in the coming years, as it will literally shape the virtual spaces in which we are increasingly engaging to gather information or to collaborate with other people.
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WANTED: Enterprise Architects
(CIO Magazine via Webword) IT has grown so big that the CIO can't handle it all. To ensure that IT is always aligned with the business, you need an enterprise architect.
With a title like architect, you'd expect the job to be about building things, but a more accurate analogy might be city planner. Unlike a building, a company's IT architecture is never complete. Furthermore, an enterprise architect needs a high-level view that takes into account applications, data formats and hardware platforms, and how these three parts of IT interact, much the way a city planner has to consider a new building's impact on sewers, traffic and the electrical grid. The need for such knowledge is one reason that a systems or software architect is usually not a good candidate for enterprise architect.
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Uncovering Users In Your Own Organization
(via Tomalak's Realm) You can optimize your internal resources by understanding where and how you can find UI information about your users within your own company. To provide context and practical guidelines, this article presents examples of how to mine internal resources at a large enterprise software company.
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Key steps in creating your reader persona
The first step in developing successful reader personas is to decide what readers you are not going to focus on. Good web management is often more about what you exclude than what you include.
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What's the Problem?
Tim Meehan Freud asked, "What does a user really want?" Ten-plus years into web development, we still don't know. One of the biggest problems in creating and delivering a site is how to decide, specify, and communicate exactly what we're building and why. Use cases can help answer these questions by providing a simple, fast means to decide and describe the purpose of your project. In this quick-reading article, Messieurs Carr and Meehan introduce use cases and their, uh, uses.
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The Password Is Fayleyure
(via Tomalak's Realm) So why are we demanding that millions of people spend more and more time and memory on a security procedure that yields less and less protection? The world doesn't need "better" or "more secure" passwords; it needs to wean itself from passwords and PINs as the medium of authentication.
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Investing in Usability: Testing versus Training
Great article from John S Rhodes of WebWord.com.
John brings attention to a simple act of training everyone on usability issues, and not just leave usability to a bunch of geeky usability guys. In my opinion this is successful for the simple fact that any organization, when on the same page, find success. If everyone is focused on a similar goal, then the company or organization has a greater chance of reaching their goals - whatever the measures of success are.
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A decade of good website design
Jakob Nielsen is a name that draws as much ire or admiration as our sitting President. In this article, Jakob Nielsen looks back over 10 years (1994-2004) and reviews the validity of many of his earlier claims.
Jakob was asked if the web had changed as much as we thought it would back then. . .
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