Information Architecture news
| WIRED on iPad: Just like a Paper Tiger… First, the paper magazine was crammed into the little iPad frame. To
compensate for the lack of interactive logic, this pretty package was
provided with a fruity navigation. In the end it was spiced with in-app
links, plucked with a couple of movies and salted with audio files
("interactive"). Then ... Cosmic 140—Final Beta [wp_eStore_fancy:product_id:7:end] Here it is, our next Web Trend Map.
No Metro lines, no URLS. This time, it's the 140 most influential people
on twitter, sorted by #name #handle #category #influence #activity.
Plus: When they started tweeting and what they first said. It took quite
some time until we had it in ... Information architect on Web Worker Daily The role of information architect is featured at Web Worker Daily today: Web Worker Payoff: Information Architect iaslash.org | 4/16/10 12:09 AM User account security measures offer annoying barriers without a reasonable payoff Random internet browsing brought me to a choice user response to "internet security measures": iaslash.org | 4/15/10 11:54 PM Nielsen drops page view ranking From USA Today, Nielsen drops page view rankings in favor of weighing time on site as more important. Article specifically cites online video and Ajax as reasons why page views are meaningless. Time on site is also skewed. Measuring content views would be a more precise measurement of user engagement. (You can track content views for both video and ajax.) iaslash.org | 4/15/10 11:39 PM Joost offers innovative(?), new ad models From Joost Unveils Stellar Brand Ad Launch Lineup, Partnership With IPG: iaslash.org | 4/15/10 11:24 PM Things You See - A conversation between Bob Goodman, Peter Jones, Eric Reiss and GK VanPatter NexD Journal has a follow-up article to GK VanPatter's Unidentical Twins that triggered much discussion a few months ago. The follow-up is a 4 way conversation between Bob Goodman, Peter Jones, Eric Reiss and GK VanPatter. I feel like I should post a witty summary, but it is too long to summarise, covers too much ground and (for me) is somewhat hard to grasp (though much easier than the first article). iaslash.org | 4/15/10 11:09 PM Vision for a new video world Online Media Daily quotes Jeremy Allaire's views on web video and advertising in Brightcove Founder Lays Out Media Vision For A New Video World. His remarks were part of his keynote to the Outfront conference. (There's a link to the entire keynote you can watch, as well.) Interesting comments fmor a smart gyu. Go read. Tasty bits to moisten your lips: iaslash.org | 4/15/10 10:54 PM On Wireframing Tools for Microsoft Environments Let's start with Boyd's IP Theft (oops, I mean Dictum) on Prototyping Tools: it is easier for someone who knows what they are doing to transfer a design concept on the back of a business card with a crayon than it is for someone without a clue to perform the same task with any other medium. In other words, the important part is transferring the design concept not look at the size of my tool. Sure, some tools make things easier. Some tools are more efficient than others. iaslash.org | 4/15/10 10:39 PM The Forces of User Experience Richard Dalton has a new blog, and an excellent post called The Forces of User Experience in which he extends Jesse James Garrett's elements of user experience diagram to represent the effect of strategy on other planes. Good stuff. iaslash.org | 4/15/10 10:24 PM Semantic analysis: Making sense of the chaos of free text Matt Hodgson has posted a summary of a presentation he did for our local IA group recently. This is a truly awesome piece of IA work - he analysed a large volume of unstructured text and designed a framework to rewrite it in a consistent, machine-readable, human-readable way: Semantic analysis: Making sense of the chaos of free text iaslash.org | 4/15/10 10:09 PM Watch this space IAslash partner, the IA Institute, cherishes this resource and wishes to see it come back to life. Therefore, in my capacity as Institute director charged with web and technical initiatives, I have volunteered to undertake a rejuvenation of this site. Over the next few weeks we will be cleaning up the aggregator subscriptions (retiring some venerable but defunct newsfeeds and adding some fresh new exciting ones) and working on developing a regular posting schedule. Our goal is to enable you to rely on IAslash as a useful and informative filter and source of interesting news from the realm of IA and the related disciplines and practices of user experience (UX), interaction design (IxD), product management, design management, social web design, and internetworked business and entrepreneurship. iaslash.org | 4/15/10 9:54 PM Discourse around Emergent Information Architecture A couple of great blog posts by Peter Merholz – Emergent IA and Gene Smith – How do people co-create information environments? touching on topics surrounding emergent IA. There is also some follow up discussion in the IAI mailing list. iaslash.org | 4/15/10 9:39 PM Christopher Fahey writes an interesting series on the “Smoke & Mirrors” of user research. As designers look towards user research for the objective truth, Christopher questions the motives behind the research. He follows with a series of articles, the first of which discuss user research as a pseudo science pointing to absolutes that do not exist. He continues the discussion stating that tools such as eye tracking provide results that are already apparent to good UI designers. His latest article explains that a value of user research is often to cut through the politics and convince stakeholders to make good design decisions. His upcoming article: “Research as Bullshit” iaslash.org | 4/15/10 9:24 PM 10 Ways If you haven’t already seen Getty Images' 10 Ways, it’s worth a look. Getty collaborated with 5 designers to create some very creative interactive experiences. They attempt to capture the compelling visual language of photography. I’m not too sold on them as educational tools but they are neat interactive pieces none the less. iaslash.org | 4/15/10 9:09 PM IAI Summary Question 1: To Content Inventory Or Not To Content Inventory Inaugural Question of the Week for the IA Institute Member Mailing ListLeisa Reichelt of Disambiguity.com posted earlier this month against content inventories, positing that they immerse you in the status quo of the content types and approaches. http://www.disambiguity.com/2006/05/why-you-shouldnt-start-ia-with-a-content-inventory/ Her position is interesting, but we'd like to hear from you about how you react to this post. How have content inventories affected your process and creativity on projects? Is completing a content inventory as one of your first major IA tasks good or bad? iaslash.org | 4/15/10 8:54 PM Designing for iPad: Reality Check Over the last two months we have been working on several iPad projects.
Two news apps, a social network thing and a word processor—without
having the actual device to test. The question "Are we designing
apps, web sites or something entirely new?" has been torturing us
until that magical package ... iA’s 2006 Facebook Designs, Redesigned From December 2006 to February 2007 we were in touch with the product
manager of facebook. The prospective: Redesigning facebook. Eventually.
Since the contract was never signed, we kept our designs in the drawer.
Until now... As you might have noticed already, the two following two
screens are not the ... Meet Big Bang, Our Next Trend Map It's one year since our last Web Trend Map. A lot has happened, but
there are not enough changes in the landscape of domains in the last 12
months to create another domain based Web Trend Map. The big changes
happened one level higher, on the social layer, that is: ... API for News? Reuters, NYT & iA Inc. Last week at Media2010, Marc Frons (Chief Technology Officer, Digital
Operations, New York Times), Nic Fulton (Chief Scientist, Thomson
Reuters) and me were asked to answer several questions on the future of
news: When and how should news organizations release copyright-free
material? What are the key points of design that ... The TPUTH, Part II Projects that will probably make some money one day are more probably
running out of money very soon. So what is our revenue plan for TPUTH?
How are we going to monetize satirical over sized headlines? As you
might have seen, we have this big ass banner on the bottom. You ... The TPUTH, Part I TPUTH brings four major iA strings together: 1. designing news, 2.
monitoring web trends, 3. monetizing content, and 4. being straight
forward. In the first post, we'd like to explain some things about the
Design and the Technology... 1. Designing News As you might know by
now iA has designed a series ... iPad Stencil for Omnigraffle This is the first version of an OmniGraffle template for folks designing
iPad apps. It's not complete; we plan to update it as we're working on
our own designs. Contains backgrounds, title bars, buttons,
selectors, and other iPhone UI elements Based the iPad PSD GUI by
Teehan+Lax. Text is fully editable on ... My Five Cents on The Thing The Thing will save the publishing industry as much as the iPod has
saved the music industry. Meaning: There are a couple of things in
publishing and user interface design that it will change. What things?
1. What's Going to Happen to the News Industry? First of all, to have
an impact ... What’s Next in Web Design? I've been asked by the Italian magazine L'Espresso to write an article
on The Future of Web Design. Here is the English text. Thinking about
what’s next online is fun because everything you wish to come true
will come true. While commercial products obey to the laws of the
market, which ... Web Trend Map Video Interview I sat down with the video team of GaijinPot.com for a short interview
about the Web Trend Map. As you will learn we are planning to publish a
book (a Web Trend Map Atlas) next year. Along with the next poster we
plan to publish a book in cooperation with ... Can Experience be Designed? First, think about a number between one and ten. Then take a step back
and look at the words "User Experience Design" as if you had
never seen them. Look at them closely until you hear them with the
vanilla motor voice of Christopher Walken: USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN. What
do you ... Dynamic Pricing for Digital Goods We decided to sell the WordPress template of our own site. The problem
we had to solve was not "why?" than "how much"?
After a long back and forth we decided to try something new: Dynamic
pricing. Here is how it works: Start selling at the lowest price
you’d go ... Kenya Hara On Japanese Aesthetics What makes Japanese design so special? Basically, it's a matter of
simplicity; a particular notion of simplicity, different from what
simplicity means in the West. So are things in general better designed
in Japan? Well, actually, it's not that simple... The New York Times
asked us to get them in ... Internazionale: Look and Feel Here are a few design explorations on the possible look and feel for
Internazionale. They are based on the beautiful work that Mark Porter,
creative director of the Guardian editorial did for the print edition.
We'd like to post them without comment as we're curious to hear what you
think. ... Google, Yahoo, Bing: Beyond the Hype The story is quite clear: Yahoo is going down. Google is going up, Bing
is insignificant. It's becoming quite clear who the real winner of the
Yahoo!-Microsoft deal is. Compared to their competitors, Bing doesn't
do that well on usability either. As for Yahoo!--the latest UI changes
on Yahoo! (and the ... Tell me again: Who Relaunched Krone.at? I got an email the other day from a young entrepreneur that asked
whether we send out press releases. The answer is twisted: So far I have
refrained from sending out press releases. But that might change...
Press Releases: Contra Press releases are not authentic. They're
written in an obsolete sleazy PR ... From Black to White: iA redesigns Krone.at After covering a high percentage of newspaper sites in Switzerland and
redoing DIE ZEIT, iA moved to the other very challenging side of the
online news spectrum: With krone.at we updated one of the big players in
the red top press industry. As of now, krone.at counts 124 Million
page impressions, ... Links in Print: Story of a Beautiful Failure In January 2009 we were invited to take part in a paid pitch for the
print redesign for the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. All in all five
agencies took part in the pitch. We were the only UX oriented agency.
The story of a beautiful failure. We put all eggs in one ... Concept Internazionale L’Internazionale is rightfully proud of its very dedicated
readership. Out of 100'000 readers, 30'000 come to Ferrara each year to
meet the editors. The facebook group of Internazionale boasts 23'000
fans, a huge number if you compare it to the groups of Newsweek with a
circulation of over 3 Million ... Zeit Online, Freshly Squeezed iA has redesigned ZEIT ONLINE, the Internet edition of the weekly
newspaper DIE ZEIT. DIE ZEIT (German pronunciation: [diː tsait],
literally The Times,) is a German nationwide weekly newspaper that is
highly respected for its quality journalism. With a circulation of
488,036 and an estimated readership of slightly above 2 million, ... Trends we can Believe in: Webtrendmap.com We've finally launched the interactive version of our popular poster.
Webtrendmap.com turned out to not just be the base for our next year's
poster, it is a new way to find high quality content. iA's newest
product helps you finding the hottest links in the last 24 hours Unlike
the common ... Pronto? While everybody is chatting about the future of news, we're shaping it.
Currently, we're working with the Italian magazine Internazionale, who
is trying to figure out where to move with their website. As only an
advanced process can result in advanced results, Internazionale agreed
to open up the design process ... The Value of Information When confronted with the necessity of offering news for free, editors
are quick at pointing at the cost involved in news production. Which of
course is beside the point. Information on the Internet is as common as
snow in the arctic. You can't expect Eskimos to buy a snowman. But,
... The Spectrum of User Experience (1) As we all perfectly know, designers are narcissists; programmers are
nerds, and whoever wears a tie must be a clueless jerk. Designers,
programmers and business people love to hate each other. That's why we
keep them separated: Can't we just all get along? Or leave each other
alone? We can't. The ... Introducing webtrendmap.com Where is this year's clickable version of the Web Trend Map? And the
screen savers? And the background images? And the PDFs? Answer: Forget
about that. We have something way better in the making. Currently iA
is building an interactive version of the Web Trend Map under
webtrendmap.com. The idea ... Web Trend Map 4: Coolest Gift For Geeks The beta version has been featured all across the web from TechCrunch to
BoingBoing, and Gawker. Now the latest version of our popular Web Trend
Map is up for grabs. The Web Trend Map plots the Internet's leading
names and domains onto the Tokyo Metro map. Domains and personalities
are carefully ... Kill Blog Comments? Blog comments have an innate communication problem: You can't discuss
and moderate the discussion at the same time. Moderating blog comments
I often feel like being pushed in the role of the understanding father
that needs to calm down his rebellious teenage son. Blogs comments are
useful to evaluate how ... Web Trend Map 4 – Final Beta Here it is, posted in a panic: Web Trend Map 4. We'll give you a week
for final feedback before we send it to the printer. Download: For
the final feedback round, we only offer a PNG (2.6MB). There are more
formats to come. Feedback: Use the comment section below for feedback
... Social Media Marketing? Kaboom, Baby! Last week on twitter, writing the dirty draft for this article, I
claimed that social media marketer is just another word for spammer. If
that upset you, don't read the following text. First, what are we
talking about here? What is marketing? Marketing is "the commercial
processes involved in promoting and ... New and Dirty: Tweet Blogging We all waste too much time reading (and writing!) boring text. Here is
one solution to the problem. One might speculate if the true reason
for boring text are the boring writers... but I prefer to blame it on
the word processors. Word processors are all about orthography, grammar,
editing, and ... |