Year: 2006

  • Conceding the death of trackback

    I held out long after all the cool kids had given up on trackback but I haven’t gotten a useful one since Prentiss Riddle pinged me about SXSW panel proposals and a trackback spam attack today finally convinced me to turn it off for all the blogs hosted at Mediajunkie. Ironically, this post will try…

  • Communicating Design: A book every user experience professional needs

    At long last, just in time for the holidays, I received a review copy of Dan M. Brown’s Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning and the book has more than lived up to my high expectations of it. I tore open the envelope and nearly devoured the book in one sitting.…

  • From the pages of the medical journal 'Duh!'

    According a study commissioned by a hosting company, websites with poor usability cause stress for users: EETimes.com – Are you suffering from ‘Mouse Rage Syndrome? (via the ixda list).

  • IA for dashboards and portals

    Quick hit ‘n’ run linking: Joe Lamantia’s The Challenge of Dashboards and Portals at Boxes and Arrows.

  • What Is User Experience Design?

    Kimmy Paluch at Paradyme Solutions has a good article up that helps clarify the meaning of User Experience Design in regard to those other buzzword disciplines such as interaction design, information architecture, usability, and so on.

  • Ever wondered where Google is heading?

    Check out this zoomable whiteboard image showing the Google Master Plan. I’m not really sure where the cattle mutilation fits in….

  • Farewell, Princess Winter Spring Summer Fall

    I didn’t know Leslie Harpold very well. We corresponded briefly in the early pre-blog days of the web when I was doing Enterzone and she was Smug (and later Hoopla). Smug was everything I wanted ezone to be: beautifully designed, cleverly written, artistic. Leslie was always involved in all the coolest leading-edge web creative projects…

  • Prototyping tools

    Scott McDowell has written an article for Boxes and Arrows called Visio Replacement? You Be the Judge about tools for prototyping rich interaction designs. We recently adopted Axure here at Extractable and we’re very jazzed about the way it’s enabling us to do IA work and interaction design and tie together wireframes with sitemaps and…

  • Hey, look – it's another book on interaction design

    This one, Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design is new from Peachpit: In this unique book, Dawes invites readers inside a series of his personal projects to get a view of his process–his creative seeing, making, and playing. He encourages designers to look beyond the normal tools of their trade to find…

  • No Magic Bullet

    Barak Obama is, among other things, a unique personal phenomenon, a political happenstance. And that is frightening in a way, because America is a country where, as with both of the Kennedys, you can kill an idea.

  • Pictures from the Extractable holiday party

    One advantage оf seasonal decorating is thаt іt іѕ, by dеfіnіtіоn, tеmроrаrу. Thіѕ gіvеѕ you рlеntу оf freedom tо еxреrіmеnt wіth nеw ideas аnd соmрlеtеlу transform your lіvіng ѕрасе оn a ѕhоrt-tеrm bаѕіѕ. It’ѕ аlѕо an орроrtunіtу to get сrеаtіvе with your hоmе’ѕ dесоr tо create wаrm, inviting рlасеѕ fоr family and friends tо gаthеr.…

  • Lance Arthur is back and says web design is dead (film at 11)

    The legendary Lance Arthur, missing in action from the web scene for half a decade now (he was spending much of that time with some complicated email service scheme I don’t understand and more recently has been helping to launch Squarespace, the magazine/community CMS Christina Wodtke and company have productized via the revamped Box and…

  • I’m not afraid to say it

    “This documentary visits Ingmar Bergman, one of the 20th century’s greatest film directors…” http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1167037-bergman_island/about.php Only the 20th century! I’m not afraid to say it–I think he was one of the greatest film directors of all time!

  • Berkeley J-School new media lecture series

    I might wan to attend some of this year’s UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Winter New Media Lecture Series: Sunday, December 10, 2006 – Wednesday, December 13, 2006 North Gate Hall Library, Hearst at Euclid Avenue, Berkeley Featured speakers are Howard Rheingold, “Smart Mobs” author; Travis Fox, Washington Post; Robert Hood, msnbc.com; Al Bonner,…

  • Catching up with NAN

    Hey, I’m only a month late on congratulating Jay Rosen on the launch of NewAssignment.Net (“an experiment in open-source reporting”). My excuse is I was finishing a novel and working full time, but what about the blogs, Christian? And who will think of the children? Here’s some tidbits from Jay’s update of the time, which…

  • Yahoo redesign driven by data

    Mark noticed this Businessweek article on how Yahoo! mined their user-click data to inform the redesign of their home page (How Yahoo! Gave Itself A Face-Lift): To avoid design by committee, Yahoo deferred almost every decision to an impartial judge: data generated by users’ clicks. “We have this culture of data,” Bhat explains. “It is…

  • Splendid Isolation

    “The administration also does not plan to alter its strategy of isolating adversaries Iran and Syria, despite mounting pressure…” —NYT, 12/1/06 DKo: We are very close to standing alone, as we isolate Iran, Syria and, in effect, the entire world.

  • I'm a weiner

    The novel isn’t done. Well, the month isn’t over until midnight tonight, and I haven’t hit “The End” yet but am aiming to do so sometime today. But I crossed the finish line from the National Novel Writing Month perspective last night when I exceeded 50,000 words written in November. w00t! It only took my…

  • Hammers vs. saws

    Over at Juxtaprose (just added to our blogroll), Jay Fienberg recently wrote about the danger of making a fetish of any one particular tool in your toolkit: But, no matter how magical a saw, it’s not so great for the people who need to drive nails. And, it’s not like hammers work and saws don’t…

  • So, that was the mistake.

    We really need to go invade a better country! Washington Post, 11/29/06: “As Iraq Deteriorates, Iraqis Get More Blame”

  • IAI website redesign documents

    I wrote a little blurb for the IAI Newsletter this month introducing the information architecture deliverables we’re using to guide the relaunch of the Institute website: WEBSITE REDESIGN We’ve all heard the cop out about the cobbler’s children having the worst shoes. Most of us have probably made that excuse about our own neglected personal…