Category: Design

  • Getting fired up for IDEA 2007

    I regretted not being able to attend the first-ever IDEA conference last year in Seattle and I was thrilled when the organizers decided to hold the second IDEA conference in New York City, my home town, at the legendary Parsons School of Design. IDEA has already in one year established a reputation for bringing big-idea…

  • Looks like Mash is in beta

    Yahoo! Mash (né Mosh) is open to non-Yahoos on an invitation-only basis. If you want to try it out, and you know me (or at least have some connection to me that you can tell me about), leave a comment and I’ll send you an invitation. Oh, my profile there, for people already in Mash…

  • Pushing social patterns

    One of my top priorities in my job as curator of Yahoo’s Design Pattern Library is to help polish up and publish to the wider web community a series of social-media oriented design patterns that our community platform team has been working on. The first of this, Vote to Promote (a sort of generic “Digg…

  • Reputation and Patterns at SXSW

    Here’s my obligatory plug for my South by Southwest proposals. I’ve got two panels in contention at the cool-but-unwieldy Panel Picker, so I thought I’d provide some shortcuts here. A lot of folks feel that there are too many panels at SXSW and not enough solo presenters. I tend to agree, but I think the…

  • Build your own search robot at Searchbots

    Back in February, Mark Zeman, Lecturer and Subject Director in Digital Media, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand, tipped me off to a search agent research project called Searchbots. I tagged it as something to blog about in my email and then, well, I got busy with my new job. I’ve finally checked…

  • My 'social media design patterns' slides from BarCamp Block

    To help edit and refactor the list of social media patterns we brainstormed in the session, drop by BarCampBlock SocialMedia DesignPatterns.

  • BarCamp virgin here – be gentle

    Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto. According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or…

  • Sifry steps down as Technorati CEO

    Maybe everyone else in the blogosphere knows this already but I just read that Dave Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati: Technorati Weblog: A Change In Seasons Looks like Tantek’s timing was impeccable. I first met Dave during the dotcom bust when blogging was booming (again) on the backs of a lot of…

  • Podcast of my SXSW panel now live

    If you missed Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Privacy, and Reputation last March at South By here’s your chance to hear me, Ted Nadeau, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and George Kelly take on these topics, very early one Sunday morning after an untimely daylight savings change and, for many people, a night of carousing…

  • Technorati launches new design

    Looks like Technorati has reconfigured itself to be less blog-centric and to take a more multimedia look at what they call over there the Live Web (Technorati Weblog: Come check out the refreshed www.technorati.com!): > First, we’ve eliminated search silos on Technorati. In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag…

  • Answering danah's twitter questions

    In reply to apophenia: Twitter questions (curiosity is killing me…): > **First, the practical question. Can i quote you?** >[ ] Yes, and you *must* use my real name. >[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information. >[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.…

  • Avoid Tagged.com like the plague

    On the SIGIA-L discussion list people are talking about a spammy social network site called Tagged.com. I only know about it because I received an invitation from an unfamiliar sender to a never-used spam-honeypot email address of mine. I looked at the site, it seemed shady, so I ignored it. That was months ago. Now…

  • Amazon adds social networking

    Following on its adoption of tagging last year, Amazon has now added a friends feature. At least I assume this is something new. I hadn’t heard of it before. The first clue I had that such as social networking functionality had been introduced was receiving an invitation in my email from a writer friend of…

  • Blog responses to my SxSW panel

    I gathered these links and quotations within a day or so of the panel I moderated at South by Southwest, but since then I’ve been to another conference and am generally running behind. Still, I was pleased by many of these responses (and even the less positive ones provide useful criticism) so I wanted to…

  • My slides from the IA Summit

    Here are my slides from my presentation, Mobile Information Architecture: Designing Experiences for the Mobile Web: (I may update them with a 2.0 version based on some new learnings from subsequent conversations, and a different idea of how to pace the imagery.) And here are my slides from the panel I moderated, Lessons From Failure:…

  • Blogs due for an information design overhaul?

    John Battelle’s Searchblog: The Blog Merchandising Problem, or, Blogs, V 2.0 (2.1? 3.0?)… (via Jay Fienberg) The great power of blogs has always been simplicity, but are we ready to go to the next step?

  • How do UX roles intersect?

    A while back I wanted to comment on Elton’s entry, Information Architecture updated to 3.0, and draw on a post to the IxDA list by Jay Fienberg, talking about the Venn diagrams that might show how the various user experience roles and practices tend to overlap. It seems that each type of practitioner has a…

  • User research context map

    A while back Erik Guttman posted an item to IxDA list discussing the role user research plays in product design: I have repeatedly attempted to explain how user research can serve to identify, prioritize and clarify product requirements. I have difficulty for a variety of reasons. people confuse or fail to see the distinction between…

  • Subway-style map of Web 2.0 trends

    Information Architects Japan has put together and posted an intriguing diagram in the style of a subway map showing many of the key “Web 2.0” players and how they’re related to each other, with subway lines connecting them labeled Main Sites, Hype, Advertisements, Social Networks, Marketing, Blogs, Technology, Content, Usability, Design Openness, Acquisitions, Democracy, and…

  • First homework of the new year: Experience prototyping paper

    Read this, Experience prototyping, a PDF of a paper from the Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems in 2000 (sponsored by SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction): In this paper, we describe “Experience Prototyping” as a form of prototyping that enables design team members, users and clients to gain first-hand appreciation of existing or…

  • 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.…