Category: Information Architecture

  • Interview on the Well about Designing Social Interfaces

    This week we’ve begun a two-week-long interview in the Well’s public Inkwell conference. The interview is being led by Jon Lebkowsky my friend and longtime co-host of the Well’s blog conference. The cool thing about these interviews is that because they take two weeks and are published “live” they can cover a lot of interesting…

  • Slides from our mini-workshop at IDEA 2009

    Designing Social Interfaces: 5 steps, 5 principles, 5 anti-patternsView more presentations from erin malone.

  • Yahoo! Design Pattern Library relaunches with 10 new social patterns

    Over one year in the making… The work of many hands… A much overdue look-and-feel refresh, with some much-needed (if subtle) usability improvements… I am bursting with pride that I’m able to announce today the relaunch of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library with “ten new patterns, a reorganized category-structure, cleaner URLs for easier bookmarking, and…

  • The wheel of convos

    Pretty cool visualization of various types of social media platforms (based on a cyclical model of conversation). (via Nick Terry)

  • Bulletin article Boingboinged

    Cory Doctorow picked up on a brief mention from Bruce Sterling in his wired blog pointing to my recent bulletin article. Cory adds Stupid pitfalls of social media: This American Society for Information Science and Technology paper by Yahoo’s Christian Crumlish has a tidy little cosmology of dumb things that social media does. Commenters seem…

  • The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets)

    I have an article in the August/September 2009 issue of The Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, called "The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets)" (quite a mouthful, eh?). I’d like to thank Stacy Surla, one of my colleagues on the…

  • Designing Social Interfaces, Rough Cut edition now available from O'Reilly Media

    Designing Social Interfaces – Rough Cut | O’Reilly Media Originally uploaded by xian The unedited, 500 page first draft of our book is available now in PDF format for review by anyone who can’t bear to wait till September for the first (“real”) edition to come out. Yay!

  • Slides from Designing Social Interfaces at IA Summit 2009

    Erin Malone and I introduced some of the fruit of our effort to carve out a pattern language for social user experience design. At the Information Architecture Summit in Memphis this past week we taught our pattern library workshop and then delivered this tandem presentation: Designing Social Interfaces View more presentations from Erin Malone.

  • Three talks for the price of, well, none

    At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a…

  • Talking patterns and social design at the IA Summit

    If you’re interested in interaction design patterns or in the elements of social web design, then come on down to Miami in April for the IA Summit and either sign up for one of the two pre-conference workshops I’m helping teach or see my presentation or panel in the main program. Here are the basic…

  • Enumerating social media patterns: a work in progress

    At BarCamp Block earlier this year I led a discussion of social media design patterns. The slides I posted were really more just about patterns and how we deal with them at Yahoo! But the group exercise was to brainstorm a huge list of social media and social networking activities that could be described and…

  • Ambient info edu revolution

    Michael Wesch, who created the virally popular internet video called Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us (its success drew on a sort of meta-application of the very concepts it discussed), was the keynote speaker at IDEA 2007 last week. As part of his keynote, he previewed two videos he has now released to the…

  • 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…

  • Lessons from failure at Boxes & Arrows

    I am curating a series of articles at the venerable information architecture (and user experience) web magazine Boxes and Arrows, based on the panel I moderated on the same topic at this year’s IA Summit. The first article in the series is Joe Lamantia’s It Seemed Like the Thing to Do at the Time: The…

  • 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:…

  • Yet another friend metaphor (for twitter)

    So I just wasted, er, spent a half hour surfing twitter pages and poaching friends of friends. I noticed that I had a strong gut sense of who I felt it was ok to befriend, most of the time, but that it doesn’t necessarily map to people who are actually my friends or whom I’ve…

  • 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?

  • IA for dashboards and portals

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

  • Polar Bear the third out now

    Congratulations to Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville on the release of the third edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web! At a time when people who do information architecture (please don’t call them information architects!) are having yet another one of their many identity crises, questioning the value or the future of their…

  • Kid-friendly faceted navigation

    Dan Brown, author of *Communicating Design* points us to this interesting example of a search interface for navigating a children’s library.

  • Selling information architecture

    A recent discussion on the IA Institute mailing list revolved around selling the value of IA to executives. One reason why we address IA and other user experience concerns within the context of web strategy here at Extractable is because it helps communicate the value of the planning process in terms of aligning with business…