Category: Information Architecture
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The interface of a cheeseburger
Via Scot Hacker’s foobar blog I landed on this interesting set of interface musings at Information Architects Japan, starting from the universal cheeseburger interface and meandering on through iPod and Zune. I like the quotation Scot selected: The cheeseburger has the easiest food interface one could think of. No forks, no knives, no spoons, no…
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Everyday IA group on Flickr
For pictures of information architecture in everyday life, check out the Everyday Information Architecture group on Flickr.
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Christian Crumlish Elected To IAI Board
Extractable’s Director of Strategic Services, Christian Crumlish, was recently named to the board of directors for the Information Architecture Institute. The Information Architecture Institute is a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. Founded in 2002, the Institute has over 1000 members in 60 countries. Christian will serve on the board from…
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Part two of the chapter on competitive analysis from Dan Brown's 'Communicating Design'
Digital Web has now published the second part of the Competitive Analysis chapter from Dan Brown’s book, Communicating Design.
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Survey results for third edition of the "Polar Bear Book" published at the IA Institute site
Over the last few months I’ve posted notices here whenever Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (the legendary authors of the first two editions of O’Reilly’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, aka the Polar Bear book) have announced another survey for their third edition. Now the IA Institute has published all of the survey…
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The case for real-looking wireframes
In Boxes and Arrows, Stephen Turbek suggests making wireframes look as realistic as possible, and argues that the old idea of clearly distinguishing wireframes from design is actually counterproductive (Real Wireframes Get Real Results): How many times have you been asked, “So, is the new website going to be black and white too?” after presenting…
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Mini Friday UX Links
Amazing amounts of work going on around here, so it’s been hard to find the time to blog (I know: excuses, excuses). Here are a couple of things I’ve been meaning to post about recently: Jared Spool’s new SpoolCast: I go to 20+ conferences a year and while many of the conferences have excellent programs,…
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The effect of tabbed browsing on web analytics
There is a brief article about the growing adoption of tabbed browsing (still very few people use tabs) and how it may effect analyses of web traffic (Web Analytics: The Results of Tabbed Browsing). The article is kind of thin, but provides some useful food for thought, mostly raising questions without providing answers.
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Axure RP Pro 4.2 is Now Available!
On the recommendation of Terry and Christian I played with Axure this weekend. I was amazed at how well this product worked. In just one hour I was able to download and install the app and create a semi-complex 3 page prototype with login and registration forms. This is a great tool that could definitely…
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Two good articles in ASIS&T's Bulletin
Austin Govella writes about rich interfaces on the web (think AJAX, Flex, etc.), and Samantha Starmer explains how to sell IA to executives.
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Digg's emergent IA
Gene Smith writes in his Atomiq blog The genius of Digg is that it packs a simple user action with the maximum social intent. A digg is a single click – about as simple as it gets – and yet it’s the central component of the community.
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Latest 'Polar Bear' survey up
Beth Koloski, editorial assistant for the third edition of the Polar Bear book has posted an invitation to take another survey: To gather information for the next edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville have been surveying the IA community. The third survey, Software for IA, is now…
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Business process modeling tools
A recent discussion on the IAI list got onto the subject of business process modeling, and the frustrations some folks have had with Rational Rose. Two recommendations for current tools were Processworks from Wizdom (uses the IDEF model), and IBM’s free Task Modeler (an Eclipse-based tool for modelling the user experience, (and for making DITA…
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A rolling content inventory
I meant to post this a while back. In response to an ongoing blog-driven conversation about content inventories, Lou Rosenfeld wrote about the inherent limitations to a traditional content inventory, in that it represents a snapshot in time of what is, often, a moving target. Instead, he proposes the idea of a rolling content inventory:…
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A faceted metadata navigation system
Recently the IA Institute list was discussing faceted search interfaces and Rashmi Sinha wrote “Now you can build your very own faceted metadata navigation system based on Flamenco Download (thank Marti Hearst, not me. I have not worked on Flamenco in a little while).” Flamenco was developed at SIMS (UC Berkeley). Sinha, who was involved…
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A web-based card sorting tool
A while back I posted an entry here about Uzanto’s MindCanvas, an application for doing user research. A week or so ago, Cody Burleson of IBM Global Business Services posted a link to the IA Institute members mailing list about a web-based card sorting product called Websort. I haven’t tried it out, but it looks…
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Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS)
Did you know the W3C has a standard for taxonomies and other classification schemes (Simple Knowledge Organisation System)? Neither did I. But apparently, Jay Fienberg did, since he just mentioned it on the IA Institute mailing list. I doubt it would be of any use in communicating with clients, but I wonder if it might…
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Why you shouldn't start with a Content Inventory (or should you)?
Leisa Reichelt, a Digital Experience Architect, writes Why you shouldn’t start IA with a Content Inventory at her blog, disambiguity. This has spurred an interesting debate in blogs and mailing lists, with a response at Donna Maurer’s blog and further discussion elsewhere (read the comments on the blogs for more). Naturally, once the rhetoric has…
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Survey results for the third edition of the Polar Bear book
Rosenfeld and Morville have posted the results of their first two surveys toward a new edition of their seminal Polar Bear Book. (My responses to the first survey were noted in this entry here at Extra! Extra!)
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IA and UI as building blocks of SEO
In SEO, Information Architecture and Interface Design, Shari Thurow writes: The most important building block of SEO is the information architecture. If you want your HTML/XHTML, audio, video, and image files to generate qualified search engine traffic, the key ingredient to making these files appear relevant are the information architecture and the interface that communicates…
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First page of search results, please
Todd just sent around this BBC News article discussing a US study that found thatsearch users stop at page three and that, in fact, “Most people using a search engine expect to find what they are looking for on the first page of results.” This jibes with my own personal experience. I rarely even go…