Category: Teamwork

  • Technical difficulties

    Technical difficulties

    If I seem at all distracted it may be that my new boss’s old boss who is also possibly the actual boss of the country’s new boss is currently attacking the team I work for, and doxxing my colleagues. 18F’s account on Twitter was apparently deleted (actually a good thing, if you ask me) but,…

  • Super friends

    Super friends

    Between recording sessions and working for the state, I’ve been planning a redux of the one-day remote Design in Product conference and just posted a video over on Linky-Din promoting it.

  • The right question to ask when solving a problem: Why? (not Who?)

    a wise friend of mine once told me when there is a problem you can ask WHO or WHY? WHO is about blame. “Who messed up? Who is at fault? Who should we fire?” but WHY is about learning “Why did this happen? Why didn’t we notice? Why don’t we check for that?” … WHY…

  • When did web designers start calling themselves product designers?

    Read Quote of Christian Crumlish’s answer to When did web designers start calling themselves product designers? on Quora see also Since when did all web designers start calling themselves UX designers

  • Tune In, Cloud On, Rock Out!

    Tune In, Cloud On, Rock Out!

    One thing about working real hard is that a lot of things I’d love to post about never seem to make it to the top of the queue, and then the blog turns into “here are my slides, here is a video of my talk, here is a weird song by the band, here is…

  • Broken Experiences panel at the IA Summit 2012

  • AOL?!? Really?

    Some thoughts on my first few days on my new job as a consumer experience evangelist at AOL, and what I hope to help the team here accomplish.

  • My Yahoo! years

    This post has turned out to be a lot more difficult to write than I expected. Last Tuesday was my final day at Yahoo! I wrote a valedictory post for the YDN blog as my official signoff. It wasn’t easy resigning from Yahoo! I started working there more than three years ago and had a…

  • How may organizations learn?

    At Overlap in Asilomar last weekend, Jay Cross asked the question, “How can we improve learning in organizations?” and filmed a number of us trying to answer that question. Here’s the just-under-ten-minutes YouTube cut: (For my extensive roster of fanboys and stalkers, my segments are approximately 4:23 – 5:16 and 7:20 – 8:36.)

  • Pattern languages interview

    In anticipation of the Pattern Library workshop I’m teaching with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, Will Evans interviewed us for Boxes & Arrows, the premiere user experience magazine online. Will asked great questions and I think he brought out some interesting discussion among us all. Here’s a taste: Question: I have heard it argued that…

  • Help me write my book about presence

    I’m going to write my book, Presence of Mind (working title), on a wiki with as much input from others as possible. I’m also starting a mailing list to discuss online presence and related topics (extending from closely related matters such as identity, reputation, attention, privacy and so on, out to the full array of…

  • As promised, my pattern library talk

    As the third curator of Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library I often receive a lot of thanks and praise from website designers and developers for the way we at Yahoo! have offered this resource to the world. I usually try to explain that much of the goodness happened before I came on board and that I…

  • 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…

  • Do pattern libraries really work?

    I wish I could have been at the recent Chicago IxDA Pattern Library conversation, a participatory discussion about using pattern libraries in practice…. Here are my thoughts on the reported conversation.

  • 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…

  • Groundswell author on blogging a book

    Back when I wrote The Power of Many I blogged about blogging a book in progress and since then I’ve noticed a number of other authors blogging about the same subject. (Contrast this with William Gibson’s decision to stop his blogging when he started his next book.) Now it looks like Forrester analyst Charlene Li…

  • 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:…

  • Scope and spec via task analysis grid

    Todd Warfel shared an interesting deliverable, The Task Analysis Grid, a sort of visual substitute for a requirements document, saying Personally, I’ve yet to come across a requirements document that is usable and doesn’t take a couple of days to get everyone on the same page. So, we use something different – a task analysis…

  • 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…

  • Stakeholder mapping

    On the IA Institute mailing list Patrick Walsh recently asked, “Is Stakeholder Analysis/Mapping a commonly used tool by IAs? It helps to identify all relevant stakeholders at the start of a project and can help ensure that they do not get overlooked.” He also pointed to a 2004 article in Boxes and Arrows by Jonathan…