I came across a useful site by Peter J. Bogaards, founder of Dutch company Bogieland and a recognised leader in the field of IA, Information Design and UCD.
InfoDesign is a useful resource site which contains links to numerous Information Design blogs, events, articles, resources, links and definitions.
The International Institute for Information Design, based in Vienna Austria, is a body concerned over the better understanding of cultural and economic issues associated with visual communication with a focus on removing the social and language barriers of graphic information design.
DigitalWeb Mag have published an interview with Jeffrey Veen following his Keynote speech from the WebVisions 2003 conference in the US.
Jeffrey Veen, a partner of Adaptive Path a User Experience company in the US and the author of The Art and Science of Web Design (which I bought way back in 2001), discusses ways that designers can innovate within the current economic climate. Although the interview is US centric it is a valuable read even for designers here in Australia.
Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path, has written an interesting blog entry with great user comments titled, Usability != User Experience. The blog looks at the definition of what exactly is Usability and makes references to Whitney Quesenbery’s Five E’s Of Usability.
I found the article+comments really interesting as it reminded me about the recent discussions on words used by practicioners in the field, eg. The use of the word Design when refering to UCD, Visual, Information Design, etc, and the more recent discussion of whether the word “Architecture” is a misuse of the word in Information Architecture.
Here is the transcript of last weeks (Thurs 10 July) ABC’s Catalyst science programme, Genius of Junk, which covered the patenting of Junk DNA.
The television programme commented on Dr. Malcolm Simons (North Geelong, Victoria) and his controversial process of owning the patent rights to the junk fragments of DNA material (the non-coding part of our DNA) and stiring up the science community on the topic of control and ownership of our genetic material.
Douglas Bowman from Stop Design has written a great article with useful links, for using MovableType (a Blog CMS) for more than just blogging.
He shows this with a practical example, by converting his portfolio site into a MT powered section. It is a great read and shows the endless possibilities and boundaries where some tweaks and smart coding can take you.
The BBC reports on a New mobile ringtone that annoys mosquitos.
SK Telecom, a South Korea mobile phone operator is offering users a new service that claims to repel mosquitoes.
Bose have release a new headset which lets you cancel out sound and enjoy the sound of silence. Pretty nitfty.
If only everything came also in these cancelling and “anti” forms, for example I can imagine anti-salt, when you accidently add to much salt in that favourite dish, or soup. Now that would be something!
Here is an article on the new Bose headphones from Technology Review.
Here is the 102 page sketchbook of the talented Kevin Cornell.
His sketchbook contains his documentation of process as a full composition of images from July 2002 and February 2003, a collection from front to back cover.
The beautiful portfolio website of New Zealand photographer, Geoff Budd.
His portfolio includes images from London, Paris, Istanbul, Gallipoli, Prague and Barcelona.
Here are two interesting articles by Mauro Marinilli on User Interface Design commenting on Usability Heuristics such as, knowing your user, minimising load, maintaining consistency following standards and displaying system state.
The first article also looks at Short Term and Long-Term Memory and a few other high-level tips. There are also great links to valuable Usability links.
Article1: The Theory Behind User Interface Design, Part One
Article2: The Theory Behind User Interface Design, Part Two
It looks like I’m not the only one excited about this super efficient article by Danny Goodman in O’Reilly’s Dev Center titled Super-Efficient Image Rollovers.
They are lean, mean and cover 3 states, Normal, MouseOver and MouseDown, see this example.
There are some great Interface and Interaction Design works in David Lu’s portfolio website.
Some of his physical interactive projects include, a Phone Dial Web browser, visualization work such as this XML based 2D Navigator and this Interface design project, Responsive Letterform3, which visualizes characters from the keyboard using an organic line.
An interesting article by Warren Harrison from IEEE titled, Whose Information Is It Anyway?, comments on a presentation from ICSE 2003 (the International Conference on Software Engineering) which looked at a software engineering tool that improves the collection of information from email logs, revision control systems, and other development information repositories as aggregated data (XML, etc).
The article acknowledges the advantages of Aggregated Information, but more importantly, identifies the comparison of usefulness and intension when it comes to collecting external data and protecting privacy.
Processes and tools which seemed impossible years ago, are today being discussed in relation to privacy, ethics and copyright, as more and more of these tools are becoming common today.
It is a worthwhile read.
I came across this really interesting 2002 article by Peter Morville titled, The Age of Findability, which comments on the importance of information delivery and result relevance in information design.
The article makes a bold statement that Findability will eventually be recognized as a central and defining challenge in the development of web sites, intranets, knowledge management systems and online communities, more so than, user experience design, Interaction design and Usability.
The article was originally published in Boxes and Arrows and is a very interesting read. The original article also has some interesting discussions and comments.
Here are interesting related articles:
* Wayfinding Strategies and Behaviors in Large Virtual Worlds
* Wayfinding Is Not Signage
