Month: February 2003

Hail the Well Designed Legal Website!. DennisKennedy praises MyShingle as the perfect example of what a law website should be.  The thing I like most about it is that it has an RSS feed, so I've added to list of law blogs with RSS feeds. [Ernie the Attorney]

Law Firm Word Processor Smackdown. The endless debate over which word processing program, Word or WordPerfect, best suits lawyers continues.  It appears that WordPerfect is the winner in this episode. [Ernie the Attorney]

Taxing Internet sales is a bad idea. Read this column by John Dvorak.  I don't like the guy and I think he's a blowhard, but he makes some good points in this article. [Ernie the Attorney]

Practical Persona Creation. Keith Robinson has an interesting article on Evolt about Practical Persona Creation. If you've used personas before, there's not a lot new, but it's a good introduction for colleagues or others not familiar with the technique. He's also followed it up with a couple example personas. [ia/ – information architecture news]

ControlledVocabulary.com. David Riecks pointed me to his site on controlled vocabularies. David discusses the benefits of using CVs and offers a lot of examples of heavily-used controlled vocabularies and thesauri. Since David is a photographer, he also has a special interest in image indexing and devotes a special section to image databases and CVs. [ia/… Continue reading ControlledVocabulary.com

Usability of Specs?. Ever been frustrated when what the developers built didn't match what you designed or architected? Maybe your specification had some usability problems itself. Brian Krause has useful tips in Getting Creative With Specs: Usable Software Specifications – An effective, usable spec serves two main purposes: First, it elicits feedback early, which helps… Continue reading Usability of Specs?

Jakob's best Alertbox in a long time.. The advice on intranets and staff directories is useful in Jakob's latest piece Employee Directory Search: Resolving Conflicting Usability Guidelines. But that's not why I think it's the best Alertbox in recent memory. It's because it shows the complex and paradoxical issues that comes with any signficant design.… Continue reading Jakob's best Alertbox in a long time.

Getting Started with a Career in User Experience. For those of you who might be new to the field of IA or user experience design, or almost anything related really, Marcus Haid has written a nice primer on breaking into the industry for Adaptive Path. [ia/ – information architecture news]

Wi-Fi Alliance sets July as tenative date for 802.11g interoperability testing: News.com reports that products certified as interoperable with the 802.11g could be on shelves as soon as August. I've already seen a few signs that I can't discuss yet that indicate rapid movement among vendors to assure continuous improvement in existing implementations.  [80211b News]

Exploring Office 2003. After Office 11 ships, we face a classic chicken-and-egg scenario. Developers can't really learn the art of modeling data in business documents without user feedback. But users can't provide that feedback until they start actually working with XML-enriched documents. Office 11's XML support isn't a final solution. Rather, it allows for a… Continue reading Exploring Office 2003