Category: Uncategorized

Faucet Facets: Best practices for multifaceted navigation. In “Faucet Facets”, Jeffrey Veen proposes that there are better alternatives to rigid hierarchies (i.e. those that don't support multiple parents or broad terms (i.e. polyhierarchy)). Faceted classification being all the rage with IAs these days, he proposes best practices for designing navigation based on a faceted approach.… Continue reading Faucet Facets: Best practices for multifaceted navigation

Building Brand into Structure. Walk into any K-Mart. Then walk into any Target. You'll see similar merchandise (substitute Martha Stewart for Michael Graves), similar target audiences, even similar prices. The difference between the stores is brand. If you followed usability gurus like Jakob Nielsen blindly, brand would have little to no place in information and… Continue reading Building Brand into Structure

Public Lettering: A Walk In Central London. This site is based on a walk by Phil Baines for his graphic design students which was then written up for the 1997 ATypI conference… [xBlog: Visual thinking linking | XPLANE]

Amazon Memoir: The Oft-Told Story. Yes, it's another dot-com memoir. Yes, it retells an old story. But Mike Daisey's 21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com is also a pretty good read. Review by Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]

Ghosts of Xanadu. Backlinking crudely approximates the two-way linking feature of an early hypertext system invented by Ted Nelson called Xanadu. Nelson coined the term Hypertext—the linking of information and a system for viewing it—in 1963 (its actual invention is thought to be by Vannevar BushD in 1945), but his project was hampered by the… Continue reading Ghosts of Xanadu

DevShed: Getting Started with PHP Fusebox. The Fusebox web methodology may change the way you approach architecting data-driven web applications. The latest version of Fusebox is the most scalable and effective incarnation of a “web box” – style architecting approach. Created by Steve Nelson, Fusebox has been further popularized by the arrival of a PHP… Continue reading DevShed: Getting Started with PHP Fusebox

Free Agent Nation. I recently read the book Free Agent Nation (which has a website). It’s about people like me: free agents, consultants, writers, independent developers, home office folks. If you’re a free agent or thinking about becoming one I recommend this book to you. It was fun to read—inspiring, even. And it opened my… Continue reading Free Agent Nation

Book Review for: Usability: the Site Speaks For Itself. According to this Book Review for the new book: Usability: the Site Speaks For Itself, “There are no hard-and-fast rules for usability on the Web, which is why this book steers away from the rigid rules of gurus. Instead, this book looks at six very different,… Continue reading Book Review for: Usability: the Site Speaks For Itself

Could some IA work have helped avoid 9/11?. This may seem a big reach for some. But if you read Seymour Hersch's article in this week's New Yorker, and you actually DO information architecture for enough people to see the connections, it starts being pretty clear that the US government intelligence and law enforcement communities… Continue reading Could some IA work have helped avoid 9/11?

Jon Udell: Personal RSS Aggregators. Quote: “Has RSS run out of steam? Quite the opposite. There's more action than ever, but it's shifted into a decentralized mode. That's just what the RSS network needed to do in order to truly operate at Internet scale. “ Comment: Jon Udell's last column for Byte. [Serious Instructional Technology]