paper & pencil

Good Reads Weeks of Sept. 14 & Sept. 21

Improving the transition from paper to Photoshop
Tips on sketching concepts and moving from analog to digital tools.

Can Information Be Saved?
Possible implications of not preserving digital information and the challenges of preserving it in a way that would be readable in the future.

How I Draft an Information Architecture
Start by making it up, measure against users and content, tweak, repeat until it feels right.

Bing Visual Search Interesting, but Needs More Purpose
Review of Bing's visual search compared to Google Fast Flip

Sustainable mobility #1: think more, move less
Instead of findings alternative fuel sources, John Tackara says we "need to re-think the way we use time and space."

The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine
The rise of Good Enough Tech such as the Flip camcorder and why it happened.

Missing the Point in the Design of Electronic Medical Records
EMR's can be effective but they currently suffer from poor visual layout and organization of the information.

Systems Thinking: A Product Is More Than the Product
Products are services and it's al about the experience. Systems thinking helps companies think through the entire experience, in various stages.

Breaking Up Large Documents for the Web & Part 2
Excerpt from Ginny Redish's new book on writing and presenting content on the web.

Lisa Strausfield: Redesigning Government
Work history of Lisa Strausfield who is going to be using her IA skills to bring more awareness to government facts.

The Duct-Tape Programmer
KISS principle in relation to software development programmers. "Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it."

Empathy and Emotionally Intelligent Signage
Using language to generate empathy and influence behavior.

Color Lab with Flickr

Thanks to the weekly signposts from Adaptive Path, I found this fun color tool from Idée Inc. They use an API from Flickr for all the photos.

Speed Up Application Development

Companies like Citigroup are investing in simulation software, like iRise, to help speed up development.

At a time when businesses are asking CIOs to help deliver innovative changes quickly, old-world application development schedules simply may not fly. Simulation tools, targeted mostly toward business analysts, offer a novel solution. They also fit in well with the agile programming trend.

j-flow

peter boersma & jacco nieuwland created J-Flow and presented it at the IA Summit:

a tool that allows designers to present designs for interactive applications. The result is a series of HTML files with pop-up images of application screens shown in a hierarchical set of flows.

The tool is based on Microsoft Visio and consists of stencils, templates and
macros that link the flows and screens.

4096 color wheel

this color wheel contains a palette of 4096 colors - web-safe and web-smart. both use 3 pairs of hex digits. also shows you the unsafe equivalent.

you can type in the hex code for an unsafe color and get the closest web-safe and web-smart equivalents.

web-based e-notebooks

paper on JoDI: Implementation Challenges Associated with Developing a Web-based E-notebook

the paper looks at Information Assimilation - they shorten to IA, which confuses me since I think Info Architecture whenever I see 'IA' - the process of

gathering, editing, annotating, organizing, and saving of Web information, as well as the tracking of ongoing Web work processes.

and how browsers are an insufficient tool.

information assimiliation tasks:

1. Gather Web information (i.e. text, images, lists, tables and hyperlinks)
   by copying and pasting from multiple Web pages into an e-notebook; collect
   archival data pertaining to when and where original Web information was
   published
2. Edit original Web elements as stored in an e-notebook
3. Annotate e-notebook contents (i.e. add/delete text, highlight information,
   create cross-references)
4. Organize e-notebook contents (i.e. control the spatial layout, re-structure,
   combine similar information together, etc.)
5. Save the contents of an e-notebook
6. Track (represent) and save ongoing work processes.

my typepad site is pretty much a web-based e-notebook but I'm dependent on the sites I linked to remaining on the web and/or remaining at the same url. the authors look at tools that will allow users to save information (text & images) from the web to their local computer with little effort as well as be able to annotate those pieces of information.

another much needed tool, states the authors, is one that will

help them track, remember and rejoin their ongoing work processes.

the paper goes on to list a number of e-notebook systems that have been developed and to review one of them, NetNotes. they determined that this solution is the best currently available, but still limited.

using the tube map for process flows

martin kay of kay initiatives in the UK uses elements of the famous Harry Beck London Underground "tube" map for creating process maps.

guide to using the elements is available as a PDF.

and he offers (for a fee) a
powerpoint file containing all of the elements.

example:

another color tool

EasyRGB :

Search for colors complements to your RGB values.
Create color harmonies, combinations and themes.
From your main (or background) color select trim and accents tones.

usability methods toolbox

James Hom has created The Usability Methods Toolbox with explanations for inquiry, inspection, and testing methods including related techniques such as prototyping and affinity diagrams.

most of these methods and techniques apply to interation design as well. i guess it all depends on how wide or narrow your definition of usability.

there is quite an extensive bibliography on the site as well.

back to common sense

matt jones on process:

I've definitely seen process become dogma in a number of workplaces, particularly around user-centred design.

Theory: because it's actually common-sense.

Two points on common-sense from my experience:

1. It's very hard to tell people there's no common sense in what they are doing if you come into an organisation or team. Even harder perhaps if you are trying to sell it into a company from the outside.

2. It's very hard to keep the common sense in a team that has it, when it will be assailed from all sides by nonsense. Which, of course, might seem like common sense (and might well be) from the other party's point-of-view.

worse is people who have no common sense, then you get asked to develop a process for those people who won't follow it correctly, if at all, because . . . they have no common sense!

jones says that strict adherence to a process causes people to lose confidence in their own decisions. they won't look to their experiences, intuition and common sense because the process tells them their decisions need to be based on steps x, y,z. he uses user-centered design methodologies as his example:

I've seen entire teams hooked on user-tests, unable to take a decision until they get the word back from the beyond the two-way mirror. Designers' and producers' confidence in their own experience gets dented. Diminishing returns on usability testing, compared to project hold-ups. Personas from past projects stalk them like the usability undead. The work becomes no fun, the common sense is gone. Projects pall, or worse, stall.

he concludes that processes such as user-centered design methodologies are good as long as you have leadership that can help steer staff to use their own common sense with the processes.