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Thursday, August 30, 2001
In case you were wondering: Heather and I are moving to Berlin for a year starting Sunday. Heather is working on her PhD in Art History and has a grant to work in archives and libraries in Germany for a year. I'm tagging along.
Heather works on East/West German art in the 1950s, a period when both sides were coming to grips not only with the political state of things after the war, but with the aesthetic state as well. Each side had some strong opinions about the other, and about what constituted good or appropriate art.
Me, I don't know what I'll be doing. As the spouse of a student, I'm sort of given the same kind of visa status: allowed to be there for a year, probably allowed to work about 20 hours a week with no special paperwork, and best of all, hugly discounted international air travel (thank goodness). I'm not going into it wanting to make a ton of cash--we should be able to live fine on Heather's grant--so I hope to be able to offer myself at a low low price to some design firm in Berlin. I'd love to work for frog, MetaDesign, Fork, or ID-Group. Experience is more valuable than income for this year, so I can probably convince someone to let me do something.
No contact information for us in Berlin yet, though the heyotwell blog and address will live on the whole year. I'll probably do a Berlin blog seperate from the generally IA and design stuff here.
Sunday, August 26, 2001
I've been meaning to mention two books I've recently enjoyed a lot. "High Stakes" by Charles Ferguson is the story of Vermeer Technologies, which came up with FrontPage and then sold it to Microsoft. Now, that sounds like pure evil, and I would've agreed until I read this book. This guy is smart, damn smart, and what they did in terms of product strategy and product design is really impressive. Besides, "High Stakes" is genuinely engrossing. I was up late several nights reading it. Will he get the valuation he wants in second-round VC funding? I'm telling you, he makes it fascinating. There's more meat in here about product design and strategic planning than in five other books. Plus, Ferguson is gossipy as hell, and often very funny. And his dire warnings about Microsoft, written two years ago, are coming uncannily true in the whole .NET thing.
I've also started Douglas Hofstader's "Metamagical Themas." Hofstader is the cognitive science guy who wrote "Goedel, Escher, Bach" which I've been too scared to approach for about ten years now. "MT" is a collection of short articles, and is slightly more accessible. He's fascinating because he's interested in (among many other things) how semantic meaning can come out of structure, which is something I've been thinking about lately in IA. He also has some fun chapters on Lisp which I'm enjoying.
Friday, August 17, 2001
I'm back from getting....ulp...married! No web links to this topic, folks.
Now we're trying to do a million things to get ready for our big move to Berlin for a year. Heather has a grant to do research for her dissertation, and I have a license to loaf for a year. Actually, I really don't want to be a tourist full-time for a year, so I'm hoping to find some kind of work.
Friday, August 03, 2001
Got to love Steve Krug's post in the blackbeltjones discussion mentioned two posts down: "#2. No point in asking why. Like '42', it just turns out that that's the answer, no matter how much some of us may want to believe that 'information longs to be free.'"
Yep.
Wednesday, August 01, 2001
This is pretty cool: re-edit the shower scene from Psycho using a simple interface. Flash 4 or more required. Could do without the draggable windows, though....
A little discussion has broken out at blackbeltjones over the old issue of "on a big site, where does content live?"
1. A single location (i.e. one path to the content)
2. A single location, but multiple access routes (i.e. many paths, but clearly within one category in a structure)
3. Able to be accessed from *anywhere* and have no 'location'
The consensus is that #2 is the most typical and comprehensible of the options, although Amazon has implemented a very usable #3.
I'm doing some follow-up work writing user documentation for the maintenance of a very large, very high-profile site that I had done much of the early IA on about 10 months ago. It's not a commerce site, it's a reference site, and so (as I remember) we designed it as a #2. Well, things being what they are, other people have had nearly a year to mess with our original ideas, and now the site is a #3. Sweet jeebus is it ever a #3. And it's bad. For example, the "About the Company" materials (roughly 8 pages of stuff) "lives" in three distinct places on the site. Depending on how you browse to it, there are three totally diffferent breadcrumb trails and global navigation tab configurations. This was done in the name of flexibility; everybody wanted to be able to do everything with their content, and so they can.
I think that's not just bad for users, but especially bad for site maintainers of which there will be very many in this large international organization. It means that you have to understand what's "local" to the content as published in a specific place on the site, and what's "globally" carried around with it as a genuine attribute of the content "chunk" itself. It's profoundly hard to explain this stuff in documentation (the wretched UI of the content management tools don't help either).
Amazon does do the #3 with great results: stuff I'm interested really is often just one click from wherever I am at the moment. Amazon has downplayed categories as a way of zeroing in on the book you want: browse through them and fully half the screen tries to lead you directly to titles tailored to you. I think that for a #3 structure to work, you need to incorporate user-generated--and ideally annotatable--"trails" (to use Vannevar Bush's term) through the material.
But I'm convinced it fails on anything that requires browsing to serve reference needs. On my current project, they seem to have mistaken the point of database driven publishing to be the ability to pour any piece of content, or indeed any subsection of the site architecture, into any place to the detriment of usable value.
Good article on personas at Cooper Interactive.
