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Wednesday, February 27, 2002
If you study design history, you constantly run across designers talking about making well-designed products for cheap prices: good design for everyone. Other than a very few exceptions, how much cheap, good design is out there really? Target gets it, and is stepping up their efforts at associating themselves with good, interesting, low-priced design by famous designers.
So I'm working on developing a faceted heirarchy for a current project. I've noticed a benefit to this approach that other people haven't mentioned (maybe it's a fluke): it's been really easy to explain to the client and to the people on my team. As soon as I show examples of it like Flamenco, and talk about how it could apply to our content, they're just yeah, yeah, and that would let us do this and that too, right? In contrast, I remember trying for the longest time to understand and explain the last content mangement system I worked on, which allowed "aliases" of content items to show up in multiple categories in a monolitic heirarchy, but secretly kept each content item in one permanent place. It just boggled people's minds: they wanted content to "really" be in lots of places. Everyone kept saying, but how will I know the right place to really put it?
Faceting takes that and says, yep, stuff not only can be in multiple categories, it should be in lots of places, go ahead and categorize it however it makes sense. There's no "right" place because it's not just in one slot in the heirarchy.
Anyway, the Comparison of Content Org Methods doc was helpful during the explanation. I've made one or two minor changes to it.
Thursday, February 21, 2002
I wrote a comparison of some content organization methods yesterday. The point was to illustrate how controlled vocabularies, thesauri, or facted classifications are improvements over plain full-text search. The document is just a draft, so please give me feedback rather than distributing it.
Comparison of Content Organization Methods (Word .doc, about 90k)
Wednesday, February 20, 2002
Who can remember where I turned up this article on thesauri. Probably someone smarter than me on SIGIA reccommended it and I'm just now getting around to it. It's a clear comparison of full-text, controlled vocabularies, and thesauri and their impact on database quality--pretty much exactly the thing I have to write for a client this morning. I'll probably add information on faceted metadata as well. If anyone's interested in the pros/cons table that I end up with, I'll post it.
Monday, February 18, 2002
Golan Levin's latest data visualization is pretty cool, as usual. This one shows the relative popularity of integers from 0 to 999999. It takes a few minutes to get the hang of the interface, but it has some nice touches, like the ability to show "associations" for numbers. So, "12345" is very popular because it's a sequence of digits. ISO standard numbers are also popular, as are zip codes for US cities.
Friday, February 15, 2002
Cool project: 3 Million New Jersey tax records running off an iPod hooked to an off the shelf iMac running OSX. There's slightly more on it at MacSlash. (It's complex and butt-ugly as a search interface, of course, but fast.)
Thursday, February 14, 2002
Other people have already pointed to this story about the $28 million cost of redesigning the Wall Street Journal site. Good to know: "Pieces of the Personal Journal actually stopped working with the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape." Standards, baby. I think the new design is nice, but it's no IHT.com.
Here's an interesting confluence of ideas. I've read three things in the last couple of days on the subject of...well, call it the de-quantification of design.
De-quantification because each essay tends to downplay the value of either the detailed capturing of specifications (since customers tend not to read or understand such things) or the quantified "proof" that usability seems to offer designers. As a group, I think they indicates that good and sucessful design happens in addition to detailed specification and usability testing, not because of them.
All three are arguing, in different ways, for the importance of Designer Responsibility, whether that's a progammer-designer, or building architect-designer, or information architect-designer. Responsibility to Design the Right Thing, even when the customer doesn't know what the right thing is. Responsibility to Learn the Customer's Business enough to understand the problems at stake. Responsibility, also, to guide the project the right way, even if that means spending time on less-important-but-still-impressive aspects of it (like the colors used in a program's interface design as opposed to, say, how it handles backwards compatibility).
Wednesday, February 13, 2002
Oh, this is makes me sort of groan with embarassment: "The Evolution Continues Web Techniques is now New Architect." That's the venerable Web Techniques magazine, late to the jargon-party with its new name. Fortunately, the content and editorial emphasis is largely unchanged.
Monday, February 11, 2002
Looks like Google's picked up where the late, lamented ArsDigita Prize left off. The First Annual Google Programming Contest has a $10.000 prize.
Google's also looking for a usability analyst.
Interesting stuff on metadata, search tuning, and UI design at the Flamenco project site. But what's with academics and stupid acronym names? It's like a mania for them: DENIM, SILK, FLAMENCO, SATIN, SUEDE, SUMMIT, BAILANDO. Even things that are unpronouncable as acronyms get the treatment: at UT, we always referred to the IITAP awards as "i-tap, "Acadmic Computing" (ACITS) was "a-sits".
Wednesday, February 06, 2002
Michael Moore blasts Bush on Enron. That it's a fish in a barrel game at this point doesn't matter: Moore's last two paragraphs here are scathing, and therefore satisfying as hell to read if you, like me, assume that Bush's White House is little more than Enron's nice DC branch.
Wired says the Taiwanese website movie88.com is selling streams of new and classic movies for $1 of three days of unlimited access. Of course, there's the predictable complaints about intellectual property. Know what? That price point is just about right for me: streaming video is sort of sucky and I don't want to watch from my desk. I'd even pay a buck a movie, if I could be sure of reasonable streams. Hollywood can't stop this one easily (for reasons given in the article, like the fact that violating US intellectual property is barely considered a crime), and would do well to see how movie88 does.
Maeda spoke at something strangely called the "Superhumanism" conference. His comments are here, although he's repeating himself almost verbatim these days. He's really settling on sort of an "official" Maeda point of view and series of statements. Time for something different.
A bunch of other big names (Naomi Klein, Neville Brody) also spoke at Superhumanism; all transcripts are there for the reading, but I've had no time yet.
Tuesday, February 05, 2002
Ok, this Googlewacking thing is much harder than it seems. I tried "venerable tumbleweed", "haptic sleaze", "winnowed ventricles", "cartographic gambol", and "reticulated omelet" and all of those are on many many pages, although some results were long vocabulary lists and sorta don't count. Right?
Ok, I went from here to here. I can do that because I'm getting basically no money for anything this year in Berlin. Loose change, really. But at least I'm working on projects.
I'm not sure I should say this, but the current eye square (no, that's not eye squared) site is my design. Well, it was before they botched it up. It was a fully standards-compliant, pretty clear site that emphasized their strengths and published research. After I left it for them, they added tons of content that I hadn't been able to beg out of them all month, dumped it all in a frameset, changed the global navigation, and even changed the colors of the thing. I think they sort of decided they do something other than what they actually do in the process. (They do usability testing. Period.) Oh, this is painful, I don't really want to put it on my resume....
But now I'm working on a thesaurus for a big content management project and hanging out with people who think self-organizing interfaces are cool, so I'm happy. And also the guy who does this site works here.
Monday, February 04, 2002
I wonder if Sony knows what they're getting into here. Linux for the Playstation 2?
BBEdit made my life easier last week. Just sayin'.
