Last week Jeff Gothelf wrote a great article on the value of involving the UX designer in the development team’s daily scrums, pointing to Karate Kid as a way to be patient through the initial run of meetings. It’s great to see someone write this up. It’s an approach that we made part of our [...]
A few years back, let’s say 2006, iA put together an impressive redesign of Facebook that provides a much cleaner feel and a cool horizontal information flow from less to more specific. Filter to info stream to reaction as they put it in the article. I dig the clear hierarchy of the columns and the [...]
In his Spoolcast interview Dan Brown provides some interesting perspectives on documentation and design deliverables, using his book Communicating Design as a starting point. Growing documents Brown begins by suggesting that designers start documents with a basic nucleus of necessary information then adding detail in layers. He also put forward the idea that ideal documentation [...]
At TED 2006, Hans Rosling presented some cool data visualizations created to shed light on trends in Human Development (specifically health and economic prosperity). He and his nonprofit Gapminder have done some cool things with visualization to bring out aspects of the data that get ignored, but as he notes, we haven’t got the holy [...]
Seeking new technologies to leverage a couple months ago, I had an opportunity to review microformats as a way of making content more portable on a site project. Content + microformats = crazy delicious It’s easy to find developers and markup standardistas lauding microformats as the next great thing, and as a currently-implementable stepping stone [...]
Going through web app bookmarks on ma.gnolia tonight I happened on something curious: a prayer request management and tracking application. At first I wondered if this was for real or if someone thought they’d channel their web 2.0 energy into a “2.0 for Jesus” satire. Initial reactions aside, this makes a lot of sense for [...]
Austin Govella gets an interesting conversation going about technological developments swirling around what some are calling the “come to me” web. Structured content, microformats, json, rss and atom flavored web feeds, and other technologies are making our information more portable, but where do people fit into this improved info portability world? How will people use [...]
In my regular blog rounds, I tend to keep an eye on Jorge Arango’s jarango blog. Part of it’s a common interest in IA, but a large part of it’s been to see how another IA bilingue handles the issue of blogging in multiple languages. Until recently, jarango had separate English and Spanish language sections, [...]
Last spring the music baton meme raged through the web development blog community like a campfire through the Southern California brush. Looking through it, I’m curious whether the meme would stand up without the “I tag/pass to” part of it, so here’s my thinking on memes, an experiment, and my version of the meme. On [...]
Reviewing my posts thus far I find I’m running afoul favorite pair of writing difficulties: It’s too long, son! What do you need all those words for anyway? This weekend’s Buffy entry really drove the problem home. That is, the fifty times I’ve looked over my little 2 page essay and realized that it boils [...]