–Engage

Bill Scott, from Yahoo, and I will be teaching a 1-day workshop at UI11 in Cambridge, MA on Oct 9, 2006. The rest of this amazing conference is the entire week.

We will be teaching a workshopt entitled, Designing Powerful Web Applications using AJAX and RIAs. (description below)

If you’d like to geta nice discount please shoot me an e-mail and I can give you a discount code.

I will also be doing a short 90min. presentation entitled, What is “Rich”? Why Do “Rich”? (description below)

I Also want to take this time to really recommend that you consider Luke Wroblewski’s workshop if you attend UI11. Luke is a fabulous designer who really understands the complex intersections between visual design and interaction design. It should be excellent! It is entitled Site Seeing: Communicating Successfully with Visual Design

DESCRIPTIONS: (click more)

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IA Summit Call for Proposals is open. Give it your best shot … See you in Las Vegas — Dave

IA Summit – Call for proposals

The Information Architecture Summit is a premier gathering place for information architects and for discussion about information architecture. Everyone who touches on IA is welcome to share and learn. Last year’s IA Summit attracted over 500 attendees, including beginners,
experienced IAs, and people in a range of related fields.

In this call, we seek proposals for presentations, panels, research, pre-conference workshops & posters.

All proposals can address core IA principles, emerging trends and technologies, or the business of IA. We are also interested in cross-disciplinary contributions to the practice of IA from related fields such as library science, user experience, interaction design, and user centered design. Sessions may address core IA skills or advanced IA topics.

We encourage submissions from practitioners, academics, and students. We also love hearing from developers, business analysts, managers, and others who work with information architects and/or information architecture.

We also seek research papers. Submissions in this format should makeempirical or theoretical contributions to information architecture. You do not have to be affiliated with an academic institution to submit a research paper.

For more information please see:
http://www.iasummit.org/2007/

I have just finished the books, Designing for Interaction (D4Ix), by Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path (and Board member) and Designing Interfaces (DI), by Jennifer Tidwell of MathWorks. Alone they are good, but together they just encapsulate IxD so beautifully.

Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer
This compact read, does a wonderful job of articulating the basics of IxD: history, theory, and basic practice.

Dan’s book is the perfect introduction to everything IxD. Covering some more detailed areas like Personas, but mostly sticking to a very good overview of the discipline and what it takes to practice it holistically.

Designing Interfaces by Jennifer Tildwell
The books goal is to be a reference guide for Interaction Design patterns. What it ends up being is a definitive guide to the craft of IxD.

The whole time I was reading this book, I was comparing it to another Canical book, O’Reilly’s “Definitive Guide to JavaScript”. The book not only taught the reader how to do JavaScript, but is also a desk reference as important to a Web Developer as “Strunk & White” is to a writer. That’s how I feel about Tidwell’s great work here.

People should buy both of these books, ASAP and courses should be created that use these books in their classes and departments should send them to all their colleagues.

I usually stay away from Politics, but this touches home way too much today. Can we really allow paranoia to begin to set customer service policy in our travel?

What sparks this usual design blogger to post such a set of political questions?

Yesteday through the glory of Digg.com I came across this posting which just shocked and amazed me.

The cruxt of the story is that a man wearing a peace shirt that had Arabic and English writing on it was told to remove his shirt or otherwise hide the “offensive” language. He happened to be a naturalized US citizen of Arab desent. Airport security and a representative from JetBlue could not substantiate their request with any legal cause, but cited that customers have complained about the man since his entry into the terminal.

The seeming background to this story is that post the British attack attempt there was a group of passenger on a British charter from Malaga to London who refused to get on a plane on 2 men of Middle Eastern appearance. It was advertised in the media as a mutiny that the airline capitulated to by re-assigning the people in question to a different flight.

I am appalled that this could also happen in the US considering our history around similar topics. Where does this end? Should I take off my Hebrew shirts in the subway of NYC? Can I not where I a Che Guavera t-shirt when going to the top of the Empire State Building? What about my Hebrew and Arabic peace stickers on my guitar case?

An airline like JetBlue of all airlines to treat a human being like this, just seems like really bad brand management. It seems you really are an airline first and a customer service company second. See! I got the design angle in there.

I came across Ben Hopson’s site today. In it he discusses movement in product design as an important element of a product’s aesthetics.

His work with physical objects with motion as an attribute are very important.

Where I think he can use a little help is in thinking of motion as a particulate of how an object exists in TIME and how time has many dimensions. Motion also alternatively is a change in shape over time, shape of the object or shape of the space the object is temporally residing in.

But his basic beginnings for thinking about how to model, describe and record design of motion is definitely helpful and there is probably a lot that IxD and ID can learn from each other basedon this work.

As a point of comparative reference, I’d refer people to my own writings on foundations of IxD as I think there is a good bit of overlap.

• Foundations Category
• Aesthetics Cateogry

Besides the Apple example (and I’m not REALLY sure of that one) are there any internal people who are doing customer experience design?

What is an innie?
An innie is someone who is a salaried employee of a product producing organization. This is obviously vs. an outtie who usually works for an organization that is highered, even if long term, by that product producing organization.

I have been speaking with a lot of Product Development managers over the last few months at least in the NYC area and not a one has the role of someone who connects the customer experience between the actual product and the rest of the customer experience sphere and I’m really wondering how many organizations have a real sense of what “customer experience” is and that it needs to be a primary internal part of the organization.

The best I have seen is where support (side) applications like knowledge management and actual help documentation are also “owned” by the “user experience” organization regardless of the name. What I haven’t seen is where sales, marketing, support, product design, etc. are all looked after from the point of view of creating a coherent and consistent and well messaged customer experience.

I know some orgs hire out a one time consulting gig like hiring “Creative Good”, but this is not the same as having an internal customer experience team.

What about your org?

South by (x) SouthWest (SXSW) Interactive is asking for help with their panel selection process and created a great AJAX based voting system to do it.

I got a chance to do it Voting for some excellent panels by BJ Fogg, Luke Wroblewski, and Peter Merholz to name a few and really enjoyed the overall experience. I understood it quickly and it seemed very fluid in its interaction model. Kudos!!!

Two times in 1 week I have been approached by publishers who found my pictures on Flickr and then requested to use them (assuming for free). How does this bode for stock photography shops?

The first was a book packager in India that does children’s books in English for the US and UK markets. I had THIS picture of Caiman (fancy Brazilian crocodiles) that I took when I was at the Vancouver Aquarium, while at the IA Summit 2006. They sent a single e-mail requesting the picture with a link to it and then saying that they would give credit. There was no mention of much else and seemed very one-off-ish.

The other was much more interesting. A company that creates travel guides that you can download, called Schmaps contacted me through FlickrMail sending a form e-mail with a link not to my images on Flickr but to a page on their system that showed a series of pictures, a detailed explanation of what they were asking, recognition of my “Creative Commons” license and a quick way for me to approve use, and give them the proper credit, or to decline all or any number of the images they selected.

I applaud their ingenuity in seeing that there is a wealth of good photographic content out there, and how they incorporated the process of using these pictures into their publishing system.