Archive for May 2007

31 May 2007 0739H

Are IAs really actually part of an FA/BA team? Are engineers really to blame for bad IxD?

What if information architects are, in fact, the ura to the omote, or the nage to the uke, of the functional/business analyst team? Just throwing this out there. Pardon the pun.
Are engineers really to blame for bad interaction design and information architecture? Or is it more the case that the IAs/IxDs really didn’t penetrate [...]

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30 May 2007 0408H

Edge cases in interaction design

Designing for edge cases takes a lot of time out of the design process, but we don’t have personas to design scenarios around this time. We have a state about which we don’t have any prior body of data or knowledge except our own collective experience and competitive analysis.
Of course we can begin with [...]

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23 May 2007 1558H

And so. . . checkout

As used as we are to one-click e-commerce, you never think you will have those conversations around a table with a half dozen people about what if the user wants to add multiple instances of an item, some of which need to be giftwrapped, some of which don’t, and how they will be added to [...]

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20 May 2007 2349H

Updates

Been pretty depressed lately, the kind of depression where you just want to lie in bed and not do anything, but, occasionally you have a good conversation with someone on a plane, like I did this evening with a remarkable young lady who comes up from Kansas City to ride horses in Gilberts, near Elgin, [...]

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15 May 2007 2209H

Picking at WebSphere Commerce 5

I’m unhappy with the way Websphere Commerce 5 handles customer addresses, particularly this quick checkout that comes out of box. Where is the hierarchy. If I delete one will the rest exist or will it maintain referential integrity? Why are there, all of a sudden, three addresses for a consumer, one for their registration profile, [...]

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12 May 2007 0953H

Shameless plug for Sage

I notice most people come to this site via Google Feedfetcher, Bloglines, and Firefox Live Bookmarks, but I wouldn’t be able to get my news without Sage, a plug-in to handle RSS feeds for Firefox browsers, mostly cos I don’t like how Firefox handles the taxonomy for RSS feeds by commingling them along with page [...]

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10 May 2007 1732H

BusinessWeek design podcast on design in China

Sad. The only time I can blog lately is when I’m stuck in Detroit at the airport and ironically, it would have been faster to drive back to Chicago from here at this point. Anyway, on to the blog.
Gordon Bruce talks about Design in China, implied, Westerners, designing for Chinese consumers, on this podcast from [...]

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09 May 2007 0627H

Travel tip: Lost your cellphone charger?

As I have done now, twice? Abandoned in some lonely hotel room somewhere like a used prophylactic? Those Motorola Razr Cellphone Chargers aren’t cheap either. But never fear, road warriors! As I’ve learned, you can recharge your phone using the same USB cable you use to connect your camera to your computer! Or at [...]

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02 May 2007 0443H

Designing Services

Dan Boyarski, head of the D-School at CMU, talks about designing services on this podcast, and mostly, about CMU taking leadership on this area.
Just some random jottings here. I’m still hearing a lot of talking about this shorthand phrase, “design thinking,” and skepticism at what is now being labelled ethnography and user-centered design techniques. I [...]

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01 May 2007 0845H

On videogames that don’t suck

Some of the readers of this blog play video games, I am assured. Among my squaddies, with whom I have fought seven online global conflicts and been killed thousands of times, not much has changed over the last 10 years, except that video games have become more directly social, to be played with others simultaneously, [...]

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