Work

12 Nov 2008 0918H

Lumping & splitting among information architects, user experience people, and interactionists

Of all the lousy times to be looking for a new gig, there’s a recession and a marriage banquet and an election and all these things with starting a new life. But I really can’t complain because at least the interviews keep coming, so that signals to me that the market is still fairly strong.
So, [...]

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17 Aug 2008 1710H

Alan Cooper tries to set the record straight

You’ll remember an infamous debate between Kent Beck and Alan Cooper re: XP vs. interaction design waaaay back when. Alan tried to set the record straight at Agile 2008 in Toronto last week.

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17 Aug 2008 0647H

Biting the hand that feeds you

Seems a recent post at grokdotcom has inflamed the information architecture community: hardly worth mentioning really but for the strident responses drawn to that flame. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that interaction design or information architecture is faulty or point out how they are incomplete, and most mature disciplines at some point in [...]

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07 Aug 2008 1216H

Research driving UX projects

We’re in the production stream of a project now, and I’m looking back on an affinity diagram I put together after we’d had a group of about four or five users tell us their loves and hates (such strong words, I know) about a particular online service we offer. Hadn’t looked at it in a [...]

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05 Aug 2008 0800H

In re: interaction design v. information architecture

At one time, before the dotcom world ended, people would put out these crazy job descriptions where they wanted what used to be called a webmaster: someone who coded, designed, researched, and managed the web services for a company or an organization. They wanted someone who was familiar with major scripting and programming languages, someone [...]

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30 Jul 2008 0641H

Brulant + Rosetta: crazy delicious?

Well, not quite. Since the dotcom days, I have always been somewhat suspicious of firms that have grown by merger and acquisition. In those days, rolling up firms for their assets and clients seemed to be the predominant exit strategy, and all the equity built up by the talent within went for naught as they [...]

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02 Jun 2008 0624H

UX-dojo-storming PotteryBarn.com

Oh. Looks like W-S brands’ UX & Dev teams down at the north end of Van Ness have been hard at work lately. Let’s look the numbers:

#21 on the Internet Retailer Top 100,
$1.1 billion worth of stuff sold online last year, up 19% from the previous year,
7.1 million visitors a month,
6% conversion rate,
Average ticket of [...]

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26 May 2008 0839H

Stop kvetching, start doing

The other night was a local IxDA event which they graciously arranged for it to be broadcast via internet, which was frankly genius in intent, although the execution of it was rather poor — speaker positioned in front of a window, no backup microphone to relay the sound to the online audience. If I am [...]

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06 Mar 2008 0906H

Reworking wireframes

Probably one of the most frustrating things about this type of work is the amount of rework that is required due to changing or poorly gathered business requirements, and in fact, sometimes the business side is actually using hard code and layouts as a kind of sandbox for their own ideas before rejecting or accepting [...]

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01 Feb 2008 0636H

Observations on working with stakeholders

Sorry, been busy ramping up at my new gig, but, I was recently reminded of something a pretty smart guy, Ahmed Sako, once told me when I was working in New York: we are all eventually going to be technologists, someday. And he was right: in our line of work, any business is inevitably going [...]

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