It's been a while since I last blogged about Google's fabulous holiday logos.

Since I really enjoyed the Halloween edition this year, I felt it was time again to pay homage to Google's logo designer, Dennis Hwang.

If you're really a fan, you can pick up a couple of Dennis' logos on tees at the Google store. IMO, not enough selection...there should probably be a poster of logos per year at least!

07:32 PM | | linkme | home

And here's another list pointer. William Hudson alerted folks to a draft of an article he's done for the Cutter IT Journal. It's a simulated conversation between a UCD consultant and an XP team leader: (PDF). It starts:

eXtreme Programming and other Agile processes provide a middle ground between chaos and over-elaborate processes sometimes referred to as "death by documentation." A particularly attractive aspect of the Agile approach for many teams is its willingness to accommodate change no matter how advanced development might be. However, this very flexibility can cause user interface design issues and ensuing usability problems.

Adopting a user-centered approach to user interface design can address these issues ...

I'm assuming that XP/Agile are primarily relevant in software applications development. Are people using it for web sites or web applications? Inquiring minds and all that!

07:13 PM | | linkme | home

Here's another email list tidbit. Whitney Quesenbery pointed to an interesting initiative across the pond: it's the UK-based Skills Framework for the Information Age Foundation (SFIA). From the what is SFIA? page:

The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) provides a common reference model for the identification of the skills needed to develop effective Information Systems (IS) making use of Information Communications Technologies (ICT). It is a simple and logical two-dimensional framework consisting of areas of work on one axis and levels of responsibility on the other.

There's a section that describes the structure of the SFIA framework, which describes "what ICT practitioners and users do."

When I get a few moments, I'm looking forward to exploring this in more detail. There may well be some useful concepts for the whole "big picture" UX/ED issue.

06:57 PM | | linkme | home

My apologies to those across the ponds for this US-centric entry, but I came across Graphic Design USA magazine in a Google search and thought it worth a mention. Turns out you can get a free subscription if you're stateside and remotely involved with the field. They also have a feature or two per issue online; you can review their archives page, which goes back to 2001.

This month's feature is on edgy stock visuals from leading agencies. My fave is the Rupert Everett lookalike in the desert (see right).

Other interesting features include designer-friendly companies (who "understand the creative community, develop products and services for that community, and support its endeavors and interests"), trends in logo design, and standout annual reports.

06:50 PM | | linkme | home

The SIGIA and lists had some interesting pointers today for folks interested in the issues of information literacy and the digital divide. On the info literacy side, there's this executive summary of Adult Literacy in America (for free) and this slightly older, and international piece on Literacy in the Information Age (for a fee). The first took an interesting approach in their study, surveying 26,000 adults in order to get a richer picture of the literacy issue rather than simply estimating the number of "illiterates."

The aim of this survey is to profile the English literacy of adults in the United States based on their performance across a wide array of tasks that reflect the types of materials and demands they encounter in their daily lives.

On the digital divide side, there's this CNET article that describes this report: Charting and Bridging Digital Divides (PDF):

Lack of access to the Internet and related digital technologies is a problem not only in emerging markets but also in advanced countries, a comparative study of eight markets has shown.

This study also touches on the issue of non-use by people who actually have Internet access (something the Pew Internet Project has also reported).

05:52 PM | | linkme | home

Found this useful summary of Gladwell's . I think I'm a maven, and suspect that Fred Sampson has maven and/or connector qualities too.

How about you?

06:34 PM | | linkme | home

I meant to get to this earlier, but peterme has written volumes on his weblog about some recent UX/ED conferences. First, he writes four entries about the HITS 2003 conference (one, two, three, and a postscript). If you're so inclined, you can get HITS slides and posters.

Next, he waxed poetic about About, With and For in two parts (one and two). This conference was a 1+ day event at IIT immediately after HITS2003 and seemingly geared towards a student audience (IIT students attend free).

He was less happy with a conference he didn't attend: AIGA's Power of Design. Peter was not impressed with the seeming "circle jerk" supposedly described by Dirk Kneymeyer's notes from the conference. Not sure I agree with him there, but his view seems widely shared among the non-AIGA UX/ED folks. Perhaps a challenge for DUX2005?

05:33 PM | | linkme | home

I got a few yucks out of this one. Here's FAQ2859 from Compaq:

Where do I find the "Any" key on my keyboard?

The term "any key" does not refer to a particular key on the keyboard. It simply means to strike any one of the keys on your keyboard or handheld screen.

This FAQ entry was created on 10/8/2001 and updated on 10/25/2002. Why the update? According to Ralph Lord (who frequents the same lists I do), the original version was written by author bgates and read:

Compaq is aware of this problem and is currently researching a solution. Please check back with our website for patches or updates which may address this problem.

Ralph writes that the author of this first entry was fired. Interesting that it apparently took a year or so to discover! While amusing, there is also some semblance of cautionary tale there too. It had been a while, so I went and did a Google search for . Interesting that buddy Thom Haller had slots 1 and 2, while I had number 3. But poking through the other search results ultimately sent me back to Richard Saul Wurman, who talked about the "disease of familiarity" in both the original Information Anxiety and its sequel: . Wurman writes:

Familiarity breeds confusion. Those afflicted are the experts in the world who, so bogged down by their own knowledge, regularly miss the key points as they try to explain what they know. ... We have all had teachers who we have said are extraordinarily bright, yet we cannot understand what they are saying.

Sigh...the more I think about it, the less this FAQ is that amusing. On the other hand, the original response (and author) is still pretty funny...just not that helpful!

07:40 PM | | linkme | home

I spent the first fifteen or so years of my career in fairly serious software development. In '97, I moved to the web, and while there are some healthy tech challenges there (particularly doing web-based applications development), the two worlds tend to exist separately. Or so I'm thinking, because I've been completely unaware about the agile software development and extreme programming (XP) movements--both of which have recently been discussed on the interaction design/architects list.

Presumably these will have a lot of relevance to the web, yet I'm not sure how much cross-pollination is occurring. What am I missing?

07:04 PM | | linkme | home

Ah, here's a great pointer from the fine folks at Digital Web Magazine...it's Web Design Practices.

The site has been developed by Heidi Adkisson (an "interactive architect" ... oy!) in order to make her masters thesis (an MS in Technical Communication...yes!) more accessible. In it, she reveals the results of surveying 75 leading e-commerce sites...how they handled web design essentials such as global navigation, breadcrumbs, search, and link colors. As she notes, common practice doesn't equal best practice, but knowing what is common can help inform your own design decisions.

Heidi has recently launched a new weblog, called IA THINK, which looks at "Interactive architecture, writing, and design." One of her recent entries is about Geoffrey Moore's which I'm reading for class (after having read just for fun...my masters thesis used diffusion of innovation theory as its framework). Looks like another feed to add to the aggregator!

06:15 PM | | linkme | home

Congrats to Mike Lee on an amazing accomplishment: the first photo in the to-be-released-on-Monday photography compilation called America 24/7. You've probably heard of this project, but if not, all the photos in the volume were taken with digital cameras during a one week period last May. A (perhaps?) surprisingly few photos were from amateurs, which makes Mike's one-in-a-million contribution truly noteworthy.

The 24/7 folks (publishers Dorling Kindersley, who also do the cool Eyewitness Travel Guides) have previews of the covers of the state volumes that will be available a year from now. This may be damaging to the pocketbook, as I am very likely to pick up the volumes from states that I've spent time in (or want to spend time in). Too bad they don't have larger images...many of them are visually stunning.

As Mike notes, there is a tendency towards the sentimental, family-oriented photos, but the publishers aren't dummies...at the discounted prices ($35 at either or Barnes & Noble) this is likely to be one popular coffee table book. And the personalized cover option is a slick feature. This could make a very nice holiday gift this year!

09:57 PM | | linkme | home

Ken Friedman (of list fame) posted this interesting snippet today about an issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology on E-commerce, the Internet and the Environment.

According to the announcement:

Articles in the special issue analyze the environmental consequences of telecommuting and assess the transformation of the wholesale, warehouse and retail sectors of the economy by network technology. The environmental impact of conventional and electronic approaches to grocery shopping, book selling and scholarly journals are compared and the possibility of using product tags to improve recycling is explored. The research ranges from the U.S. to Germany, from Finland to Japan.

A lot of the articles are really about the environment (including one on greenhouse gas emissions and home grocery delivery in Finland! Others are more generically relevant to the whole society and technology conversation, particularly the reviews of books like Castells' Rise of the Network Society and Brown and Daguid's The Social Life of Information. Interesting that their method for making these available is to simply create PDFs of the relevant print pages...so in some cases, you'll need to skip over text in the first column!

Funding from the NSF (where I would love to work some day) has enabled them to make this issue available for free. However, you do have to register to download articles.

11:15 PM | | linkme | home

Once again, Conrad Taylor does not disappoint. His Line thickness, a means of expression (PDF, 1.7M) looks at both the reasons why lines in illustrations are important from a cognitive perspective as well as how intentionally manipulating them (both in drawing and through computer-based tools like Illustrator) can aid in reader understanding. I can't wait for part 2!

07:03 PM | | linkme | home

I'm just back from a weekend in Baltimore, where the seven other program committee members and I turned over 400 proposals into what will be STC's 51st annual conference in May. Alas, you'll have to wait a bit before I give any sneak session previews!

We managed to spend at least as much time getting a look at all that balmer (as the locals say) has to offer attendees. From our fab location in the Inner Harbor, we walked or water taxi'd to places like the Aquarium, the touristy Harborplace and the more historic (but full of nightlife) Fells Point. This morning, a few of us took off a bit north for brunch at the very kitschy Papermoon Diner, which has to be seen to be believed...ya gotta love a place that hot glues hundreds of kewpie dolls to the walls for decor!

Anyways, the icon ref in the title refers to an article in Boxes and Arrows titled Learning to Love the Pixel: Exploring the Craft of Icon Design. I'm looking forward to taking some time and giving it the proper read it deserves. But I'm intrigued already by the top pullquote:

Discussing craft as a value of the user-centered process will expand upon typical issues confronting designers, highlighting matters of moral value, innovative potential, and aesthetic character.

Years ago, I did a (PDF; the newsletter of the STC Information Design SIG) that focused on the future of information design as a profession. Some interesting responses there, and the topic of craft came up there as well...see David Sless' comment in particular.

05:16 PM | | linkme | home

Oy, I've had to change the channel...the Yankees have tied it up :(. Courtesy of TiVo, I can watch the rest of the game later if it doesn't go even more downhill. In the meantime, here's a quickie post to take my mind off the game (and the MLB.com score card in the background).

The latest issue of NextD journal has come out with an interview with Clement Mok [ framed | unframed ]. This follows up on his recent Time for a Change call to design professionals, which has also appeared in Communication Arts.

Over on Contact Sheet, Scott provides an interesting take on this call. He also points out that you can get the snazzy version of of this pitch here. I don't mind the Flash presentation, but think it might not have been the best design to assume the reading speed they did. Making folks click next would be bad, but a small speed and/or rewind control wouldn't have hurt!

11:21 PM | | linkme | home

I came across the byrdhouse review today. It's tagline is "Smart talk about architecture, design, and photography." Very nice!

Two entries I particularly enjoyed were modHouse, which shows a series of logo comps that were developed for a client, and a recipe for color, which describes a neat way for coming up with a natural color palette for design.

The latter is cool just because it is such an easy technique to reproduce. The former is cool because it exposes something from the field of design that I'm not sure is common in the field of web design, and that's the idea of exploring lots and lots of solutions to a design problem.

I think this is related to the problem with high-fidelity prototypes. Once you get close to something that is real, it makes it much harder to go outside the box and consider a design that isn't simply an extension of a known design.

Hmmm...is it a design meme? Kevin, like Ken, is into the cropped face as blog design element.

08:38 PM | | linkme | home

Well, I don't know why I didn't do this sooner. But after having to delete hundreds of spam messages (and files like vicodin.gif), I'm crying uncle and signing on with a spam filter service...one of those where they check to see if it there's actually a human on the other side of that email.

I've gone with Knowspam.net based on Mike's recommendation (and a followup to hear that both he and wife Amy are still happy customers).

My transition wasn't a smooth one, but that was largely due to my use of an embarrassingly old mailer. Now that I've upgraded, life is good! And I have to give a huge thumbs up to knowspam for their above and beyond tech support to help diagnose this. I'll be signing up long before the free trial is over!

BTW, I've made a tiny hack to MT so that folks who comment on IDblog will not need to prove they are humans :). I think the content of the comment will do that nicely.

08:33 PM | | linkme | home

If you enjoyed the "According to a Cambridge researcher..." parlor trick that went around a while ago, you may also enjoy this page, which has a lot more useful stuff. Matt Davis provides some very interesting info about what's true and what's not necessarily true, and also a summary of what may have been the source of the theory. You can also find the same text in a whole bunch of different languages.

06:56 PM | | linkme | home

Into visualization? This may work for you...it's the call for papers for VR'04: Visual and Spatial Reasoning in Design, which will be held at MIT in Cambridge, MA, next July 22-24, 2004:

The design process has become the focus of an increasingly intense research effort. Of central importance in designing is the interplay between two types of knowledge - abstract, conceptual knowledge and perceptually based knowledge. Visual and spatial reasoning are the cognitive and/or computational processes that link these two types of knowledge and it is this aspect of the design process that forms the focus of the conference.

The conference aims to bring together researchers from both within and without design who work on visual and spatial reasoning and researchers from both cognitive and computational viewpoints. The overall objective is to develop this new interdisciplinary field and provide a unified research agenda for this socially and economically significant area.

Based on the last conference's accepted papers, this is fairly academic. Submissions due January 23, 2004.

06:19 PM | | linkme | home

Oops...that's what I get for trusting the blogroll...Yinzer buddy Ken has migrated his weblog, caleb walker, to TypePad and I just noticed!

Big yeah, there's now an RSS feed so he can now go in the reader with all my other favorite haunts! Now I can read about cool things like the blogger boobiethon (oy, now there's a project for class). And I can see that he has the same bearded visage as he did when I was last in Pittsburgh. Love the funky crop :).

If you're so inclined, please visit Ken. I'd love to break his current record of 100 visits from a single referrer :).

08:35 PM | | linkme | home

The place I go to school is doing an NSF-funded project that is exploring the role of kids as design partners (they are currently looking at the International Children's Digital Library).

While reviewing this site during class, I remembered an entry that Christina blogged long ago, about the hole in the wall project in India that exposed poor urban kids to a PC for the first time:

Sugata ... Mitra's passion is computer-based education, specifically for India's poor. He believes that children, even terribly poor kids with little education, can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computer literacy. The key, he contends, is for teachers and other adults to give them free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves. He calls the concept "minimally invasive education."

To test his ideas, Mitra 13 months ago launched something he calls "the hole in the wall experiment." He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. ...

What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.

Too bad this effect doesn't carry over as one ages!

08:26 PM | | linkme | home

I've been intrigued by the relevance of the double-edged sword as a metaphor in life, particularly regarding technology. Everyone's on the Internet? Big yeah! But now we have millions of computers that have security holes you can fly a 747 through. Yikes.

Similarly, I've been enjoying blogs both as a reader and an author for years, but now I'm being forced to deal with the dark side of it--spam via blog comments. Yuck!

Over on Brainstorms and Raves, there's a great summary of the problems and potential solutions for dealing with unwanted comments. I've gone ahead and implemented the "Screen Your Comments" option (i.e., comment moderation) for IDblog.

So, my apologies to my readers, but I'm getting really tired of deleting porn spam from my comments. Since I think the universe of spammers is much larger than the universe of IDblog commenters, I'm choosing to moderate the comments rather than try and keep up with blocking the spammers.

The solution I implemented involves two different authors/plug-ins and instructions from a third. Here is what I did to install this for the first time on IDblog, which is Perl-based and uses the Berkely db format (see scriptygoddess if you want comment moderation but use PHP and MySQL).

Here are the steps:

1. Make a backup copy of your blog entries by exporting them from the MT menu (listed in left-nav under UTILITIES). Better be safe than sorry...and it only takes a minute or two.
2. Download the following two scripts/plug-ins and install in your MT script directory (where mt.cgi lives):
   • The Perl version of Scriptygoddess' Comment Queue hack from David Raynes.
   • The mt-rebuild plug-in from Timothy Appnel.
   Make sure that these files have the right permissions (775, o:rwe, g:rwe, w:re).
3. Make this edit to your Comments.pm file (note the plural Comments). This file can be found in YourMTFolder/lib/MT/App/:

   This will make the script work with all blogs in your MT install.
   Change this line (If you have trouble finding the line - do a search to find it):
   
       $comment->entry_id($q->param('entry_id'));
   
   to:
   
       $comment->entry_id('0');
       $comment->temp_entry_id($q->param('entry_id'));
   

   If you don't want to make this change to all your MT blogs, see step 5 in the instructions for the Scriptygoddess version of this hack.
4. Make this edit to your Comment.pm file (note the singular Comment). This file can be found in YourMTFolder/lib/MT/:

   Change this line:
   
    'id', 'blog_id', 'entry_id', 'author', 'email', 'url', 'text', 'ip'
   
   to:
   
    'id', 'blog_id', 'entry_id', 'temp_entry_id', 'author', 'email', 'url', 'text', 'ip'
   
   

5. Test the script functionality by going to the URL Your_blog_URL/mt-comments-pending.cgi (i.e., take your MT login URL and change mt.cgi to mt-comments-pending.cgi).
6. Go to the template that includes your comments form (if you have in-page comments, that is probably the individual entry archive template). Add some language that alerts comment submitters that you will be moderating comments so they don't stress out when their comments don't appear immediately.
7. If you haven't already, update your Comment Configuration (under Preferences, see weblog config under MANAGE in your MT left-nav) so that you are notified via email when someone posts comments to your site.

Update: This is the code I now have to do the recent comments section on the home page. Alas, "unapproved" comments don't appear in the specific blog entry post, but they are showing up via the tag:

This breaks when folks use things like a carriage return or single quote (like in "don't") in their comment. But I don't really want to go back to listing just the entries. Too bad I never did get up-to-speed in javascript, but I'll try and figure this out when I get a chance.

08:13 PM | | linkme | home

There's all sorts of good stuff over on Digital Web Magazine's What's New page, but this one was particularly interesting. Nick writes:

I recently stumbled across a community site that provided services for testing web sites. Testing not done simply by software, but by real people using realistic computer and software configurations. The testing services included Section 503 accessibility validation, W3C spec validation, usability testing for browsers, navigation, design and accessibility issues, script testing for both JavaScript and CGI, cross platform testing and even proof reading. So how much is the service? Free.

The site is Independent Testers.org. Not sure if this can scale, but seems well worth the look!

10:49 PM | | linkme | home

Meg inspired me to add my own right-nav decoration to IDblog. Having lived in Boston from 1976 to 1994, I'm afraid to hope. But there's just something so perfect about a 7-game Sox/Cubs World Series. Now if the teams can just deliver...

10:38 PM | | linkme | home

Livia Labate emailed AIfIA folks today about a cool service by Emerald Publishing. It's their Journals of the Week feature, where they give people free access to full-text versions of two different journals each week.

For next week, the interesting looking journal is The Electronic Library, which "aims to be the definitive source of information for the application of technology in information environments." The week of the 26th, one of the featured journals is foresight, which "provides an effective forum for debate on the important social, economic, political and technological issues, which are shaping all our futures."

You can also sign up for a twice-a-month email to get notified about future journals of the week. Slick!

09:36 PM | | linkme | home

Rats...it's a class night, and I've got to catch up on a couple chapters. So I can't do much more than make a quick blog entry for Jason Nichols' very intriguing looking masters thesis called Information on the Assembly Line (subtitled A review of Information Design and its Implications for Technical Communicators). Here's the PDF link if you prefer that to his HTML version (which is nicely designed).

I jumped right to the Defining Information Design chapter, and appreciated this comment for its general relevance in UX/ED/ID/IA:

While very few people seem to agree on just what information design is, everyone does agree that the reason it is so hard to define is that it draws from so many other disciplines and professions. ... As Robert Jacobson explains, the emerging field of information design possesses very little research, experimentation results, case studies, or anecdotal evidence that it can call its own. It thereby lacks a "coherent corpus of rules or principles a novice can obey".

I can't wait to dive into this and find out why the final chapter is called The Need to Learn Database Design Principles. Hmmmm.

BTW, thanks to Peter for another great tip.

06:11 PM | | linkme | home

Peter blogged this interesting piece by Adam Greenfield on compassion and the crafting of user experience. As a card-carrying UU and dabbler in Buddhism (or at least the Western version), I appreciated the essence of Adam's piece. For example:

How I, at least, ensure that my work meets my criteria for right livelihood is by practicing it with compassion. This may, at first blush, appear to be a strange word to stumble across in this context. But to my mind, this is the crucial insight at the heart of the discipline: a good user-experience practitioner has to be able to imagine, and share the frustrations of, the human users of the artifact in question, in the hope that these frustrations can be reduced or eliminated. This primary understanding is something that I'd like to see explicitly incorporated into the professional education of user-experience professionals, at all levels: not because we should all be Buddhists, not because we should all be concerned with the ethics of our livelihood, but simply because it would make for better design.

Adam wasn't the first to explore the issue of Zen and design; the CSS Zen garden pre-dated him, though their emphases are a bit different!

09:22 PM | | linkme | home

Another fab issue of First Monday is out. On my list to check out are this piece on copyright and authors and this one on democratizing software.

08:57 PM | | linkme | home

I feel quite the pretender, but I'm one of several bloggers who are now on the weblogs of AOIR list (AOIR is the Association of Internet Researchers).

There are some interesting blogs on the list. So far ones I've particularly liked include overstated.net and brio.

05:17 PM | | linkme | home

I was doing a paper on wikis and stumbled across an interesting logo design effort for the Wikipedia. On the left is the old logo; on the right is the new logo:

What's really interesting is how they went about changing their logo wiki-style. You can find information about the voting, the logo ratification process, among lots of others. But what's really interesting are the final logo variants -- they are already discussing alternates to the new logo. Some very slick designs there.

10:36 AM | | linkme | home