Microsoft Application Archetypes - developing guidelines around types of application

Microsoft is working on expanding their for the next generation of Windows "Longhorn" with a concept called .

The one-size-fits-all approach to the Windows user experience is becoming less useful. We're planning a new approach that recognizes a set of different models for "Longhorn" applications. We're calling these models archetypes, meaning "something that serves as the model or pattern for other things of the same type."

Interesting to see the different archetypes they've defined: Document editors, Database apps, Production/development environments, E-commerce, Information/reference, Entertainment apps, Viewer apps, and Utility applications. The most interesting part - the lines between the desktop and the web really seem to blur with some of these, and IAs and others with a web focus will need to embrace and extend to stay relevant.

As well as general guidelines, the team is working on a book of "user experience recipes" for different archetypes - taking design patterns and showing how they integrate together for a particular purpose. The recipes are heavily based on scenarios following a particular user through several tasks (I wonder if they have personas for each application archetype?) You can see the .

(on an interesting sidenote, check out the graph at the bottom of the article showing how people rated it. One for Widgetopia...)

37Signals boys have been busy - Book and new project management application

This is old, but news to me: 37Signals has released their book . Congratulations! While "contingency design" might be more accurate, the tie in to defensive driving will help communicate the topic to non-UX geeks.

On another 37Signals note, they've released , a web based project management tool that is clean, simple, and effective without all the headaches of Sitespring (Macromedia's discontined foray into the space) or PHPCollab (open source Sitespring attempt). Well done.

IA Summit Redux - Bay Area and Online

For those of you in the Bay Area that couldn't make the Summit or missed sessions, there is a happening this week, on Saturday, March 20th. IA Summit presenters from the Bay Area like Brett Lider, Jesse James Garrett, and John Zapolski will share their sessions again. Please RSVP to Peter Merholz: peter AT peterme DOT com.

For those of us not in the Bay Area, there are video clips from the Summit up online, thanks to the hard work of Bob Doyle. Check out the , the , and Jared Spool (evil RealPlayer required). Presenters' are also making their way onto the Summit site (look for handout links by presenter names).

Personas & Scenarios in the wild

It's been interesting over the last 6 months to notice personas escaping from the design team out into marketing. Not surprising, since personas largely derive from marketing's user archetypes. Sightings: and (thanks ), and the more scenario-focused Macromedia and . Vodafone's piece isn't just about marketing - it's scenarios in the sense of prototyping the future. Most of the scenarios involve technology that only exists now as concepts or clunky kludged prototypes, not the polished integration of wearable, mobile communications into everyday life depicted in their scenarios.

One of the challenges of personas being more publicly visible is that clients or other departments may start building up preconceived ideas about how personas work, what they should include, and how they should be used. The marketing scenarios and personas shown above are all valuable, but don't have the level of detail required to make decisions about behavior. I'm not sure how well George Olsen's would be accepted by folks who already have set expectations about the deliverable and its usefulnes.

Know of more public personas? Drop a line in the comments...

A roadmap for enterprise weblog services

I recently presented . This is in the realm of what I think Lou calls "Guerrilla IA" in his Enterprise Information Architecture talks. The presentation, given at Computers in Libraries, is aimed at Library/Information Services organizations in corporations, but is applicable elsewhere. It's really an untested discussion starter that proposes near term goals for supporting individuals doing bottom-up knowledge creation. It also discusses a mode of progress that aims at integration of many types of enterprise information in the long term. I'd be interested in getting feedback on these ideas, especially comments that point out weaknesses.

UCD / UX / IA Salary survey

There's a new that's open for participation until March 31, 2004 (). It's is focused on UCD & HCI but has a number of questions where Information Architecture can be selected, and it's fairly comprehensive in many other respects.

I think that it is beneficial for both practitioners and hiring managers to have accurate, realistic compensation information, and hopefully participating in this survey will help.

FYI, more salary and compensation info is available at the .

Small Business IA & usability

I am thinking of creating some sort of Small Business IA/usability organization to promote the practice in small businesses. I've seen too many small biz websites that have really unusable websites -- since the vast majority of small biz owners have the do-it-yourself mentality (whether that's the best attitude to have is a whole different story) many, if any, do not understand that a site must be usable for it to benefit consumers.

I am not new to the idea of IA and usability, actually found out about the field a few years ago...in the past months have I have been starting to actively take a role in it.

I hope a few of you read this blog -- I'm currently looking for any organizations that exist that already fulfill the need I see...so if you are reading, and do, please let me know so I won't duplicate any work or step on any toes.

Information architecture conference in Paris

is an information architecture conference held in Paris 8-9 June 2004. Featured speaker is Peter Morville from Semantic studios. The conference takes place in conjunction with .

IA Summit blogging

The IA Summit has set up a where all conference-goers will have posting access. For those blogging the conference on their own sites, you can trackback to http://www.iasummit.org/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1

Thanks

The Page Paradigm

Mark Hurst has written an interesting . In it, he reminds us of something he wrote in 1999,

On any given Web page, users will either… click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal, or click the Back button on their Web browser.

The interesting part of his message here, I think, is that the IA/designers’ focus on aspects of the UI such as navigation consistency is less important than the supporting of users in getting them to their intended goal. He says provocative things such as “users don’t care where they are in the website”. If you can get your head past that idea, 3 bullets summarize what this should mean for you in practice:

1. Identify users’ goals on each page.
2. De-emphasize or remove any page elements (or areas of a site) that don’t help to accomplish the goal.
3. Emphasize (or insert) those links, forms, or other elements that either take users closer to their goal, or finally accomplish it.

I’ve posted additonal elsewhere on my weblog. Mark’s ideas as well, pointing out that he shouldn’t dismiss the value of wayfinding cues in order to make the point that empasis should be placed on user needs and behaviors supporting those needs. in Mark’s oversimplification and suggests that informational cues such as breadcrumbs put the burden of mental strain on the user. It’s nice that she also suggests alternatives identified in her Widgetopia to helping users identify alternate paths related to their current task, addressing a point that I think is important — “Where can I go” is perhaps more important than “Where am I?”. that both Peter and Mark are probably both right in this debate, but the difference in perspectives is explained by their different experiences.

Tracking user navigation methods by logging where users click on web pages

I wrote about some research we're doing in my organization (body, local navigation, breadcrumbs, global navigation). Our observations aren't dissimilar to what Michael Bernard observes in usability testing -- links to content are most often searched for/clicked in the body of pages. Navigating our site (a digital library) consists mainly of browsing through a directory (a-z lists are available as are a poly-hierarchical directory listing), so what we were mainly interested in was how people made use of the links in the local navigation. I'd be interested in seeing if other people have done this and what they were looking for. I find, as an in-house site developer, that being responsible for a site for a long term (as opposed to just launching one and going on to a new project) gives one good opportunity to observe and assess the site for usability. Your can assess patterns of use over long periods of time. You can make contact with users and keep the lines of feedback open with them over time. Clearly there is something unique about being involved in the evolution of a singular site, which I am only beginning to appreciate.

Online Magazines, the invasion.

Online magazines vs. printed magazines, I recently found that paper print does not provide the most recent info I want. Here is where I learned about online magazines that are way more up to date than regular printed issues.

Here are my latest findings:

Hintmag- Dedicated to fashion trends and lifestyles.

Melomag-Creative art content: music, interviews, reviews.

Groove Manifesto-Focused on design, visual culture and new media.

Please add other online magazines that you think are interesting.

Book review: Information architecture for designers

ContentPeople has a of Peter Van Dijck's book "Information architecture for designers".

How Everyday Things are Made

First we had Don Norman's The Psychology of Everyday Things(aka Design of Everyday Things) and now we have How Everyday Things are Made. I wasn't going to contribute this item but I started thinking about how someone would view the UE/IA practice and try to create a video describing how a website/web application is developed. For instance, how do we describe to our parents what we do for a living. At least people in the various industries profiled in this educational site would have something to show & tell about their work to the common person. Do we have an equivalent?

So are we really a sum of all our deliverables? How do we capture our dialogues and conversations which really contains the value of our work? I believe there are various projects out there that is trying to solve this problem by literally capturing the brainstorming sessions into digital format. If there is something out there that is a packaged description of what we do, I would love to see people post links to those types of projects.

Academics Turn to Video Games

Interesting :

Some of the new questions in a very young field: How do you judge a game? As you would a novel? Should we think up a whole new vocabulary for evaluating games? What do the social dynamics of online worlds -- those massively multiplayer games -- tell us about human behavior?

In Copenhagen, Denmark, the IT University has established the Center of Computer Games Research, which just graduated its first Ph.D., Jesper Juul.

Juul appears to be the first person anywhere to ever get his doctorate exclusively in video game studies. His dissertation 'Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds' seeks to define what video games are, and how academics ought to go about studying them.

...and here are some simultaneously interesting and heartbreaking quotes from old coworker Eric Zimmerman and Chris Crawford:

"What we try to do is provide not a single way of looking at games but a whole series of ways," Zimmerman said. "We would like to have an audience that thinks about games as more than boy power fantasies."

Some in the industry, however, are not so sure that games will ever mature. They fear games could be a dead end like comic books -- valuable as a social phenomenon, but outside a select few titles like Art Spiegelman's "Maus," not worth a great deal of individual study.

"I seldom play computer games, because it's such a depressing experience," said Chris Crawford, a game designer who is building a program to create interactive stories. "I end up shaking my head in dismay at how stuck the designers are in a rut."

The Pareto Principle

The history of the 80-20 Rule: Vilfredo Pareto () was an Italian economist who, in 1906, observed that twenty percent of the Italian people owned eighty percent of their country's accumulated wealth. Over time, this theory came to be called . It states that a small number of causes is responsible for a large percentage of the effect, in a ratio of about 20:80.

comments at .

OK/Cancel: Announcing OK/Cancel Forums

Our objective is to create a place for people in the industry, or interested in the industry, to hold discussions. Granted, we're not the first to offer such a service. Mailing likes such as CHI-Web and SigIA are great places to hold discussions as well and they go straight to your inbox.

The difference is that we're here primarily to have fun. People in the industry have started taking themselves too seriously and forgotten the fun in our profession. Also, we are starting this off from the start with a few moderators to help the forums along. The intent is not to rule over the discussions with an iron fist but to ensure things are running smoothly and the signal is where the signal should be while the noise is where the noise should be.

Information Work Productivity Forum Notes

I attended the Information Work Productivity Forum and . The day consisted of sponsors of the council and some academics presenting their thoughts on Information Work productivity. A few speakers took the opportunity to talk about their products, which was unfortunate, but some individuals stayed on topic and discussed the real issues related to measuring information work productivity at a high level.

Ben Fry's zipdecode and anemone: Visualization apps

A friend and I were surfing Ben Fry's site today, where we played with these interesting visualization experiments.

, a nice little visualization tool that Fry created to learn how the zip code system works in the U.S. When it loads, click on the map to activate it and start typing the first numbers of zip codes one at a time. Would be nice if it also included a way to zoom in to understand what geographic area (state/town boundaries) you are looking at.

is an example of organic information design that gives a visualization of the changing structure of a web site, juxtaposed with usage information.

IA Slam Workshop looks like a blast at Summit preconference

A brings together small teams of IAs to share thoughts on process and deliverables as they come up with "big ideas" and specific solutions. The fictitious Company X, represented by , will get input from teams formed from workshop participants. It looks like a great break from the standard PowerPoint drill, and there will even be fabulous prizes...

Because it's shorter (2 hours) the is also cheaper than other preconference activities...something to consider if you'll be in Austin on the 26th but don't have $575 for a full day.