When Boxes and Arrows was founded a little over ten years ago, there was nothing quite like it online. There were peer-reviewed journals, and basic how-to articles. A List Apart was much more concerned with the CSS behind the interface back then, and UX Matters, Johnny Holland and Smashing Magazine were not even a twinkle in their creators’ eyes. So a bunch of scrappy volunteers gathered together and pushed to get the stories we wanted to read online. We were struggling to figure things out in our day jobs, and we created a place where we could learn from each other. Boxes and Arrows did much better than we could ever have imagined, surviving transitions over four chief editors, thirty-nine editors, and today it holds four-hundred-and-forty-one articles written by three-hundred-and-nine members of the community at large.

But it was always a volunteer organization. It lost money for the first five years of its life, and for the next five barely paid for hosting and conference coverage. This allowed us to podcast the IA Summit for the first time, and paid to have those podcasts transcribed. Jesse James Garrett’s incendiary talk on User Experience is captured because of the passion of those volunteers, and the kind sponsors who made it possible. Our history is written because of the amazing volunteers of Boxes and Arrows. Wireframes were defined and debunked here, Design Patterns explained and complained about, career advice given out and career transitions documented. Boxes and Arrows was the best of us, and we like to think it inspired our many peers who now make it so easy to share inspiration and knowledge.

But as often happens with volunteer efforts, the volunteers’ lives changed. Some people left the field, some people took on jobs that required long hours, and some people made babies. Some people did all three. The people who used to have spare time, didn’t.  They didn’t even have time to notice what was happening. And through spam and neglect, the magazine started to wither. And the torch didn’t get passed. And lacking oxygen, it started to flicker. And now, some say, the light is gone.

But rather than dead, let’s say it is sleeping. Boxes and Arrows is old for an online magazine, and with age comes some advantages. One is SEO: with no new article published, it still gets 5-7K pageviews a day. A bad day for Boxes and Arrows is ten times most blogs’ best day. Which means Boxes and Arrows is still a site with reach. It means it is still a place where a voice, having something important to say, can be amplified. That voice could be yours.

And so, facing retirement or resurrection, we’d like to ask you, reader, what should be the fate of Boxes and Arrows? Is there a new generation of designers out there who wants to take the power of this magazine’s reach and use it to talk about the next generation of user experience design? Will you define it? Will you defend it? Will you debunk it?

If you would like to take over Boxes and Arrows, speak up. We have moved it to a new platform. We have reached out to new writers. We have breathed a little oxygen on to that torch, and the flame begins to catch. We’d like to pass it to you.

If you would like to to volunteer to create the next Boxes and Arrows, please leave a note below. Say what you would like to do, and this magazine is yours.

Again.

As it always was.

As it should be.

Addendum: So grateful for the outpouring of support!  Please join this mailing list where the next generation of B&A begins to plan for the future…

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IA Summit 2009 Podcasts

The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions (“see schedule”:http://iasummit.org/2009/program/schedule/).

| Preview | “Keynote”:http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-keynote | “Day 1″:http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-1 | “Day 2″:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-2 | “Day 3″:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-3 | “Closing Plenary”:http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-plenary |

When Life Intervenes

Samantha Bailey missed the 2008 IA Summit in Miami due to an illness. Still, she could look forward to 2009 as the Summit’s Chairperson. A few months later, she was excited to find out she would be having a baby, due several weeks after the Summit. With Fate relishing its spoiler role, Niles arrived six weeks early – ensuring that Samantha would miss the ’09 Summit, her Summit.

I spoke with Samantha the week before this year’s Summit about how she approached creating this year’s IA Summit program, the how the Summit community has morphed over time, and what it means to be a part of this community of practice.

This is a first in a series of IA Summit podcast posts.

Creating the Program

Samantha talks about how she started forming the 10th Summit by creating a big committee around her, then looking both backward and forward to ensure that the program reflected at the same time it set a new course. She points out that patterns are forming around the choosing of the opening keynote and closing plenary speakers.

The keynote speaker shapes the theme, how people perceive event. At the Summit, this tends to be someone that’s not an “insider.” When Peter Merholz suggested Michael Wesch, Kansas State Professor and producer of the powerful “The Machine is Us/ing Us.”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE YouTube video, Samantha and her team knew it was right because their reaction was, “How did we not think of that before?”
(Download Michael Wesch’s Opening Keynote later this week.)

For the closing plenary, organizers look for an insider, someone who is a highly respected, deep thinker. Jesse James Garrett has, for several years, participated in 5-minute Madness, always offering wisdom in that narrow slice of time, making him a perfect choice to sunset the ’09 Summit.
(Download Jesse James Garrett’s Closing Plenary later this week.)

Summit History and the Communities of Practice

We talk about the 20th anniv of the World Wide Web, and how we continue to use some of the same tools for a completely different Web.

Further, Samantha goes into detail about how summit has changed in respect to different communities and their involvement in the Summit. She describes how, from 2001 to 2003, the discussion was around whether IA as a practice would survive the Tech bubble bursting. In recent years, the practice has started to broaden its horizons and interact with other practices more openly.

Boxes and Arrows welcomes Niles. Congratulations, Samantha and Karl! Thanks to Samantha for taking the time to speak with us.

These podcasts are sponsored by:

The “American Society of Information Science & Technology”:http://asist.org/: Since 1937, ASIS&T has been THE society for information professionals leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.


The “IA Summit”:http://www.iasummit.org: the premier gathering place for information architects and other user experience professionals.

The theme of the event this year, Expanding Our Horizons, inspired peers and industry experts to come together to speak about a wide range of topics. This included information as wide ranging as practical techniques & tools to evolving practices to create better user experiences.


“Boxes & Arrows”:http://www.boxesandarrows.com: Since 2001, Boxes & Arrows has been a peer-written journal promoting contributors who want to provoke thinking, push limits, and teach a few things along the way.

Contribute as an editor or author, and get your ideas out there. “boxesandarrows.com/about/participate”:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/about/participate

Unintended Uses and Innovation
Very often, people use things in ways never imagined by their inventors. The makers of Excel probably never envisioned IAs one day using their application to create wireframes for web site, for instance. (Some IAs do use Excel for wireframes, you know).
Just consider the trash can propping open a door or that stack of books holding up the end of a broken shelf or the refrigerator door used as a bulletin board for the family. Examples of unintended use are all around us. I’ve even heard of double bass players using their large, soft-shell instrument cases to nap in between rehearsals like sleeping bag. Odd!
Here’s one thing I do: I use my browser bookmarks to manage passwords. After bookmarking a site that requires a password, I go into the properties of the bookmark and append the password to the title of it. (Not the most secure thing, I know, but there are worse things you could do, like having passwords on sticky notes all around your desk, which many people do). Did the makers of IE or FF intend that? Probably not.
Improvising and re-purposing the objects around us is common. In the ethnographic research for my company, we try to focus on is unintended use. Where do people find work-arounds to the tools and software they normally use? Where do people find hacks? The answers to these questions often point to places where a system breaks down, where people need a better mouse trap. And this is where there is potential opportunity for innovation and where product developers can bring real value to their users.
But unintended uses are also something that usually don’t come out in things like questionnaires or even usability tests. Instead, you have to go out and observe people in the natural setting to get this type of insight. Observing unintended uses first hand is an important source of inspiration and ideas for innovative design, I believe.
Take a quick look around your home. What things are doing that fall under “unintended use”? You probably don’t even realize that you are using many things in an unintended way. Most people don’t.
—James Kalbach

Real: Paper Airplanes
My grandfather was an aviator as a young man, and a printer in later life. A considerable part of my childhood was spent making paper airplanes in his print shop. I was obsessed with making and flying them; there was something fascinating about transforming an inert object—an incredibly simple one, at that—into something that could soar.
My brother and I created hundreds of paper airplane designs. The first were very simple: one folded sheet of paper. Later ones incorporated other materials: glue, tape, balsa wood, metal clips, electric motors, even small Hot Wheels cars. We learned basic principles of aeronautical engineering: how to balance the plane’s weight around the wing, how to shape wings for optimal lift (or speed, as need be), the functioning of the diverse control surfaces, etc. We challenged ourselves to make planes that could fly smoother, faster, higher, or just look (or fly) unusual. Our paper airplanes were more than mere toys: they were a basic design education.
Fast-forward thirty years. I hadn’t made a paper airplane in a long time… until my nephews came along. They seem fascinated by paper planes! And their uncle knows how to make lots of them. So what was originally my plaything and obsession has become a bridge that helps me connect with a new generation in my family.
You can’t buy paper airplanes, but you can make them easily enough. Here’s a basic plane for you to try out…

Ephemeral: Bachelor of Arts, Architecture
When I entered architecture school, I expected to spend the rest of my life making buildings. However, I wasn’t too clear on what this actually meant. I’d known a few architects, but only had a very vague notion of what they did day-to-day. I was in for a shock.
The first couple of months in architecture school were among the most important in my life: I now had to think about and through design. My colleagues and I worked hard; the educaton of an architect is primarily a studio-based affair that entails long hours (“all-nighters” were common) and brutal group critiques. The objective seemed to be to understand (and exploit) the relationship between meaning/purpose, technology, and “human factors”. In the process I acquired many practical skills, ranging from arc welding to Photoshop. I was also exposed to concepts that changed my outlook on life: “Design Thinking”, Modernism, Derrida and those other nutty French post-structuralists.
Then something happened that would derail my plans: during my last semester, a friend from the Computer Science department showed me the internet. I was intrigued. Later—a year into my professional practice as an architect—I got on the web for the first time. It was clear to me that it was going to change the world, and that creating stuff on this medium would require an understanding of the relationsip between meaning/purpose, technology, and “human factors”—exactly what I’d been trained for. I dropped the drafting pencil and bought a book about HTML.
—Jorge Arango

Real: Here’s Thinking of You, Kid

My sister and I get on incredibly well, belying the fact that our experiences have been so different. Starting early on the family track, she still lives in myhometown with her two kids and will probably be there for a long while. On the other hand, I have traveled the world, lived in San Francisco, and now reside in Montreal with me, myself, and I.

She gave me some nice black earthenware bowls last year for Christmas. Being somewhat a minimalist, it can be difficult to find gifts for me. I receive a lot of small art and kitchen gifts. I appreciate them immensely, but my entertainents rarely feature multiple courses (or sorbet), include 15 people, or require serving vessels. As a result, I didn’t use the bowls for about six months. They sat in forlorn neglect on my kitchen shelf, poking little pins of guilt into me on regular occasions. Sigh.

One thing I do like is small rituals. One day while burning stick incense messily on a totally inappropriate incense burner, it dawned on me that the bowls would work amazingly well with some sand I had on-hand. The white sand stood inlovely contrast to the bowl and proved a perfect resting place for ash incense remnants.
Having expanded the use somehwat, I now enjoy the bowls quite often, thinking of my sister all the while.

Ephemeral: Do As I Do

I always have a mentor, sometimes several, as I like to ask people about how they got to be so great at x or y, try out his or her method myself, and come back for a bit of discussion.
My first mentor found me* way back when I was fresh out of college, thinking I would go immediately become an uber-consultant at Andersen (now Accenture) or Deloitte. Instead, I ended up as a temp on the phones at a mortgage servicing company. Talk about a reality check. The trainer at that job was amazing. He made the class fun even among some of the most boring raw material ever conceived. A few days outside of class, he pulled me aside and asked me, "What are you doing here? You can do more than this." Well, now it’s obvious that I was there to meet him.
Starting at that moment, he mentored my career for years, even helping me slough off some social awkwardness as I shifted from a suburban to a city resident. During this process, he helped tune my observational skills in ways that still benefits me every single day. One of his big themes was "play the game better than anyone else." I always had a hard time with this idea, as I was constantly amazed (and still am) at how organizations communicated in one direction (from top to bottom). It wasn’t until I ended up in San Francisco that I finally found a game that I wanted to play – to change the game!
I feel like my work is to find ways to help people listen to each other. It turns out that one-way communication is just a symptom of people not understanding context. Most of the time my suggestions manifest themselves as an interface, but others end up as changes to business plans, communication policies, and relationships between people inside and outside the organization.
To this day, he still makes fun of me on occasion, grousing that I never listen to him. But I did, really! I just had to apply his advice in the exact opposite way of how he intended. I can never thank him enough for sticking with me.
*Yes, I realize that this, too, is the opposite of how it normally works. Welcome to my world.
—Chris Baum

Real: Contact Lens Holder
As someone prone to headaches, I learned the hard way that having some remedy with me at all times is crucial to my personal and professional sanity.
The problem is that most packaging for headache medicine is either too bulky (and loud, carries in a purse) or hard to open (and struggling with super-hard plastic packaging is definitely not an option when faced with a headache), so using a contact lens holder is just perfect.

A free lens case is included with online lens orders, so it’s nice to find a perfectly good use for one of those seemingly useless extra cases that would otherwise end up in the trash. Besides, a contact lens case has two compartments—one for a simple headache remedy and the other for a major disaster. And that makes for a great, though unintended use of a real everyday thing.
—Natalia Minibayeva

Real: Skills Transfer
My first job after university was at a forensic psychiatric centre. We assessed the whole range of mentally disordered offenders: crime. mental disorder, and myriad combinations. Working there required patience and compassion as these people were not, um, at their best considering their mental state or legal situation. One time the only thing that kept me from getting a severe beating was my refusal to break eye contact with a six-foot-four screaming, angry patient. I did this kind of thing for 14 years as my wife and I raised our kids and I went through graduate school.
Time went on and I finished graduate school and began teaching. One of my first thoughts was "that’s 14 years of experience successfully binned". Was I wrong! The very skills of compassion and patience that I learned in the mental hospital (loony bin, nut factory, pick your euphemism) were precisely those needed with my students and (from time to time) my colleagues. While they have never threatened me and rarely yelled at me: they still have required a similar understanding as they pick their way through new territory. While the reasons for being there are different (pick a crime and I have worked with someone charged with it) the anxiety and fear are all too similar. This has also encouraged me to not dismiss any experience and try and fit it into my bag of tricks.
—Bernie Monette

Ephemeral: Holiday Potty
As a Chicago suburbanite, it is inevitable that my family will visit the German Christmas Market at Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago. There’s also a pretty good chance that I’ll be walking around that little village-like setting drinking from a mini-boot mug of hot spiced wine or Dinkle’s hot chocolate, momentarily transported to that tiny village.
As the father of a four-year-old, it is also inevitable that my daughter will find the least opportune moment to have to go to the restroom. Since my wife is 30-odd weeks pregnant, that generally means that there isn’t even a chance to roshambo to see who the fortunate one is that gets to accompany the mostly-adorable child to the facilities to take care of this business.
Don’t get me wrong–I can handle Daddy-duty just fine and can deftly change a diaper or wipe a nose with my sleeve on a moment’s notice, but sometimes it can be fun make a sport out of it.
After perusing the various overseas goodies from a variety of the shops, getting our pictures taken with the giant tree and with Mr. Clause, my daughter determines that it was time. THE time.
I feel a brief moment of pure, unadulterated terror as I consider my options until I feel a tug on my gloved hand and hear, “Daddy, I’ve really got to goooooo!” My focus returns and we head out in the direction of the restrooms that people within earshot kindly point out to me with knowing smiles.
The dread sets in as I realize that the “restroom” at Daley Plaza is nothing more than a plastic teal Port-A-Potty. The last time I checked, Port-A-Potties aren’t exactly made for more than one person, yet alone 1.5 people in full-on winter garb. The terror returns as I have visions of shuffling around clothing while trying to get my daughter into position.
We round the corner and are met with the surprisingly pleasant view of a couple of tents, each surrounding its own Port-A-Potty on one side and a table on the other. A very sturdy glass door provided entrances, and we quickly placed the coats, etc. on the table and got down to business. The rest is pretty uninteresting, and I am sure you’re thankful for that.
However, somewhere out there in a planning committee is a person who, when placing squares on a layout plan for Daley Plaza, considered that the freezing cold was not the ideal place to use a Port-A-Potty. That UX genius on a committee somewhere may a small–but very significant–change that kept our pre-holiday festivies… Festive!
—Russ Unger

Real: Alarm Clock Muffler
The oldest everyday-use thing I have in my home is my alarm clock, it’s a small digital green Casio clock that I’ve had since I was in primary school, think the size of half an ipod, or a small cell phone.
I have a sensitive ear, and a rather light sleep. Regular alarms are too loud for me and when they ring I wake up in shock, clinging from the ceiling and with an over-revved heart: not a good way of starting your day. So, since my alarm clock is so small, I place it under my pillow every night, with the speaker facing the mattress. This dims the beeping alarm substantially and wakes me up in a much less traumatic fashion.
Ephemeral: Communication Architecture
Darrin Stevens (of Bewitched) was one of my childhood heroes; he introduced me to the world of advertising, which fascinated me. Later on, I would copy corporate logos on my notebooks at school and take notes on my history class in a medieval font.
Upon leaving high school I went directly to a school of communication that had great reputation in the local advertising industry. I deeply enjoyed my years at the communication school. We were taught the basics of visual design and worked hard on copywriting. We had creativity and non verbal communication workshops, and, of course, theory on communication, advertising, and social sciences research methods. We worked on practical campaigns, always with tight deadlines. At that time I did not have strong presentation skills, yet I was always the intellectual author behind the scenes.
One day during our communication theory class we came up to McLuhan; the teacher explained how he said that all media are extensions of our senses, like cameras being extensions of our eyes, but I was mesmerized by his statement that electronic media are direct extensions of our nervous system. At this point – the early nineties – the Internet was becoming popular. As the son of an IBM employee, I’d long been an early adopter of technology, and I had a strong interest in the Internet. If McLuhan was right, going online meant having your nervous system directly connected to the whole world: to potentially anyone anywhere, or maybe to everyone at once. I was intrigued and decided to focus the rest of my career on the Internet.
Leaving school, I taught myself web design, as there were no schools ready for it yet here, and later I would become my country’s first information architect. During my years of IA practice, I’ve found the skill set provided by the communication school to be very useful for an IA, and I’ve always looked at the Web as a communication media: where computers are just the canvas and the key is allowing people to interact with each other. The recent expansion of the web to the masses, with millions of people forming online conversations, is proving me right.
—Javier Velasco

Real: Necklace art
About 12 years ago I got a job in an antique store that sold jewelry. Up until then, I usually found a necklace I liked and wore it constantly, even in the shower, for months until I got bored with it. But my boss wanted me to wear the jewelry so that the customers could see what it looked like on someone and be more likely to buy it. The more I wore it, the more I wanted it. And she gave me a good discount.
Years later I found myself with massive amounts of jewelry. The earrings and rings were easy enough to store but the necklaces got tangled and I never knew what I had when I put them in drawers.
One day at Ikea, I saw three packs of cheap wood and glass 3×5 photo frames for $1.99. I bought a couple of packs then got myself some tempera paint, brushes, and a bunch of little nails. I went through all my magazines and picked out great photos of pearls and red paint and shoes. I painted the frames, put the magazine photos in the frames, and hammered the little nails into the top of the frames. Then I stuck the frames to the wall over my bureau and hung my necklaces from the nails. My necklaces were both organized and very lovely art on my wall.

Ephemeral: Book of love
I was hired to write a book about online dating. I’ve been a writer since I was 12 and it was my dream to be published. I didn’t care what the subject was. I knew I could write about it and I hoped that it would finally be my big break into the writing world. I hadn’t actually dated for four years. But that seemed like a moot point. I never actually intended to date; I just figured I’d post my profile on a bunch of sites to see how each worked and what kind of responses I got and that would be enough research.
Then, I got a response from an interesting guy. I gave in and went out. Suddenly I was dating. I was also writing my second book about online dating while working full-time at an office job. I never intended to date anyone seriously—who had the time? But once the second book was done, I found myself still surfing the online dating sites. And after several duds, I found myself out on a date with someone cute, funny, and really interesting. And he liked me, too.
Two years later we’re engaged to be married. The books did nothing for my career, but they found me him. And my life is infinitely better for writing them.
—Alyssa Wodtke

Real: Alumninum teapot
I am slowly, reluctantly accepting that toothbrushes available on the market today will never, ever fit in the built-in toothbrush and cup holder of my 1929 bungalow.
When the thing I’d been using to contain brushes and paste finally rusted out, I went looking for a replacement. I wanted something funky and vaguely retro, but also something that could survive the inevitable fall onto the tile floor. I found a sweet, two-people-for-tea-sized brushed aluminum teapot, sans lid, at a junk shop.
The handle still sticks straight up in the air and is a neat divider between brushes and toothpaste tubes.
Ephemeral: Landscape design
In the fall of 2001, I had a service come to my house to see what could be done about my wacko yard. She talked, showed me pictures, asked me questions, and did a sketch. Only after the guys stopped digging, tidied up the mulch, and left did I realize: That sketch she’d done was a wireframe, and I though I’d thought I knew what she had said, it wasn’t until I saw the finished project and the consultants had all vanished that I realized I didn’t know how to read the wireframe or the specs.
Two epiphanies came from that experience:
One, that I need to be much more gracious and careful with my own commercial consulting clients, because my own fluency in wireframes is really an esoteric skill, and it’s not fair to expect them to understand me. I have to take time to teach.
Two, once I went back and reviewed my conversation with the designer and looked at the plants she’d chosen to put where, I knew I could do a better job than she’d done.
So, I started the landscape design professional development/certificate program at George Washington University. Twenty-some courses later, I’m doing landscape design as an occasional freelance gig. I thoroughly enjoy the pace and educating clients about native plants—but mostly I enjoy a living, tangible outcome from my efforts that smells nice, too.
—Cinnamon Melchor

Real: Office Supplies

I love office supplies. When I’m on my own, I miss them, when I’m in a big company I hoard them. Many make their way into my life.

A paperclip can be twisted into an ornament holder for a office tree.

A binderclip holds recipes in place (and out of the line of fire) while cooking. You see another reuse—a simple S-hook bought at the hardware store. These are used all over our house; our pans hand from them, belts in the closet, plants from the ceiling… the S-hook is a miracle of design elegance.


Finally, post-its provide the volume of paper a two-year-old needs to express herself, and the stickiness needed for momma to display it.

Ephermeral: Waiting Tables

For a long time I’ve joked that everything I learned about people, I learned waiting tables. There are many lessons you get seeing people interact with one of their three primal needs. You are all that stands between them and food; in fine dining you are what stands in the way—or stands behind—a good night out. In fine dining, the price is even more tangible. A fifty-year-old in a tuxedo can become a two-year-old in a second, and if you don’t feed him while stroking his ego, the de-evolution can go much farther.

For example, I know now that no matter how busy you are, the customer must feel like they are the only people in the world. That means looking them in the eye and explaining slowly and patiently truffle risotto is not made with chocolate, even when your perepheral vision tells you one table doesn’t have water, another is waving at you desperately, and hot food is on the line with a rabid chef giving you the evil eye. The illustion of complete attention must not be broken! In the office, this translates to really listening to people when they talk to you, and not answering the phone or reading email. Humans don’t like to think they are the least interesting thing in the room. If you consider it, you probably wouldn’t like that either. Have you waited while your boss IM’s, or a coworker takes a call in the middle of you explaining a complex problem? Have you done this?

I also learned that no matter what happens, you can save or ruin the entire effort in the last few things you do. Give perfect service and then bring the check slowly, and the tip goes down the drain. I swear you can lose a percentage point for every minute past when the diner wants the check they have to wait. The same goes for everything else in life. You can do a perfect IA but have sloppy design or poor writing, and the IA doesn’t matter much to the overall usability. You can design a great shopping experience but a lousy cart, and there they go! Off to buy at Amazon! You can do a perfect spec for a brilliant product, but deliver late out of disorganization and no kudos for you … or worse, someone else beats you to market. An experience isn’t a good one unless it’s good from start to finish, and finish is the lasting impression.

Finally I know from experience, "I’m sorry " can change everything. If you’ve messed up, forgotten an order, you gotta own up and apologize. Even if the kitchen overcooked the steak, it doens’t do to explain or or excuse: say you are sorry. You are the face of the restaraunt. Giving away a free dessert doesn’t hurt either … after all it’s the last thing they’ll remember. And in the office, no matter how tempting it is to blame it on the other guy, apologize. If your team messes up and you are design lead, you must take responsibility as well.

Of course, a free dessert doesn’t hurt either.
—Christina Wodtke

The contest

From the start, Matt and I agreed to take this contest seriously, approaching it as if we were revamping a website for an actual client. We spent much time studying the existing site hierarchy and brainstorming for ways to produce better user experience. We knew that we didn’t have to convince Boxes and Arrows’ audience of all the invaluable and insightful articles and discussions on the site. It was only a matter of how to get readers to the content more effectively. We were looking to accomplish a very intuitive navigation and site structure/flow to allow the readers to reach their desired content with the fewest clicks possible. It took us roughly a month to create our initial design concept (see Figure 1 & 2), which we are still quite pleased with even to this day. Then with about four days remaining to the deadline, I revisited the contest guidelines and comments posted by the Boxes and Arrows staff. I realized that the B&A folks were looking for a fresh and entirely different look, but the design that we created still too closely resembled the existing site (with its color scheme and layout).

I became convinced that in order for us to have a better chance at winning the contest, we would have to rethink our concept. So painfully, we decided to put aside the design that we had worked so hard on, and started from scratch with a different visual approach. After a few sleepless nights, with heavy bags under our eyes, we submitted our new design concept less than two hours before the contest closing time (see Figure 3 & 4).

Then we waited…

Three months later, I received an email with the subject line “Congratulations!! You have the winning Boxes and Arrows Site Redesign Submission.” I habitually ignore and delete all email that has subject lines beginning with “Congratulations!! You have won…”, assuming spam, so I nearly missed this one! Not until I read through my inbox more carefully later that day and recognized it was from Erin Malone, did I realize that we had actually won the contest. I immediately rang up Matt in London to share the good news with him. I stopped everyone that passed my desk that day to tell them all about the contest. The announcement of our win put a fixed grin on my face for days to come.

Figure 1: First iteration of the front page design

Figure 2: First iteration of the author’s page design

Figure 3: Final front page design submitted to the contest

Figure 4: Final category page design submitted to the contest

Redesigning the redesign

In January of 2004, we began working with Christina Wodtke and Erin Malone on the implementation of the design. During one of our initial conference calls, we asked for permission to create another design concept different from the one we submitted. Since we only had a very short timeframe to put together the contest entry after our decision to start from scratch, we felt that we did not have adequate time to create a design that fully represented our capability or design vision. Christina and Erin kindly agreed to our request.

For the next nine months, we went through many rounds of brainstorming sessions, looking at ways to improve the visual presentation, the functionality, and the structural flow of the site (see Figures 5-7).

Figure 5: Site structure proposal submitted with the design

Figure 6: Idea for how articles should flow/transition through the front page from issue to issue

Figure 7: Proposed sitemap

The folks at Boxes and Arrows made it clear from the onset that they would like to see B&A take on more of a magazine look instead of the blog-centric feel that it had previously. We began looking at various print magazines like Time, Wired, Newsweek, and National Geographic, trying to figure out what elements in periodical cover designs make people quickly recognize a magazine when they see one. We identified strong typography, compelling imagery, and the concept of weekly or monthly issues as the elements that we would like to bring into our site design. (“Transcending CSS”:http://www.transcendingcss.com, a book recently written by Andy Clarke, includes chapters entitled “Marking Up the World” and “Looking for Grids Outside the Web” touching upon the approach of bringing visual elements from different media to the web.) A few weeks later, we created a mockup of the front page. This mockup became the foundation of the design that you see today.

Figure 8: First iteration of second redesign

Design ideas and solutions

Instead of a traditional navigation menu, we incorporated a tag cloud into the site’s left navigation design. Because of the variety of categories listed in the left navigation, we initially took this approach not only to highlight the categories with the higher number of articles, but we felt that different font weight distributions in the navigation menu would also draw the users’ attention to the category list. We invested much time in creating the best algorithm and rendering method to make this work effectively. At the end, B&A decided to leave this piece out after the site launch due to the arrangement of the current taxonomy on the B&A site and the evenly distributed number of articles across the categories (which negates the reason for having a tag cloud to highlight the variance between categories). Nevertheless, we still considered it a clever design approach and hope to see it implemented on the site again one day.

Two other areas that we put much thought into were the layout of the new articles on the front page and the transition/flow of the articles from issue to issue. We wanted to accommodate the different number of articles being published and at the same time create a dynamic layout that provides a fresh look to the front page in every issue, much like a print magazine. We proposed a template system that will allow the editors to easily choose the layout with the best fit each time they publish new articles (see Figure 9 and 10). I believe as the PublicSquare CMS continues to mature, a future plug-in can make this workflow even more automated.

Regarding the transition of articles on the front page, as you can see in Figure 6, we created a flow that will smoothly bring the articles from the new article spots at the top of the front page down to the “Previously” section whenever new articles are published. Eventually, the older articles will be moved out of the front page and will be found in the archived story section of the site. This helps to provide our readers a good sense of continuity each time when they visit the site and enables them to quickly locate the most recent issues.

Anther finer touch was the use of the font-embedding feature in Internet Explorer to apply a more attractive type (Helvetica Neue Medium 67) to the article titles and the issue header, while making sure it degrades gracefully with a similar core web font in other browsers with the help of CSS.

Figure 9: Proposed process for creating different front page layouts for publication

Figure 10: Examples of different front page layouts based on the number of new articles

After several iterations of changes and refinement of this magazine site concept in collaboration with Liz Danzico and Christina Wodtke over a period of two months, we arrived at a polished design concept that was ready to be implemented (see Figure 11 & 12).

Figure 11: Final front page redesign

Figure 12: Final article page design

A bump in the road

While we were conceiving Boxes and Arrows’ new site design, “PublicSquare”:http://publicsquarehq.com/, a new content management system (which now drives the B&A site) created by Christina and Lars Pind was in the works. We soon shared the growing pains of PublicSquare as we were met with challenges in implementing our design into this developing CMS. After failing to launch the new design prior to the 2006 IA Summit, we went back to the drawing board and the implementation phase of the design was put on hold as Lars worked hard to integrate a new theme engine/templating language (“Liquid”:http://home.leetsoft.com/liquid) into PublicSquare. You can read more about this in “Christina’s article”:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/are_we_there_ye.

Towards the later half of 2006, the maturing PublicSquare was ready for us to begin the implementation phase again. It took another few months for us to port over our design into the Liquid theme language with the PublicSquare API. Because of some intricacies in the design, the amount of effort and time required for this phase far exceeded our expectation. It also happened to be the busiest time of the year for our day jobs so we had a bit of a difficult time juggling the work. Nevertheless, slowly but eventually, on the evening of January 15, 2007, we raised the curtain on the new Boxes and Arrows site. I can’t begin to describe the overwhelming sense of joy and relief that we had seeing our design live on the web.

The tortoise crosses the finish line

It has been a long ride. From the day that we received Erin Malone’s email to the day that our design finally launched was almost exactly two years. On this road of redesign, there were many IM chats and Skype calls made, numerous late nights and working weekends spent, and countless cups of tea and coffee consumed. It took awhile, but we got there. Working with these folks at the forefront of the IA community has been a great learning experience. The positive responses from industry leaders in the field of web design have also been a real reward to us.

We hope to continue to contribute to Boxes and Arrows as well as the community it serves. But for now, I am going to get some much-needed sleep, so good night!

See also: Are We There Yet for more tales of the redesign.

Over two years ago, Boxes and Arrows’ then editor-in-chief, Erin Malone, and I decided it was time for a redesign of the magazine. The site had been tweaked and tortured into a shadow of itself over its first two years, the staff struggled with the hacked-up Movable Type installation (the software the site ran on), and it seemed about time for a makeover. Design magazines should be updated often. It’s in their nature.

That was over two years ago. And you, gentle reader, are still asking “Are we there yet?”

Finally, barraged by emails asking about the mystery surrounding the contest, the strange under-explained changes, the increasing degradation of Gabe Zentall’s elegantly understated design, we’re coming clean. We’re sharing the redesign and development process—in all its messy glory—with you.

Yes, folks, we are opening the kimono… just don’t expect Cindy Crawford underneath.

Where is the new design?
Back when we decided B&A needed an overhaul, we held a contest for a new design of Boxes and Arrows. Boy, was that a mistake.

Quality wasn’t the problem. Although the designs were terrific—beautiful, clear, and innovative—not one was what we needed. A successful design is more than beautiful; it is appropriate. And for a design to be successful, the designers need to work hand-in-hand with the client so they understand the client’s vision, and so the client understands the choices made by the designer. Collaborative iteration is the secret to getting to the right design solution. It’s embarrassing that we tripped up this way, knowing how many articles this site hosts on good process. We should have realized a contest was the very opposite of good collaboration.

Compounding our mistake, we chose to have judges—judges who weren’t us—because we thought that seemed right. A contest needs judges, right? Let the experts decide! Well, the fact is: Boxes and Arrows is our site, and the judges had differing ideas of what a great design for B&A was. They even had differing ideas of what kind of magazine B&A is—a usability blog? An information architecture site? They choose designs as winners based on their vast experience in IA, usability, design. But they all had different experience, none of it in being a B&A staff member, and they all choose different winners. The most usable, the most beautiful, the most… you get the picture. When Erin and I saw the judge’s favorites, we knew we were in trouble. Not only did they differ in preference, they could not envision the direction we planned the magazine would go. The judges just weren’t psychic!

Erin and I struggled through the contest process, realizing the issues but committed to following through. Too many people had worked too hard on wonderful designs to toss it all away. We tried to reframe the problem with additional instructions to our judges, and further-defined specs, but it was clear we were in too deep for an easy out. So we held fast to our core goals and prayed the winner might understand.

Luckily, the winning team, April 3rd, had a similar attitude about process. When they won, they immediately asked “Can we redo the design?” They wanted very much to work with us, iterating and exploring, to come up with the right design for B&A. Somehow they’d kept in mind what we had forgotten.

Figures 1: Contest winner by April 3rd (Click to enlarge)

Those who don’t learn from history…
We also should have known better because we’d been down this path before. When we were working with Gabe on the first B&A design, it took a while to find the right style. He went through multiple color and font explorations before even beginning page design, and founding team’s struggle with the design led us to write a mission statement so we could share a single vision. Design is often the place where ideas become flesh, and that is where you discover conflicts in the constituency. We were no different.

Even after we thought our design was perfect and launched with it, we discovered many things needed to be changed to accommodate our audience and staff needs. Today it’s the font size-too small! The next it’s the color-too light! The next it’s the images-we don’t have a Welcome this week! We need a new icon! And soon the design only loosely resembled the original.

Even Gabe was annoyed with his design when he saw it in HTML. Daily, I received polite little fix-it notes. “The gray is #eeeeee, not #cccccc.” “Please make the type 10px, not .8em.” Eventually, he forced himself to stop looking at it and no more sad emails appeared in my inbox.

Figures 2: Original sketch by Gabe Zentall and the design in September 2002 (Click to enlarge)

B&A finally settled into a stable form, and lived more or less happily housing smarter and smarter articles by the design community. Until we decided to muck…

Our story continues
So finally we had a light at the end of the tunnel for the redesign. The design team had been selected, was ready to go and was eager to design something amazing. We had done our homework and we knew what we wanted from a new design! Ready, set…

And then several things happened at once. I decided to build a new CMS from scratch, and Erin decided it was time to pass the baton on to a new editor-in-chief.

Rolling your own
Movable Type, despite the glowing blog entries and great success as a self-publishing tool, was not made for and is not a suitable tool for a team of writers and editors using an editorial workflow to produce quality articles. It’s a blogging tool. Knowing that we wanted a more-robust CMS, we looked at a number of open source solutions, including Drupal, WordPress, and Mambo. But after hacking Movable Type, we were wary of using the wrong tool for the job. That took WordPress out of the equation. And both Drupal and Mambo are like Swiss Army knives: they do everything, but not one thing well. Ever open a bottle of wine with a Swiss Army knife? Using an open source CMS is about as pleasant.

The fact that there were no tools for small groups to publish collaboratively seemed strange, and an opportunity. I suspected fate’s hand when, while giving a talk in Copenhagen, I was introduced to Lars Pind, a programmer who had built several CMS’s. He and I chatted, and he expressed the belief that it was time for a revolution in publishing tools. Around that time, both A List Apart and Digital Web were building their own CMS’s to run their magazines. I cried out “The writing is on the wall! Citizen journalism! New paradigm! Let’s make software!” With that, Lars and I started a new company, Cucina Media, and began our first product, PublicSquare.

So how does this fit with the redesign?
PublicSquare was originally designed to allow for lightweight customization. We thought if we wrote nice, semantic HTML all it would take to customize would be stylesheets, Zen-garden style. Again, we were mistaken. It soon became clear that people care even more about customization with their publications than with their blogs. A stylesheet can take you only so far, despite many articles to the contrary. It’s really not possible to completely separate form and presentation, as April 3rd learned to their chagrin. They struggled mightily to get the new B&A design launched for the 2006 IA Summit, giving up sleep only to see the launch fade in the 11th hour, thwarted by what CSS can and cannot do. With that failure, we decided to regroup.

Luckily, Lars tripped over an interesting templating language, Liquid, made by the folks over at Shopify. Liquid gives all PublicSquare users the ability to fully customize the design-including our much-put-upon B&A design partner, April 3rd. Now that we’ve got the templating language in place, we’re working to stabilize the markup so that April 3rd can do their job without having to redo it over and over again. Nobody wants to see the IA Summit fiasco happen again, even if the only ones who knew about it were Lars, April 3rd and I.

Figures 3: More recent iteration on contest winner by April3rd (Click to enlarge)

Now what? The redesign and beyond
With Erin’s move out of day-to-day oversight, Boxes and Arrows’ internal processes really had to start changing. We brought on new staff, including our first managing editor Javier Velasco, who watches over deadlines and quality; and Liz Danzico, the new editor-in-chief, who helps shape strategy. With new people, we’ve gotten a few new projects underway:

* Publishing: We started a series of new projects, including our first publishing venture. We’ve been talking about paper publishing since the beginning, but it’s just been this year that we’ve started planning in earnest. We’re stepping out with a collection of essays on tags and tagging.

* Events calendar: The Events Calendar, which you may have noticed, is another new addition that came about from personal experience. As a former design manager, I always had a hard time finding events for my direct reports to attend. My staff often came to me trying to choose a conference, but I never really knew about every event that was out there. I saw another opportunity: why not create a centralized dedicated list of events for design practitioners? I see you folks agree; we’ve been bombarded with events!

* Suggestions: You may have noticed the Suggestions area. This is the place for you to add your own story ideas and vote on what you think we should be doing. Beyond that, people have been using it to ask questions, note interesting articles, and make suggestions about site functionality. Don’t think we’re ignoring that! It’s clear more features such as a forum are required. B&A is a place for many voices, and we want to work toward making a tool that makes publishing more participatory while maintaining the quality that an editorial process and staff provides. We’re also learning a lot about voting, reputation systems, and user profiles (i.e., what makes a community tick).

Being without-profit
Until now, B&A has been a “without-profit” venture—just me, paying the hosting and keeping volunteers motivated with the help of an amazing volunteer editorial staff. B&A is still going strong, but we want to take it to the next level, which requires money. We could pursue sponsorships and go non-profit, but we’ve decided to try to make B&A into a self-sustaining business. People, no matter how committed to design and the community, eventually want their weekends and evenings back, and get sick of working with no return beyond the gratitude of the community. The goal is to be able to pay editors and writers, as well as fund new ventures needed by the design community.

This does mean some changes in the site you’ve grown so fond of, including the addition of ads. Don’t fret! We plan to stick with only relevant ads and relevant features. Although Budweiser won’t be advertising here anytime soon, do expect things like a job board or a bookstore.

We care about “Y”
We’re working toward a special way to launch the new design. We’ve asked a guest editor to curate a special issue on virtual and physical spaces, and we hope that will be the first in many special issues to come. Sure, we all love wireframes, but man cannot live on Visio alone!

We’re also interested in hearing more about the directions in which you’d like to see the magazine go. Too often, people dismiss the chance to help a publication grow—”They are all about X, they don’t care about Y.” Well, we do care about Y, we care about it very much. Boxes and Arrows was originally created to fill the need of senior practitioners to get better articles on the questions they faced in their work. As those practitioners have grown, we needed to grow also. Watch for more articles like Erin’s on creating a five-year plan, more articles like Icon Analysis, and, in general, more exploration of the issues you are just becoming aware of (…We hope! You are hard to keep ahead of!).

So, that’s our story so far. The good, the bad, and the ugly. We decided to let you know, even though it’s not a pretty story. We have made missteps, gone out in strange directions, realized we were drinking strange brew, and then tried our best to get back to a better course. In our daily lives we often make mistakes and then spend our time covering them up, trying to look cool. So this article is all about admitting we’ve done dumb stuff and owning up to those mistakes in the hope that you won’t emulate us, but will keep us honest and relevant.

Boxes and Arrows is our magazine. The line between staff and reader grows thinner and thinner. We welcome you to help us as we grow, with your honesty, your critiques, and your participation!

Excelsior!

Holiday lists, to-do lists, grocery lists. With the end of the year come the holidays, and holidays are usually a time for … that’s right … making lists. Take a look into the process (and obsessions) of list-making from our staff. Have a sparkling holiday season and may all your lists come true.

From the staff:
Holiday cookie list
Holiday music list
Palm lists
Online lists
Mantra box list
Buy-Me and open checkbox lists
Refrigerator lists

Holiday cookie list
Every Christmas, from as far back as I can remember, we’ve made Christmas Cookies for Santa (and us!).

If one kind is left out—even if most folks don’t really like them—there is an uproar. Tradition is important in our house, and more than ever now that my daughter Amelie has joined the world. This is one list I have to check twice!

• Frosted sugar cookies
• Almond pretzels
• Pinwheel or bar shortbread cookies
• Cream cheese spritz (colored animals and shapes)
• Chocolate (kisses) filled bon bons
• Meltaways (which resemble Mexican wedding cookies)
• Bourbon balls

These last two are my favorites, and the recipes for them are here, written in my mother’s hand.

-Christina Wodtke

Holiday music list
I am a teeny bit obsessed with using iTunes to make playlists. I cannot describe how much I love music mixes. Putting together a bunch of songs in an unexpected way to set a mood or match a particular occasion just makes me all giddy. This pursuit used to take hours (when I was finding songs on record albums and taping them). Now it’s merely a matter of going through my library and dragging songs to a playlist. Such joy.

For your listening pleasure, I’ve made a new playlist in honor of the holiday season. It’s not really full of holiday songs, although there are a few–it’s more about the feelings, good and bad, that this time of year evokes.

1. Merry Christmas, Baby / Otis Redding

   Otis just has soul. He’s one of my all time faves, so I thought I’d use his best holiday songs to bookend this list.

2. Money (That’s What I Want) / Barrett Strong

   To get everyone presents.

3. In My Life / The Beatles

   During the holidays I typically start thinking about the big stuff.

4. Turn Turn Turn / The Byrds

   We sang this at my sixth grade holiday concert.

5. It’s Getting Better / Cass Elliot

   I have to believe it too.

6. Baby It’s Cold Outside – Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan

   It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s romantic.

7. December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night) / The Four Seasons

   What a very special time for me.

8. Blue Christmas / Elvis Presley

   Some of you may know I have a teeny teeny thing about The King. This tune is Elvis incarnate.

9. Day By Day / Godspell

   More spiritual than religious. Besides, it’s groovy.

10. He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother / The Hollies

    I’m just getting all mushy now.

11. Little Drummer Boy/Silent Night / Jimi Hendrix

    I’ve come back to my senses. Jimi tears into some holiday faves.

12. Where Have All the Flowers Gone / The Kingston Trio

    I can’t help thinking about our soldiers overseas now.

13. The Morning After / Maureen McGovern

    She sang this on New Years Eve just before the ship turned over and that guy crashed into the skylight.

14. He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands / Nina Simone

    Yes He does.

15. Put Your Hand In The Hand / Ocean

    Another groovy ‘70s happy peace and love song.

16. Joy To The World / Three Dog Night

    I couldn’t avoid putting this one in. Kind of had to.

17. What a Wonderful World / Tony Bennett & K.D. Lang

    At least I try to think it.

18. Get Together / The Youngbloods

    Try to love one another now.

19. White Christmas / Otis Redding

    I’m dreaming of it too.

Get Dorelle’s Holiday Mix at iTunes, and at Y! Music.

-Dorelle Rabinowitz

Palm lists
The best thing about holidays is traveling, and whenever you travel, it’s critical to bring the right gear along with you. So this is a time when lists come in handy, to help you make sure the right luggage is there.

I have a small application in my Palm Pilot that lets me make all sorts of checklists. I use Checklist by Handmark, which allows me to make several lists, sort the items, and even beam lists to my wife. Once you check an item, it can disappear, shortening a list until it’s done without the need to scroll down.

My longest list is for doing groceries, but I rarely use it–paper and memory are handier for daily stuff. But the lists I force myself to use are my packing lists. I have one for weekend escapes, holiday vacations, and another for camping trips.

Of course, they all include my camera gear, the difference is made by the food and cooking supplies, travel documentation, and kinds of clothes needed for the situation. Using these lists, it is safer to drive away without the feeling that you have to find out what you left home before it’s too late to turn around.

My camping list is:

• Tent
  
• Hooks for tent
  
• Sleeping bags
  
• Air Mattress
  
• Flashlight
  
• Pans
  
• Stove
  
• Fuel for stove
  
• Knife and big spoon
• Swiss army knife
  
• Utensils
  
• Matches
  
• Cups/mugs
  
• Dishes
  
• Tea
  
• Toilet paper
  
• Cooking oil
  
• Salt
  
• Sugar
  
• Pepper
  
• Boniculars
  
• Outdoor soap (the one that doesn’t need water)
  
• Camera
  
• Film
  
• Sunblock
  
• Chapstick
  
• First-aid kit
  
• Candles

-Javier Velasco

Online lists
Ta-da Lists, a free service from the good folks at 37 Signals, are a great way to create and manage lists online. (Really–it’s free). After a painless registration, you can create as many lists with as many items as you need. Just check an item and it moves to the bottom of the list, signaling it’s completed. Editing lists is effortless, but reordering items is a little clunky. You can also share lists with others, email them to yourself, and even set up an RSS feed.

I tend to use online lists for longer-term inventories of things like gift ideas, repairs around the house, and music I want to buy. Think of a great gift for someone six months before his or her birthday? Jot it down online. Or, if I read a review of a CD I eventually want to investigate, I’ll add it to my “Music” list. This way you can snowball ideas, thoughts, and catalogs of things over time.

The portability of Ta-da Lists is key. Anytime you’re online you can access your stuff. OK, it’s no Memex, but it can help you recall things. If you travel a lot or move between computers, it’s quite handy to have a single record. You get a simple URL in the format “yourusername.tadalist.com”–very easy to remember.

Daily to-do lists are better on paper, close at hand, in my opinion. So it’s a combination of old-fashion, handwritten to-do lists and online list management that helps me keep track of things.

-Jim Kalbach

Mantra box list
2005 was a challenging year for me; big changes in my life have forced me to reexamine some of my values and objectives. As part of this process, I’ve been trying to become better attuned to my inner voice—to approach important decisions in a more intuitive manner. One tool I’ve used during this time is what I call my “mantra box:” a list of phrases and words that I’ve come across in my reading, or in interactions with others, that resonate deeply with me.

Here is how it works: I keep a stack of 3” x 5” index cards and a Sharpie marker with me most of the time. When I come across a phrase that “calls” to me, I immediately write it on a single card in large block letters. It goes into my mantra box—one of those cheap card boxes you can find at drugstores.

I try to keep my “judging mind” out of the collection process; some phrases are trivial, obvious, or tacky. Others are quotes from personal heroes. Still others are somewhat mysterious at first; the full reason for their attractiveness is only revealed to me at a later time, when I’m in a more contemplative mood. All of them go into the box—the sole criteria for admission is having struck a deep chord in me.

Sometimes—when I’m feeling introspective—I review the contents of the box. If a particular mantra feels relevant to my current situation, I copy it to my day planner where I can refer to it frequently, and bring it into my daily life. (I don’t throw out mantras: it may turn out that even the stupid ones have a reason for being there.)

Here are, in no particular order, some of the phrases and words that have spoken to me—and merited a place in my mantra box—in 2005:

• Simplify
  
• He who owns little is little owned
  
• Smaller, smaller
  
• Do only what you love, love everything that you do
  
• Collaborate
  
• Underpromise, overdeliver
  
• Embrace constraints
  
• Less
  
• Business is personal—not an abstraction
  
• Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee
  
• Context
  
• Honor your mistake as a hidden intention
  
• Disrupt business as usual
  
• Convert talent into code
  
• Anchor
  
• Yes or no?
  
• Eat like a bird, shit like an elephant
  
• Axis thinking
  
• Tenacity
  
• Style—happiness—emotional appeal
  
• Disorganize (for renewal and innovation)
  
• Storytelling
  
• As simple as possible, but not simpler
  
• Nobody knows what they really want before they get it

-Jorge Arango

Buy me and open checkbox lists
Every day, I use at least two lists:

1. The Buy-Me method
While I pretend not to be cautious about music, I do tend to try a track or two before I buy an album. About once a month, I view the handy “Buy Me” smart playlist I created in iTunes. In it, neatly sorted by Play Count, are the tracks I’ve been listening to most often. No need to think about value of the purchase or an album’s potential for pleasuring. Chances are, if I’ve listened to a track at least once every three days for three weeks (roughly), I should buy the album. The Buy-Me recommendations are often a surprise to me, which is kind of a fun by-product of the system (no pun intended).

Smart playlists do the list making for me

2. Open checkbox method
Although I’ve tried all kinds, paper-based to-do list works best for me. Even though it’s analog, a consistent visual vocabulary helps me get things done. Here’s how it works:

When I need to get something done, I create a new list item. Each list item gets an open checkbox and a name. Other variables might include:

* Checkbox and asterisk: Indicates open task that is urgent
* Checkbox and “f/u:” Indicates an open task that needs additional follow-up before I can complete it.
* Checkbox and circled letter: Indicates that an open task needs to be performed in a specific location. Adding the location makes the list easy to scan to chunk potential errands. (“T” below indicates that the three tasks must all be performed at Target, for example.)

When a task is complete, I put a check in the checkbox, allowing the satisfaction of crossing something out without rendering the item illegible. Oftentimes, I must refer back to completed items, so I prefer to have them available. Sometimes, a task is still unchecked after a significant period of time or several pages in the notebook. In these cases, a strikethrough is necessary, and the unchecked item gets moved to a new page. When an entire list is complete, I put a strike through the entire page.

-Liz Danzico

Refrigerator lists
I write lists for lots of things, though I wouldn’t call myself obsessive. I like the legitimacy of putting something on a list. It means a commitment of some sort—something to be bought, a task to be completed, a thoughtful intention to do something.

I have the daily-weekly-monthly lists for work, but for the rest of my life, I mainly make lists for must-dos such as groceries, Christmas gifts, and errands. There is no formality to my lists. They are as basic as can be—words on paper. Often they’re written on small scraps or Post-Its with whatever I can get my hands on, pen if I’m lucky, pencil crayon if I’m not.

The grocery list is my most formalized list. It lives under a magnet on the side of the fridge. It’s simple, accessible. Everyone in my house knows what it is, and why it’s there. And to my great annoyance, I’m the only one who uses it. That means that even after a $300 grocery bender, I can still come home to someone asking why I didn’t buy Cheerios. “Because you didn’t put it on the list!!” Big sigh.

My favorite lists are ones I do most infrequently—life goals and ambitions. The list of big dreams. I’ve done these off and on for years, and they follow a fairly strict format. Things can’t be as simple as “win the lottery.” Items on this list have a certain amount of thought behind them that address the particulars of how to make something happen. My practice has been to spend time creating these lists, and then promptly forget about them. I now tend to save them on my computer, which means I could look at them occasionally, but I never do. Since I’m rather disorganized elsewhere in my life, these lists are usually lost, then turn up accidentally while I’m going through old notebooks or papers and files. The best thing about these occasional findings is remembering what I dreamt about long ago, and what I can check off.

Much to my surprise, I seem to have had a plan for how I wanted things to be. I have the two kids, a house by the ravine, work I can do from home, a Master’s degree—all things that have appeared on my life’s grocery lists over the years. I think it comes back to the notion that putting something on a list legitimizes it and increases the likelihood that it might actually happen, whether you’re talking about getting a new job, having another baby, or buying Cheerios.

-Pat Barford

As an editorial team, we thank you. We think about you all the time, in fact, and enjoy working with you. But now there are so many of you. And you have such brilliant ideas. That’s why we’ve decided to give the magazine to you, in part.

Starting today, you’ll begin to see some changes. While the editorial team will still maintain the tone and consistency of B&A, you’re now officially invited to be part of the process.

Here’s how:

Better ideas, better magazine.
Instead of emailing your new story idea to an editor, you post it here for comments and ratings …by everyone. This shared editorialship will help authors refine ideas and help us understand what you want and need to read.

Say that again?
Yes. You decide what gets published. (Well ok, we’ll weigh in some too.)

Ratings and transparency and reputation points. Oh my.
The B&A community has always been a smart, respectful community. We’ve been amazed at how little spam and how few trolls we attract. But we know this can’t last forever, so we’ve instituted a reputation manager. See an offensive comment? You no longer have to wait for us to get to the issue, you can help get rid of the drek. Moreover, you can star the best comments, and help the cream rise to the top!

Location, location, location.
You can see where the conversations are happening and who’s having them. Each page posts stats on conversations and people, so you can quickly find the most interesting, controversial or insightful moments on the site.

Home transparent home.
The homepage gives you the full list of site stats as well as access to your profile on B&A. You can now see what we see—what a vibrant, smart community we’ve got!

But wait! This is only the beginning. The new look and feel is still to come, now that we’ve got a new set of features. And you, our beloved community, are invited to let us know how we’re doing (as if you’d hold back!) And watch this spot—the tool we’ve build for you to enjoy B&A, we plan to make available to you to build your own community of practice.

Excelsior!

Boxes & Arrows: When did you start thinking about “findability” as a concept? How is it different from the concepts you learned and applied in library science?

Peter Morville: I first used the word in a presentation at the 2002 Information Architecture Summit in Baltimore. Soon after, I wrote “The Age of Findability.” For me, findability is about crossing boundaries of discipline and medium.

Findability takes us beyond usability and information architecture into the realms of design, engineering and marketing. And it encompasses wayfinding and retrieval in physical and digital environments.

So findability builds on the foundation of library science and human-computer interaction, but addresses the new challenges and opportunities of social software, collective intelligence and ubiquitous computing.

B&A: What is “ambient findability?”

PM: Ambient findability describes a world at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. It’s not necessarily a goal, and we’ll never quite arrive, but we’re sure as heck headed in the right direction.

B&A: In a recent article about authority, you point out that Tim O’Reilly proclaimed the death of taxonomy. Do you agree with him?

PM: No. Unfortunately, Tim is suffering from apophenia. I think he caught it from Clay Shirky. I hope they both get well soon.

People have been predicting the end of hierarchy since the beginning of hierarchy. But it’s not going away. In fact, I dedicate a whole chapter to explore the hyperbole that swirls around social software and the Semantic Web. I make the case for a “sociosemantic web” that relies on the pace-layering of ontologies, taxonomies, and folksonomies to learn and adapt as well as teach and remember.

David Weinberger once noted “The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together.” I’ve always found this to be a brilliant metaphor. Because we know what happens to those piles of leaves we shuffle through each fall. They rot. And they return to the earth. Where they become food for trees. Which come in many colors, shapes, and sizes. And live a really, really, really long time.

B&A: On the sigia mailing list, it was recently pointed out that your book wasn’t findable via the Safari Bookshelf under either “information architecture” or “interaction design.” When will these types of findability problems become nonexistent?

PM: As long as humans use words to communicate, findability will remain imperfect. But in our lifetimes, we can probably expect a few more modest innovations like full-text search, the PageRank algorithm, controlled vocabularies, and user-contributed metadata. Things may get a little better, but don’t expect big advances from the likes of artificial intelligence. Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath for the singularity.

On a practical note, I’m pleased to report the lemur (on Safari) is now filed under:

Internet/Online > Web Design
Internet/Online > Usability
Human-Computer Interaction > Interface Design
Human-Computer Interaction > Usability
Human-Computer Interaction > Information Architecture

Of course, it’s also showing up in all sorts of strange places, but that’s another story altogether.

B&A: In your book, you claim that users are often willing to sacrifice information quality for accessibility. Do users have enough awareness of authority to judge quality?

PM: My article on authority provoked a wonderful discussion on web4lib about this very question. My sense is that many adults lack the information literacy skills needed to cope with a mediascape that enables us to select our sources and choose our news. We grew up in an overly simplistic world of centralized authority with teachers and encyclopedias that taught us “the truth.”

Today’s kids are growing up amidst a web of social facts and collective intelligence where folksonomies flourish and the truth is a virus of many colors. I’m optimistic these kids will develop sophisticated skills for judging authority and quality and deciding who to trust and what to believe.

B&A: With information gaining on us, are we destined to become satisficers? And if so, is this a bad thing? We’re developing our own definitions of authority after all.

PM: We have always been satisficers. It confers competitive and evolutionary advantage. We satisfice to succeed. And I reject the conventional wisdom that suggests our information diet has been corrupted by the Web. To the contrary, the Web has radically improved global information access and source diversity and quality.

I can understand why an academic with access to vast libraries of books, journals, and licensed databases might sneer at the free Web. But these crown jewels of the ivory tower are unreachable by most people most of the time, and they always have been. Amid cries of “let them eat cake,” the Web gave bread and fruit and vegetables to the starving masses.

Of course, Google Print and Yahoo!’s Open Content Alliance are about to steal the crown jewels from the ivory tower, so we can all eat a balanced information diet, along with a healthy dose of free radical memes and mixed metaphors.

PM: Data is not dead, but I do agree with David Weinberger’s wicked smart insight about the blurring of boundaries between data and metadata. Just consider Amazon’s Search Inside the Book, which transforms content into searchable, indexed metadata.

Similarly, in social network analysis, I noted that we use people to find content and content to find people. A blog post can serve as destination content and as descriptive metadata that makes the author more findable.

B&A: In your book, you point out that the information in the Encyclopedia Britannica has a findability problem. If its findability were greater, would Wikipedia have a viable competitor on its hands?

PM: I think of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a wonderful educational resource for kids. It explains important topics in a traditional manner that is clear, simple and safe. But I never use the EB, even though I have free, electronic access through my University of Michigan affiliation.

I did a great deal of research for my book. And I made extensive use of licensed bibliographic and full-text databases. But the Wikipedia was the single most useful source. Findability is only part of its success. It’s also strong in quality, currency and breadth of coverage.

As the world’s largest, most popular encyclopedia, the Wikipedia illustrates the efficacy of open source content creation and the power of collective intelligence. So, in short, the answer is no. Wikipedia has nothing to fear from EB.

B&A: Did you think about the findability of information within the book itself? What did you do to make it more findability-friendly?

PM: As I note in the preface, the book is meant to be read in linear style from start to end. We included some wayfinding devices like page numbers and a table of contents, but they’re not central to the user experience.

However, if we ever do a second edition, I’d push for a more detailed index, so I could use it to find what I wrote. In the meantime, I rely on the free Search on Safari (see the red box in the lower left) for detailed lookup.

Of course, as an author, what I really want for Christmas is to have my book indexed by Google Print and Yahoo!’s Open Content Alliance. I hope you’re reading this Tim.

B&A: What bugs you as being unfindable? What kind of information do you wish were more findable?

PM: A few weeks ago, I visited our local shopping mall for the first (and last) time this year. I went in search of shoes, but the store where I found them last time didn’t have my size. So I had to drag my body around the meatspace of the mall, and the whole time I just kept wishing that I could Google the Mall, and go home. I ended up finding the shoes online at Amazon.

B&A: I’m assuming you monitor how findable you are as a person. What do you do to ensure that you yourself are more findable online?

PM: Semantic Studios and findability.org are designed with findability and search engine optimization in mind. And my email address has been public for years, which means I can easily be found by friends and clients and stalkers and spammers. Sometimes, the real trick is becoming unfindable.

B&A: With the influx of wireless devices and new affordances, you note that the “user experience is increasingly out of control” and you suggest that we lose the C in HCI. Can you explain?

PM: The complexity of user experience in today’s environments is not expressed well in typical models of human-computer interaction. HCI approaches are optimal for applications and interfaces where designers exercise great control over form and function. HII (Human Information Interaction) approaches are optimal for networked, transmedia systems where control is sacrificed for interoperability and findability. At the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, users may find and interact with objects through a variety of devices and interfaces. The context of use is difficult to predict and impossible to control. And so, the emphasis shifts from interface to experience, and from HCI to HII. Or at least that’s what I’m hoping to argue at CHI 2006. Wish me luck!

B&A: In your book, you often refer to William Gibson’s quotation, “The future exists today. It’s just unevenly distributed.” Do you have any predictions on where we might look for signs of ambient findability?

PM: Everyware is everywhere but we take this magic for granted. The fact that I can surf the Web at the beach and check email while driving is amazing, but what we’re really searching for is the impossible. I’m reminded of Howard Rheingold’s observation in Smart Mobs:

“People for whom pervasive computing is an abstraction will understand very clearly that the traditional barriers between information and material have changed when the air they breathe might be watching them.”

Of course, not long after this becomes possible, it will be considered mundane. We’re only fascinated by the future because we can never get there.

B&A: For many years, you were associated with the venerable polar bear. How does it feel to be associated with a lemur?

PM: What’s important is that the two get along well together, though the cheeky lemur sometimes gets a well-deserved cuff behind the ears.

Related information

Laughing Lemur Contest
Entries will be accepted through December 11, 2005.

Peter Morville is widely recognized as a founding father of information architecture. He co-authored the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and has consulted with such organizations as Harvard, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. Peter is president of Semantic Studios, co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute, and a faculty member at the University of Michigan. His work has been featured in many publications including Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal. Peter’s latest book, Ambient Findability, was published in 2005.

He blogs at findability.org.

Liz Danzico, editor in chief for Boxes and Arrows, is currently director of experience strategy for AIGA. She plays the role of managing editor for the online journals specifically, and, generally, oversees all online content and tools. She’s also the publications manager for the AIGA Press, a partnership with New Riders Publishers, publishing books that explore where design, business, and culture overlap.

Liz is an adjunct professor at the New School University, where she teaches design history. In past roles, she helped build and manage the information architecture team at Barnes & Noble.com. Prior to BN, she enjoyed being at Razorfish, where she managed the information architecture group for the New York office.

Her personal site can be found at bobulate.com.

When Christina first approached me four years ago, it was to be a writer for this new secret project of hers. I was honored and of course immediately said yes. Within a month of that request, she and George Olsen approached me about being co-editor, and with that I was pulled into the fold. Several people were working furiously trying to craft and shape and design a place that information architects could have a voice. This was to be a place to share and learn and not be encumbered by the baggage of academic language or obscurity. This was to be a place of practice, craft, and open arms as we sought to find our home in the greater universe of the user experience realm.

George and I worked diligently to define types of articles and features we wanted—what would be regular columns and what would be monthly features. We aspired to a lofty goal of two articles a week plus a monthly “Welcome.” On a volunteer basis with two editors, that was lofty indeed. We made lists of people whose writings – from articles, books, blogs, and list postings – that we liked, admired, or just plain suspected would be thought-provoking or controversial. We approached people to write for us.

When we launched at the 2002 IA Summit a few months later, it was with a full stable of articles, a planned calendar, and a queue full of works-in-progress. At the Summit, Christina said, “I’ll be happy if we last six months.” Little did we know. It was a few months later, when George resigned, that I took on the mantle of editor in chief.

Now here it is: four years later. We are part of the landscape and a resource that is often referenced. Everywhere I go, folks refer to an article they read on Boxes and Arrows. We are expected to be here. The last few years has seen a dot-com bust and gradual rebuilding. Folks have been out of work, freelanced, became entrepreneurs, and finally joined staffs and rebuilt organizations in-house. This cycle has also affected Boxes and Arrows. As a volunteer organization, we have seen the cycle of authors, of volunteers, and of readers rise and fall as people became employed again and became engaged in a myriad of activities. The landscape, too, has gotten more crowded as more people have found their voice to share. Yet, despite the pressures of jobs and life, we continue to have a flow of great people interested in writing. People want to share their experiences and their practice. I am continually amazed at how open and giving this community is.

Over the years I have had the pleasure of meeting some great folks and of working with very dedicated people. George Olsen, Ryan Olshavsky, Brenda Janish all gave their time and effort. Our current editorial staff—Dorelle Rabinowitz, Liz Danzico, Javier Velasco, Jim Kalbach, Jorge Arango, Elisa Miller, Pat Barford—all eager and working behind the scenes to keep the knowledge flowing. Our copywriters Lara Ferguson McNamara, Emily Wilska, and Kirsten Swearingen always ready at a moment’s notice to turn something around in 24 hours. Thanks.

It is with this reflection that I announce my resignation as editor-in-chief and the appointment of new leadership. It is time for new voices and fresh eyes.

I am confident that Boxes and Arrows is going to be in great hands and am proud to pass the baton to Liz Danzico as the new editor-in-chief. And Javier Velasco has accepted the first ever managing editor role.

I’d like to thank Christina for the opportunity that she gave me—without really knowing me at the time, and for our readers for being there and continuing to come back.

Most of all I’d like to thank all the authors that I have worked with over the years. Some of the work was hard (you know who you are) and some of it was easy, but because of all of it, I am a smarter person because of what you have shared.

Thanks for the privilege of working for you.

Erin Malone

Erin Malone is currently Director of Design, Platform group at Yahoo! Her team is currently responsible for developing tools, brand guidelines, cross-network research and a knowledge management system for Yahoo! Design Standards and Best Practices for the entire User Experience group. Before Yahoo!, she was a Product Design Director at AOL (America Online) and worked on such applications as AIM, WinAmp, AOL Radio, AOL Media Player, AOL Wallet, My AOL, various Community products and other things deemed important to the company. Prior to AOL, she was Creative Director at AltaVista, where she managed a team of Information Architects and Designers working on the AltaVista Live portal and various other web applications. Other work has included being the first and only IA/Interaction Designer at Zip2, working on the first generation Adobe web site, redesigning the San Jose Repertory Theatre web site, as well as designing GUI for several projects at Eastman Kodak company and early AOL Greenhouse partners. She has plied her trade in interactive and digital information spaces, including the web since 1993. Prior to that she worked in some crazy field called Advertising where she was indoctrinated into the world of Brand and Marketing.

Erin has a BFA in Communication Design from East Carolina University, Greenville NC and an MFA in Graphic/Information Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester NY.

As an editor she spends a lot of time reading these articles and wrangling writers. In her spare time, she cycles, takes a lot of photographs, plays guitar and keeps multiple websites including The Dr. Leslie Project a web interpretation of her Masters Thesis; a Photolog and Design Writings, in which she talks about Design, Design History, Information Architecture, Design Theory and Design Criticism.

Boxes and Arrows has gone through some ups and downs this year as well. Christina and I decided to ask our readers to help us redesign, and we had a lot of fun reviewing submissions from around the world. Look for a redesign in mid-2005. We have also been researching a new CMS system, looking for something that is geared towards periodical publishing with editors and multiple levels of administration and publishing. If you have ideas, we would love to hear them.

The end of this year also sees Brenda Janish retiring as editor. Brenda, who started as a copyeditor at the very beginning before we launched and evolved into a full editor soon after, helped me carry the editorial load for about a year before our other great editors joined us. Brenda is still going to be copyediting, but we will miss her editorial vision. Thanks for everything Brenda.

With Brenda’s retirement, we would like to announce the addition of Molly Wright Steenson as a new editor on our staff. Welcome Molly.

I want to take this opportunity to thank our other editors, Liz Danzico and Dorelle Rabinowitz–both of whom also changed jobs this year–as did Christina. As you can tell, it has been a bit tumultuous for the staff this year and through it all we still continue to publish. Thanks go out as well to our copyeditors who help support the editorial staff and our great technical guru, Kirk Franklin.

Most of all, I want to thank all of our authors–for your patience, for your continued interest in writing for us, even when we get busy and take forever to respond. Thanks for the great things I continue to learn and for keeping us honest.

A final thanks goes to you, the reader, without whom we would not exist. You keep us going.

Erin Malone
Editor in chief

Time for reflection, new beginnings, and giving thanks

Ah the holidays. Time for reflection, new beginnings and giving thanks. Since I recently made a fresh new career move, and in the process moved far away from most of my family and friends, I’ve been thinking lately about what’s important to me and what I’m thankful for–and Boxes and Arrows is up there on my list. Not just because of the thought-provoking, career-helping, and all-around interesting content, but also because it’s given me the chance to serve as an editor.

So first of all, thanks to Boxes and Arrows for letting me come on board. I wanted the chance to give back to this community–but instead I feel like I’ve won the lottery.

I’ve been an editor now for over a year, and I’ve had the chance to work with many remarkable people–some have shared my passion for user experience design and some have shared their unique points of views, and I’ve learned from them all. Another common trait is their patience–sometimes trying to fit B&A into my overwhelming works schedule leaves many author’s articles in my to-do pile too long. Thanks to each of you.

At each industry event I’ve attended someone recognizes my name from B&A and I’ve been able to have another conversion about Information Architecture or Interaction design or Big IA vs Little IA. Thanks to those folks.

Since my world is one big six-degrees of separation game, I wouldn’t be at Yahoo! without B&A either. I’m thankful to all the Yahoos who welcomed me as if they knew me, especially to my UED team, and to those people who said nice things about me so I could come here.

I’m grateful and impressed by all the people who entered the redesign contest, coming up with ideas to improve something we all care so much about.

Remembering why I made the choice to devote my time to this “peer-written journal” and all the benefits I’ve received from that choice make me extremely thankful. Are there any other wannabe volunteers out there who’d like to get back much more then they put in?

Dorelle Rabinowitz
Editor

Authors + context = happiness

Reflecting back on my work with Boxes and Arrows in 2004, I must admit that I’m most thankful for the exchage of ideas I get to have with the authors. Exchanging ideas on big-picture IA concepts, reader needs, as well as the best way to hypenate a title: I look forward to it all with every first draft I receive.

I suppose that I’m most thankful, then, to be part of the context-making. Boxes and Arrow’s shiny and sometimes controversial outside and the messy and industrious inside–to me, this wholeness is the real context of the article. Further, helping to publish an issue of Boxes and Arrows is about creating context for our readers. We work to create meaningful combinations through the juxtaposition of articles. And I like to get involved in the working insides where the author-editor context is (Not to be overlooked is the discussion section of the site where authors, readers, editors, and other surprise guests create their own new contexts.).

So thanks to all the authors I’ve worked with in 2004. I’ve been flattered to be on the inside as part of your process: Nancy Broden, Jeff English, Alex Kirtland, Brian Krause, Marisa Gallagher, Victor Lombardi, Max Lord, Laura Quinn, Tanya Rabourn, Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, Chris Ricci, Jason Withrow, Jonathan Woytek, Liam Friedman (not yet published), Maggie Law (not yet published), John Rhodes (not yet published), Andrea Streight (not yet published).

Liz Danzico
Editor

Have Yourself a Merry Little Fourth Quarter

Here we are again, at the end of another year. This is the time of year when Erin likes to remind me when we started our little magazine, I said I would be happy if it lasted sixth months. Well, I would have been, so you can imagine my delight that we are entering our fourth year of publishing articles for the professional designer.

When we started B&A, all the magazines I could find were either full of beginner articles on design, or academic articles, accessible only by experts. I had Inmates Are Running the Asylum open on my desk as I contemplated this phenomenon, and saw the chart where Cooper illustrates how designers design for beginners and experts, but the vast majority of users are actually intermediates. It struck me that that was true of my experience as a reader, and I set out with many of my friends to try to create a magazine we would want to read. Since then a number of other websites have begun providing more advanced discussions of design, but B&A has managed to continue to attract smart people who both write articles and then enrich them further with smart commentary. I’m amazed and delighted every other week when I see what the Boxes and Arrows community (along with its caretakers, the editors) have brought into the world.

I’m so very grateful to you, dear readers and writers, because day after day you make me smarter. When I think a realm is done and buried, you surprise me with something new–a perspective, a technique, a persuasive argument–I hadn’t thought of, and once again I feel the pleasant sensation of the cogs in my head turning. I consider my small work of sending out updates, paying for hosting, and dusting out the comment spam as a miniscule price to pay for the intelligence shown here on these pages. As publisher I feel humble, because I know all I did was open a door to all the insight that was already there.

And so I thank you all, and hope you will stay with us as we embark on our biggest adventure yet–taking B&A to the next level with a new platform, a new architecture, and a new design.

I hug you all.

Christina Wodtke
Publisher
Boxes and Arrows