Comments on Prognostication Digitalis

Brendan Hamley — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:56 GMT

One last one:

ThumbGen®

Brendan Hamley — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:56 GMT

Co-creation

Content docking

Self building architecture

Orbital architecture

Data guardians

Click-profiles

Trait-trails

Internet O/S

Keyhole apps

Soundscaping

AudioNav

Feedback styling

Metaphor programming

Experiential algorithms

Salepath

Experience audit

... and a thousand other vague but mystical sounding buzzterms.

Andrei — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:56 GMT

“1997 to 2001 was our digital childhood, but now we are clearly in our adolescence?immature, cantankerous, argumentative, but also passionate, hopeful, and determined. “

The late 90s was our childhood?

Man… and what does that say about those of us who have been doing this kind of work since the early 90s? What about MY peers, the ones who broke ground in the 1980s? What about the pioneers in 1970s? Were they embryos and me a simple infant? I don’t think so.

I think you mean to say, “1982 to 2002” was our digital childhood.

That so many in the field these days seem to not know what happened prior to 1997 is serious problem in the field of design for technology proiducts. IMHO. Let’s not perpetuate the lack of understanding of how things got to 1997, or worse, not include it in the log.

In fact, maybe B&A should have an article written about what was LOST in the Internet craze. What things were suddenly forgotten when the browser emerged. So those who got into the field in 1997 can not be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Andrei

Eric Scheid — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:56 GMT

On Taxonomies: my prediction is that this is the year for general awarness of formal taxonomies as distinct from grab bag collections of words), and sharing of small scale taxonomies.

Efforts like XFML, LiveTopics, and FacetMap are leading the way, along with support for categories in the major blogging tools. The growing interconnectedness of the blogosphere is also helping here, with trackback/pingback/referrers/etc.

Bruce — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:56 GMT

Rich Internet Applications – whether based on Flash and ColdFusion or not – will become much more widespread, as people want the kind of interaction that they’re used to with desktops, games etc. This will be a Good Thing, although the IA world will resist it, until plenty of people find new, better jobs, working on the IA of rich internet apps.

The growing maturity of web standards, CSS etc etc will mean a greater gulf between those web professionals and ‘bedroom’ coders. This means greater barriers to entry to people wishing to publish on the web, unless they want to add to the legions of blogs. This is potentially bad for the democratic web of communication.

Devising a framework for the semantic web will be the next big challenge.

Ashvin Jetpuria — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:56 GMT

I believe the views put forward all have their basis in their own right. I would like to just add my perspective to all this. Here goes (my 2 cents worth)

I think the love affair brought about by the internet revolution is just beginning. The internet has put forward so much in so little time.

We have only just begun to appreciate some of the benefits. Like all love affairs, the love affair with putting up web pages quickly and easilyand hence web sites so easily and quickly has only just begun. This is shown by the recent introduction of online web site generation tools that seemingly make putting up web sites by Yahoo and some large corporations.

Therefore I forsee many people going down this ‘discovery’ path before taking stock of what IA can do for them. Information Architecture will have to wait a while longer before gaining widespread recognition as one of the proper activity in web site design and building.

A lot will have to come from the IA community being able to organize proper organizations and marketing the benefits of IA.

As has been said, attempts to develop methodologies to be used IA will be futile. This is because the subject itself demands extreme skill-sets, which are not deliverable by individuals. Each organization/group seems to have their own methodologies, veryone of them working well for their owners. Standardisation becomes increasingly difficult.

Advertising companies, holding the key role in shaping corporate identity, marketing and media strategies are best positioned to take advantage. However, I still think they are still locked into traditional approaches rather that innovating new ones recognize convergent trends of media.

People will continue to be pushed with technologies only to discover that this approach will only provide a shallow experience both for the owners as well as their audiences.

Organizations looking for ROI’s with magnifying glasses will continue to be overwhelemed with confusion and non achievement.

However, the handful of organizations that concentrate on usability and seriously endeavour to integrate web sites as well as other forms of technology to better serve their customers, will eventually be the winners in usability strategies and eventually see big returns on ROI’s. These groups will advance the use of IA methods.

All this gives IA proponents time to organize themselves. We can only hope more and more people go down the ‘discover’ path and quickly realize that web site buidling is more than just some quick coding and some fancy graphics. In this lies IA’s real growth. Attepts to fight this trend will be futile, as the variables are just too difficult for people to see.

ML — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:56 GMT

CW: in terms of prepackaged taxonomies…that’s already happening. Many content aggregators are starting to give their taxonomies to their existing clients and even working closely with them to help develop the taxonomies that would be used internally to tag the content they aggregate. There are also other companies out there who “sell” services to create taxonomies for a company. In actuality they just grab a previous taxonomy that they built and add/delete what is relevant to that current client.

Jacky Kwok — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:56 GMT

I was come from Hong Kong and I’m very new to this field. I don’t want to predict anything but only to make some wishes.

The sense of our profession (aka “what we do” by Christina) is very low here in Hong Kong. The most famous term to the senior management or clients is usability. I think this may be because of the Jakob Nielsen effect and the FURPS by HP (which means Functionality, Usability, Reliability, Performance, Supportability) which includes usability.

For example, my previous Chief Technology Officer would just throw a few usability books on the web designers’ desks and assume they can do everything including web site organization (those IA jobs), UI design and visual design with good usability. No one know we need time and resources to do user and task analysis, create personas and scenarios and even do some user testings.

I just hope our field can draw some attentions in Hong Kong (and similar places where our profession is not as popular as US).

And thank you all for making such a good web site for us.