“Experience design” doesn’t just apply to online design. Paco Underhill’s “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping” explores customer experience and consumer behavior as they affect retail and offline environments and in turn provides dozens of lessons for those in web development.
Continue readingPart 1: My entrée into the web world—Spaceland, or “Hyperspace”—was not a smooth one; in fact, it was downright mind-bending. My personal journey from designing and writing for print media to becoming an information architect for websites conjures up images of Flatland, written by Edwin A. Abbott, an English clergyman, educator, and Shakespearean scholar (1884).
Continue readingCHI, the annual conference for ACM’s special interest group on computer-human interaction (SIGCHI) was, as usual, packed with information, research findings, and hotly debated theories. In this article I’ll try to cover the events and topics that were most interesting to me as well as the issues that stirred up the most intense conversations during breaks or at social gatherings afterwards.
Continue readingAs I write this the Police’s “Synchronicity” is on the radio and that’s a good way of summing up some of the interesting developments experienced during the past few months.
Continue readingSeveral orienteering strategies – including map simplification and contact, navigating by checkpoints, rough and precise map reading, and using attack points to find the goal – have useful IA parallels. Gene Smith explores how IAs can learn from these parallel techniques and create digital spaces that are easier to navigate.
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