Nathan Curtis of EightShapes asked a very simple question, “Why don’t we spend more time designing our deliverables?”
My Twitter notes are below:

How do we produce deliverables better, faster? Audience: execs, PMs, strategists, visual designers, Dev, QA, copywriters, us
Artifacts: strategy, concept model, map, flow, storyboard, wireframe, spec, mockup, style guide
Wow. Great matrix on which audiences [...]

[Read more →]

Christian Crumlish hosted a panel on “Presence, identity, and attention in social web architecture” starring Andrew Hinton, Andrew Crow, Gene Smith and the crazy/incredible Christina Wodtke who’d had back surgery earlier in the week but was determined to make it to IA Summit.
The topic is very timely and each of the panelists had some [...]

[Read more →]

I love presentations that at the surface seem irrelevant but underneath have a lot to teach us about how we approach our work and think about our practice. Matthew Milan of Critical Mass did just that with his talk titled “The IA and the Fighter Pilot.” Thanks goes to David Armano for insisting that I [...]

[Read more →]

I was very happy to have caught the reprise of Luke Wroblewski’s “Content Page Design Best Practices” at the IA Summit. Thanks to Luke for doing it twice!
Here’s what I twittered during the talk:

Content = making good on the links that sites deliver across the web
Before redesign, Chicago Tribune article page: 24% content, 76% [...]

[Read more →]

Gene Smith of nForm is the tagging guru. Having recently published Tagging: People Powered Metadata for the Social Web, he is a veritable encyclopedia of all things metadata.
In his talk at IA Summit, Gene identified five emerging trends in the use of tagging online:

More structure
Automanual folksonomies
Leveraging communities
Rethinking [...]

[Read more →]