19 items tagged “information-architecture”
2024
Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group (via) I just learned about this delightful piece of internet culture via Leven Parker on TikTok.
Occlupanids are the small plastic square clips used to seal plastic bags containing bread.
For thirty years (since 1994) John Daniel has maintained this website that catalogs them and serves as the basis of a wide ranging community of occlupanologists who study and collect these plastic bread clips.
There's an active subreddit, r/occlupanids, but the real treat is the meticulously crafted taxonomy with dozens of species split across 19 families, all in the class Occlupanida:
Class Occlupanida (Occlu=to close, pan= bread) are placed under the Kingdom Microsynthera, of the Phylum Plasticae. Occlupanids share phylum Plasticae with “45” record holders, plastic juice caps, and other often ignored small plastic objects.
If you want to classify your own occlupanid there's even a handy ID guide, which starts with the shape of the "oral groove" in the clip.
Or if you want to dive deep down a rabbit hole, this YouTube video by CHUPPL starts with Occlupanids and then explores their inventor Floyd Paxton's involvement with the John Birch Society and eventually Yamashita's gold.
2012
What are some good ways to insult an Information Architect?
Ask them if they’ve started calling themselves a UX designer yet, or if they’ve jumped straight to Service Design :)
[... 36 words]What are good ways to design a web application? Do you, for example, begin with a wire-frame of the front-end and work your way back to the database schema? The reverse? Figure out both ends and work towards the center?
I start with a working prototype, which I find I can often knock together in a couple of hours using Django. Having a functional (albeit buggy, ugly and insecure) prototype makes it much easier for me to start to reason about the larger application. There’s not much point in coming up with a comprehensive architecture plan only to find out you’re building the wrong thing!
[... 111 words]2011
What is the “best” programming language to learn if you want to mockup your own ideas but don’t have a technical background?
I knew a very talented UX designer at Yahoo! who did all of his interactive mockups in PowerPoint—including widgets that you click to transition to another “page” in the interface. I’ve heard of people doing the same thing in Keynote, and OmniGraffle Pro also has tools for creating interactive mockups.
[... 111 words]2009
If you are demanding registration before checkout, you need to cease this practice immediately. It is costing you a fortune.
2007
XFML (via) Throwing the new home for the XFML specification some Google juice; the domain name got nabbed by a squatter.
Long pages work. And thanks to Pay Per Click advertising, splitting an article over multiple pages to get more ad impressions doesn’t make sense any more.
2005
The blooming of information architecture at Google. A discussion of the IA concepts embedded in Google Base.
2004
Wikipedia enhancements
I don’t know when it happened, but Wikipedia has a stylish new design in mostly valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional (the front page validates, some of the inside pages do not) with a CSS layout to boot. They even have an option to turn off the single layout table used on their home page. The site seems much easier to navigate now and the organisation of the front page is a masterpiece of information architecture. When you’ve got over 250,000 articles just in the English version providing a useful home page is going to be a challenge, but Wikipedia pulls it off with aplomb.
[... 220 words]2003
A List Apart Again
A List Apart has unveiled the long awaited redesign, and is celebrating it’s third manifestation with three brand new articles.
[... 339 words]Information Architecture testimonials
Poor old AIFIA are still trying to explain what Information Architecture is in easily understood terms. Their latest effort should be pretty much garaunteed to succeed—14 testimonials from web experts explaining why it is important in pleasant little sound bites.
2002
Content inventory tips
Peter has been blogging the progress of a 3828 page content inventory he is working on. Day Two describes his method of working with Excel, Day Three provides three useful inventory tips. Christina Wodtke’s Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web has a nice overview of the content inventory process which recommends a dual monitor setup and links (well, footnotes) to these tips by Noel Franus. Peter has also commented on my decision to go with the blue RSS button in favour of the standard orange XML button—I’ve posted my reasons in a comment attached to his post.
More geek books
A £5 Amazon gift voucher combined with Amazon.co.uk offering free shipping on orders over £39 has lead me to order 3 more books: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Don’t Make Me Think! and The Elements of Style. They should arrive on Monday. I wonder if All Consuming can pick up on links to isbn.nu?
Asilomar Institute
The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture—very promising organisation, great site but I have to admit I’m not too keen on the name (though I’m sure it will grow on me). The highlight of the site for me has to be the 25 Theses, which provide an excellent condensed description of what IA is and why it is necessary. The site lead me to make my first impulse buy in quite a while, so with a bit of luck from Amazon Christina Wodtke’s Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web should be with me in the morning.
Zend re-design... terrible!
Zend (the commercial company behind the PHP scripting language) have launched a redesign of Zend.com. My verdict on the new design ... terrible.
[... 161 words]Mike Pletch to Column Two
I spotted Mike Pletch in my referrals this morning. His blog has a clean, readable design and some great content, particularly if you are interested in information architecture and content management. Via Mike I revisited Column Two which is currently documenting an implementation of a full content management system for a client—well worth a read.
An IA process
Anders Ramsay: How I work as an Information Architect (via Guide to Ease). An interesting overview of Information Architecture, including what it involves and how it can be aproached. The article also touches on Software Engineering related concepts such as project management and system design.
XFML
XFML—eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language (via Guide to ease). Now this is interesting. It’s an open XML format designed to facilitiate the publication and distribution of metadata—it uses a load of terms that are currently way over my head (hierarchical and faceted taxonomiest, topicmaps?) but the general principle looks fantastic. I wrote a metadata system last year that used a relational database and it was something of a nightmare—XFML looks like it solves some of the problems I faced, although my biggest challenge was how to grab and present usable information from the huge amounts of metadata collected which is a problem that falls outside the scope of XFML. XFML is best summarised by the following quote:
[... 307 words]