Explain IA is a contest created by the Information Architecture Institute to find the explanation of information architecture. Will be interesting to see what people come up with. I'd especially like to see the explanation that explains IA in layman's terms in a way that my non-techie mother could understand.
What is it? Why is it important? What does it mean to you? Some folks may offer a definition in 140 characters or less, while others will use this opportunity to tell a story (using text, pictures, audio, and/or video) about their relationship to IA. Anyone can enter, but only IA Institute members can vote for the winners.To enter, simply join this group, upload your entry to your Flickr account, add the "explainia" tag, and then select "send to group" from the menu options above your entry. Entries must be received by February 11, 2010. Please see below for more details and to learn about our generous sponsors and wonderful prizes.
Grand Prize
The grand prize of $1,000 is co-sponsored by the IA Institute and Endeca.
To enter, post to the Explain IA group.
Rosenfeld Media have a book site and Ning community up for John Ferrara's forthcoming book, Playful Design: Creating Game Expderiences in Everyday Interfaces.
Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses. They have much more in common than their perceived distinction typically suggests, and user experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design. This book will show you how.
This is a book I can't wait to read. It's to be published in 2011, but as with all Rosenfeld books, we get the benefit of reading about the author's research in-progress beforehand.
UXFind is a mashup that uses Google Custom Search Engine and Google App Engine. It provides a search engine tailored for User Experience pros. It indexes over 200 of user experience web sites and blogs. Oddly, they index my old blog iaslash, but not Konigi, so I guess the sources might not be so fresh. It's a great idea, and I've tried to do this in the past too, to just limit to sources I trust. To be honest, I always end up casting a larger net, however.
It's nice to have something good to look forward to every week, and Joshua Porter and Joshua Brewer will deliver by writing a weekly blog about user experience. Nice.
After the sell-out success of last year, UX London returns with a another great line-up of the biggest and best names in the UX industry. The likes of Jesse James Garrett, Bill Moggridge, Peter Morville, Scott McCLoud, Liz Danzico and Kristina Halvorson will be presenting three days of talks and workshops from 19–21 May 2010. Early bird tickets are on sale until February 1st.
UX Lx, User Experience Lisbon, is set to take place in Lisbon Portugal next May 12 to 14. Nice time for a trip to Portugal. Speakers include Jared Spool, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Saffer, Peter Merholz, Donna Spencer, Brian Fling, Bill Scott, and Dana Chisnell.
Drawter has been sitting in my tabs for a few days now, and I keep coming back to play with it. It wasn't until I watched the screencast, however, that I really got to see how beautifully it generates markup and css.
Drawter is a web-based xhtml/css layout tool written in JavaScript using the jQuery library. It allows you to literally draw your website's code by dragging boxes within the onscreen canvas to create divs using the dimensions of your rectangles, and then to edit each div's style properties within floating inspectors. When precisely positioned, divs will be nested within containers, and nested divs can be floated within them.
Where this tool really impressed me was with the output of code. Upon generating the code for the layout, a clean stylesheet was produced that used floated divs for positioning, unlike most attempts I've seen to generate code from layouts using absolute positioning. In this way, this tool is not a toy, but creates usable code. The markup and css are also formatted nicely. Watch the screencast to see what I mean.
Drawter is available in a Pro version, which means that it is intended for webmasters use only - knowledge of HTML and CSS is required. It also requires at least 256MB RAM and 800Mhz CPU. It would be interesting to know how they'd react to getting money to integrate it into existing CMSes. They are also working on a simpler version that requires less knowledge of html/css, so this will be one to watch for sure.
Martin Belam recently underwent the process of finding a house using real estate agency sites and has documented his observations. His notes are in a 2 part series looking first at site search and information architecture and following up with a review of results displays.
Smashing Magazine have curated a list of 25 videos UX videos and presentations worth watching. It will take you more than 16 hours to watch all of these videos.
Robert Scoble picked 100 tech startups to follow in 2010, linking to each company's Twitter account.