37 Theses

New York Times dot com designer Khoi Vinh discusses the 37 Signals manifesto, Get Real (Subtraction: C’mon Feel the Signalz) and the ensuing discussion in his blog’s comments illuminate the controversy Fried and company’s increasingly strident calls-to-arms have stirred up. Vinh tends to admire where the 37s gang is coming from:

[I]t’s hard to deny “Getting Real” as, at least, important documentation of this particular point in the evolution of design and development for the Web. You could say that historically, it’s not to be missed, and that would be true; if you want to have a first hand look at how this industry’s working methods are changing, this is the book to read. But if you’re resigned to being passively buoyed by shifting trends, then you can skip it: before too long, anything of consequence to be found between its digital covers will be fully dispersed in standard practices. It’s Jason Fried’s world, after all. We just develop in it.

How to Print Selective Sections of a Web Page using CSS and DOM Scripting

Shimone just sent this guide to printing sections of a web page around to our developers’ list with the comment, “You know this is going to come up.”

Protests organized on MySpace

According to Boing Boing, the recent LA student immigration protests have been organized on MySpace. The revolution will be smartmobbed?
Update: Here’s danah boyd on the same topic. Check her next post too, in which MySpace inadvertantly takes down the NPR when Tom sends the community there.

How much to disclose?

The whole idea of living your life partly on the web, partly in public brings to mind new subtleties to the boundary between public and private. There are all kinds of shades of gray, nuances between what’s utterly private and what we are comfortable sharing with everyone on the planet.
Meanwhile, the available tools are for the most part not yet sophisticated enough to allow us to safely dictate exactly what to reveal and to whom. We are stuck with much more blunt instruments: draft vs. publish and possibly password-protection options or the friends and family spheres available at sites like LiveJournal and Flickr.
At the recently revitalized Blogging Blog (it’s now a group weblog), Stephanie Brail examines this issue in
Fear of Exposure – How Much Disclosure is Too Much?:
> I’ve been blogging on and off for a few years, and also reading various blogs as well. In choosing how much to divulge, consider:
>
> 1. Will this hurt your family and friends?
> 2. Will this put your job in jeopardy?
> 3. Most importantly: Is such a disclosure really interesting anyway?
>
> I believe number three should be the first and foremost consideration when sharing personal information. Personal information done well can be the most engaging, intimate, and powerful form of writing. Personal information done in an indulgent, self-serving way is simply dull and pointless, and it’s that sort of writing that is damn embarrassing.

Making user research fun (for the users)

Having met Rashmi Sinha at SXSW and again at the IA Summit I’ve been interested in understanding what she’s working on. She’s brilliant so her work product must be equally compelling. Sure enough, her company Uzanto makes a product called MindCanvas that’s used to conduct user research in a game-like way (check out the testimonials on the linked page) and then present them in various compelling interactive formats.
Something to keep in mind when you want to understand what your users expect or care about.

Extractable reprazent

uploaded by erin_designr.

Erin Malone took this nice pic of me at the IA Summit.
The summit was great. Learned a lot. Met very cool people. I’ll probably write up some key takeaways as I digest my thoughts over the next week or so.
tags: iasummit2006, iasummit

Blogging's impact on PR (and vice versa)

The other day I ducked down to my room on the 8th floor of the Hyatt Regency Vancouver to get some money to buy drink tickets at the welcoming cocktail party at the IA Summit.
Ran into David Weinberger, who’s been refining the plenary keynote he’ll be giving to kick off the official proceedings tomorrow. We talked about some of the emerging themes in his current book project (called Everything is Miscellaneous and eagerly awaited in this corner) and he mentioned that he’s noticed recently that marketing and particularly PR folks seems (finally) ready to board the Cluetrain.
“If blogging were to change PR,” he said (quotation approximate), “that would be big.”
“Let’s hope that PR doesn’t change blogging, though,” I said.
“It already has, to some extent” he kinda replied.
“We wouldn’t want blogs to become the silencer on the gun of PR,” I said, gesturing with my hands as if screwing a silencer onto a gun, something I would have no idea how to do in real life, but I’ve seen a lot of movies with Nazis and gangsters in them.
“That’s a great image,” he said. “You should blog it.”
tags: iasummit2006, iasummit
(reposted from The Power of Many as a test to see if Technorati will pick up the tags, which it didnt from the POM entry)

PR getting a clue

I’ve just ducked down to my room on the 8th floor of the Hyatt Regency Vancouver to get some money to buy drink tickets at the welcoming cocktail party at the IA Summit.
Ran into David Weinberger, who’s been refining the plenary keynote he’ll be giving to kick off the official proceedings tomorrow. We talked about some of the emerging themes in his current book project (called Everything is Miscellaneous and eagerly awaited in this corner) and he mentioned that he’s noticed recently that marketing and particularly PR folks seems (finally) ready to board the Cluetrain.
“If blogging were to change PR,” he said (quotation approximate), “that would be big.”
“Let’s hope that PR doesn’t change blogging, though,” I said.
“It already has, to some extent” he kinda replied.
“We wouldn’t want blogs to become the silencer on the gun of PR,” I said, gesturing with my hands as if screwing a silencer onto a gun, something I would have no idea how to do in real life, but I’ve seen a lot of movies with Nazis and gangsters in them.
“That’s a great image,” he said. “You should blog it.”
tags: iasummit2006, iasummit

Using comics to illustrate scenarios

I just spent all day in a seminar led by Kevin Cheng and Jane Jao, both currently at Yahoo! Local, on the subject of Creating Conceptual Comics: Storytelling and Techniques and I came away from it with some great ideas about how to communicate web interface and functionality ideas at the early, prototype stage of a project using comics.
The presenters articulated the problem this way:

At Yahoo!, we’ve used a combination of tools such as requirements documents, personas, user scenarios and storyboards with varying degrees of success. For example, requirements and personas were rarely consumed or were interpreted differently between individuals. Traditional storyboards detailing screen by screen progressions created a focus on the interface, rather than the concept.

The solution offered was to use comics as a relatively cheap and easy method intermediate between video and static sketches, and avoiding the problems of traditional storyboards which, by “detailing screen by screen progressions created a focus on the interface, rather than the concept.”
They taught us some principals of communicating with comics, and some key elements of a visual vocabulary and then assigned us in groups to brainstorm, script, and illustrate a scenario using storytelling and the comic-art techniques we’d just learned.
After lunch we paired up with other groups and acted like user focus-groups, giving feedback on the scenarios and suggesting what we found useful, confusing, etc.
The workshop taught me a lot and I can think of a few ways we could employ these techniques at Extractable to get buy-in for some hypothetical user-interfaces, both within our multidisciplinary teams and with our clients.
tags: iasummit2006, iasummit

Now we're talking old school

Tanya Raybourn (Pixelcharmer) points to Waterfall2006 in her Field Notes blog:

This one, Waterfall 2006, sounds unmissable.

After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance. You