Three women to watch

Donna Maurer, Livia Labate, and Rashmi Sinha consistently write insightful commentary and useful advice. You won’t find three more divergent perspectives on the same business. That’s not to say that they disagree with each other. Rather, their approach and style of talking about information architecture and design problems is radically different. Recent highlights:

• Labate describes her brief experience in retail.
• Maurer offers practical advice on creating wireframes.
• Sinha introduces us to cognitive anthropology. (Just what I need, another cognitive_blank field to follow.)

Spinuzzi Words

I’m thoroughly enjoying Tracing Genres Through Organizations. Spinuzzi provides a unique perspective on industry-standard user-centered design best practices and has opened my eyes to a different way of thinking about genre. More on this in a subsequent post, since I’m barely 50 pages in. Spinuzzi, however, uses a few words I’ve never seen before. Here are their definitions:

• praxis: Praxis is a complex activity by which individuals create culture and society, and become critically conscious human beings. Praxis comprises a cycle of action-reflection-action which is central to liberatory education. Characteristics of praxis include self-determination (as opposed to coercion), intentionality (as opposed to reaction), creativity (as opposed to homogeneity), and rationality (as opposed to chance). [source]
• mesoscopic: Mesoscopic scale refers to objects larger than an atom, but smaller than anything that can be manipulated with human hands - roughly between 10 and 10000 nanometers in diameter. We hope that our work will facilitate and encourage engineering on a mesoscopic scale. [source]
• trope: The intentional use of a word or expression figuratively, ie, used in a different sense from its original significance in order to give vividness or emphasis to an idea. Some important types of trope are: antonomasia, irony, metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche. Sidelight: Strictly speaking, a trope is the figurative use of a word or expression, while figure of speech refers to a phrase or sentence used in a figurative sense. The two terms, however, are often confused and used interchangeably. [source]

Taking a mesoscopic view of American society, one can easily see the introduction of new tropes about terrorism that could only result by praxis in a post-9/11 context.

How’d I do?

10,000 channels and nothin’s on

With my shiny new G4 iBook and iPod Shuffle, I’m ripe for trying podcasting, but it turns out most podcasts suck. (Don’t get me started on the hour-long bluegrass show that was 45 minutes of the host talking to his cat interspersed with a quarter hour of music.) Livia’s got a couple good suggestions and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to “In Our Time” while doing my morning chores today, but I have no idea where to begin. Any suggestions? I’m looking for just about anything smart or funny (especially smart and funny) that’s no more than 30 minutes and that’s something I won’t be able to read online. (One or two people monologuing seems like spoken-blog, and not worth downloading, but you should try to prove me wrong.)

Please, help me out.

Getting rid of the “user experience” in user experience

I’ve started replacing the words “user experience” in my writing with “design”, a la Todd Warfel, and have been pleased with the result.

Effective pagination in Visio

If you’re using backgrounds in your Visio documents to represent the skeleton of a screen, give the background generic names for the screen. For example, “Log-in” or “Home Page”. Assign foreground pages names that describe the particular state, like “Anonymous user” or “Default view”. This can get challenging because several screens may need to reflect the same view — several screens may have a “default” for example.

Create a new background with a titleblock on it. The title block should have two fields: screen and view. In each of these text areas insert a field. For screen, use “background page name” and for view use “page name.” On each foreground page, this will create a title block with the appropriate labeling. It’s a small step, but it can help make bookkeeping a little easier.