Last night on the radio, on the way back from dinner at a friend’s in Alexandria, Sarah and I heard part of the top 10 songs in 2005. When I was a kid, I remember seeing all kinds of “year in review” things at the end of every year–in magazines, on television, on radio. For some reason, those do not seem as prevelant these days. I thought about doing a “Top Ten Best Things That Happened to Me in 2005″ but then I thought that might be a little too self-indulgent, even for me.
Instead, I’m going to be only slightly less self-indulgent and write about what I’m anticipating in 2006. Frankly, these are also some of the reasons I’ve been absent from greenonions.com.
- Presentations at IA Summit: At this year’s IA Summit in Vancouver, I’ve got a few irons in the fire that I’m excited about. I’m involved with four different proposals, including a panel on Enterprise Information Architecture which includes four experts from this field. I’m also hoping to do a one hour session on improving content management, based on the linguistic analysis I’ve been doing in the last year. There’s also a Web 2.0 [sic] panel and the leadership seminar, during which I’ll have a chance to talk further about the content management linguistic analysis.
- Publication of my book: One of the things that made 2005 so great was signing a contract with New Riders to do a book on documentation. The writing has been a really fun process and the publisher matched me up with fantastic editor. Since I’ve been fairly mum on the topic, I’ll provide some detail here. The purpose of the book is to give practicing designers strategies for creating and using design documentation, like wireframes and site maps.
The book focuses on what kinds of content to include in the document, how to structure the document, how the document fits into the process, and how to present the document to the client or the rest of the team. It’s process-agnostic, meaning I do not discuss the creative process at all. My feeling was that there are tons of books on process and methodology, but virtually none on our work product. While methods may vary depending on the project, many of our outputs are consistent. Also, there’s been very little writing on strategies for presenting the documents to clients.
The book covers eleven different kinds of documents, and so far the hardest part has been narrowing down that list. I tried to avoid highly specialized or proprietary documents, and focused on the deliverables that I have been asked to produce at all my various positions—these seemed to be the most “standard”.
- DCIA Events: The local IA group in Washington, DC hosted some pretty good events last year, and I hope we can continue the momentum. James Melzer all but single-handedly set up the new web site for group. It’s been great to post job opportunities and events in one central location. In the first quarter alone we have three events in the works, including a redux of the IA Institute event in Pittsburgh, a book group for the Lemur book, and hopefully a panel on doing graduate work in IA. Of course, DCIA will do a redux of the IA summit in the Spring.
- My day job: Things are getting really interesting at my day job. We’ve been able to do some internal usability testing that has really stretched my chops in planning, facilitating, and reporting these things. What makes these tests different from other tests I’ve run is that the participants have a very keen interest because the application helps manage a crucial process for my client. Also, the data stored in the application is very, very complex and technical. In the tests we’ve learned that how the information behaves is more important that how it’s presented. I hope to post some other lessons learned as the project progresses.
- One more thing: There’s one other project in the works, but I’m not prepared to discuss it yet. For this, you’ll just have to wait until 2006.
So, that’s what’s been keeping me busy. I have all kinds of plans to write more articles and update the design of the blog, but these things will have to take a back seat to the projects above. If you see fewer posts on greenonions.com in the coming months, you’ll know it’s because I’m otherwise occupied. Or lazy.
