“Lou Rosenfeld is an information architecture consultant and coauthor of O’Reilly’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition. Steve Krug is a web usability expert and the author of Don’t Make Me Think. They both lead seminars in their respective fields, and recently decided to pair-up to offer back-to-back sessions of their symposiums. We spoke with both Lou and Steve about the advantages of their joint seminars, the common pitfalls of web usability and information architecture, and the state of the web industry today.”

“Americans probably use a greater variety of units of measurement than anyone else in the world. Caught in a slow-moving transition from customary to metric units, we employ a fascinating and sometimes frustrating mixture of units in talking about the same things. We measure the length of a race in meters, but the length of the long jump event in feet and inches. We speak of an engine’s power in horsepower and its displacement in liters. In the same dispatch, we describe a hurricane’s wind speed in knots and its central pressure in millibars.”

“Lou Rosenfeld is an information architecture consultant and coauthor of O’Reilly’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition. Steve Krug is a web usability expert and the author of Don’t Make Me Think. They both lead seminars in their respective fields, and recently decided to pair-up to offer back-to-back sessions of their symposiums. We spoke with both Lou and Steve about the advantages of their joint seminars, the common pitfalls of web usability and information architecture, and the state of the web industry today.”

“This book is about designing and coding Content Management Systems from scratch. It covers revisioning, permissions, workflow, and templates, and by the time you’ve reached the end, you should be able to write your own enterprise-strength CMS from the ground up, or at least have a better appreciation of the issues involved.”

“I found this wonderful thing at an estate sale of someone who I’m pretty sure once worked for a nuclear power company. This comic was included in a simple manilla envelope package given to executives of an atomic weapons company in 1957, presumably as a self-congratulating gift or maybe for a holiday event.”

“Weblogs are everywhere… In the words of weblog conceiver and chief evangelizer, Dave Winer, ‘A Weblog allows you to easily publish a wide variety of content to the Web. You can publish written essays, annotated links, documents (Word, PDF, and PowerPoint files), graphics, and multimedia.’ To many this will sound a lot like a Geocities home page. Nothing new here…”

“In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall… the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?”

“In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall… the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?”

“If you are a designer or product planner, you probably create documents of some kind to capture your design decisions and solutions. Documentation is a crucial component of successful product planning and implementation, so it’s important that it communicates as effectively as possible. Good organization, complete information, and clear writing are, of course, key to the success of any design document, but there are some other, less-obvious techniques you can use to make your documents more readable and understandable. Here are a few of them.”

“This tutorial describes how the instructional design of an online course can facilitate an optimal learning experience for the student. The optimal learning experience is the state termed ‘flow.’ Flow, as defined by creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is the ’state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.’”

“If you are a designer or product planner, you probably create documents of some kind to capture your design decisions and solutions. Documentation is a crucial component of successful product planning and implementation, so it’s important that it communicates as effectively as possible. Good organization, complete information, and clear writing are, of course, key to the success of any design document, but there are some other, less-obvious techniques you can use to make your documents more readable and understandable. Here are a few of them.”

“Cascading Style Sheets offer a unique way to control the look of your site. But while the the user sees a breath-taking web page, writing the underlying CSS code can be less enjoyable. CSSEdit changes this by allowing you to edit your colors, fonts, sizes, borders, etc in a refreshingly easy application.”

“…the first day of class I arrived at the studio room, and found a young man at a drawing table, sketching out different variations of the Walkman® he was designing. I got close enough to see the large sketchpad and saw 30 or 40 different variations that he had considered and put down on paper. I introduced myself, pleaded ignorance about design, and asked him why he needed to make so many sketches. He thought for a second, and then said, ‘I don’t know what a good idea looks like until I’ve seen the bad ones.’”

“Written language is just a particular case of visual language. In fact there are many visual languages that appear to share common rules. Thinking about the visual language can help us to convey our messages in a more effective way.”

“Over one day in May, people all over the world will be taking a photograph an hour to illustrate a day in their life. Will you be photographing yours too? The May Day Project is about collecting glimpses into people’s lives through photographs. Whether they be self portraits, landscapes or macros, candid or posed, snapshots or something more creative — we want to see what your day was like Saturday May 10th 2003.”