1. How academics are using blogs
2. Redesigning a portal - How a US state portal was redesigned and its subsequent success
Through a series of user interviews and user tests with successive prototypes of the new architecture, we dramatically improved the success rate and time for finding information through the state site. Our approach was based on systematically exploring the design space and was metric-based, allowing us to show formal quantitative evidence of site improvement and make well-grounded estimates of financial benefit for the state. Our approach was fundamentally user-centered, gathering feedback from many people throughout the process to achieve effective tradeoffs in the design.
Because no design is ever perfect and redesign is a fact of life...
3. There's a new column at Digital Web magazine, Information Architecture for the People. The first article discusses Information architecture as an extension of web design.
Information architecture can be viewed as an extension of Web design. New Digital Web columnist Joshua Kaufman explains why this is a useful perspective and how Web designers can make the extension to information architecture.
4. And because I am in no way techy and usually neglect techie stuff, he's one for the real nerds: Make magazine has been launched. It's tagline is "The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and D.I.Y. inspiration". There is a sneak-peek online but you'll have to subscribe to it to get it regularly. There is a blog though (but of course). Check out the waterproof Shuffle case...
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