November 10, 2004
Information Design Watch
From Dynamic Diagrams
Consultants in Visual Logic
In This Issue:
INFORMATION DESIGN
- Information Architecture vs. User Experience: What's the Difference?
VISUAL EXPLANATION
- Election Wrap
DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION
- Shortcutting the Semantic Web
- Complexity and its Costs
DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS
- International Reading Association Relaunches Web Site
INFORMATION DESIGN
Information Architecture vs. User Experience: What's the Difference?
Information Architect Peter Boersma argues that "big" information architecture, the large-scale integration of specialized IA tasks such as navigational design and metadata analysis with related specialties such as visual design and copywriting, should inherit the term "User Experience."
With the aid of several condensed cocktail-napkin sketches, Boersma gets beyond the terminology debate and offers a useful way of understanding the scope of big information-based projects.
Boersma introduces his essay with a reference to Peter Morville's "Big Architect Little Architect" essay, found here:
VISUAL EXPLANATION
Election Wrap
Following up on our link to Professor Sam Wang's
U.S. Electoral College map in our October 13 issue, here is a set of interesting post-election maps. Created by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan, each geographical map of state or county results is paired with a map that is distorted to reflect population:
"...on such a map, the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island."
One map that Gastner, Shalizi and Newman manipulate is Princeton Unversity Professor Robert Vanderbei's "purple" map that shows the full continuum of percentage-based results. The patterns that result indicate interesting correlations between geography and demographics as well as a more complex view of the vote:
DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION
Shortcutting the Semantic Web
The W3C's Semantic Web project is an attempt to define the attributes necessary to make Web data usable by database applications as well as people. Now, Sony Computer Science Laboratory is promoting its "emergent semantics" technology as an alternative. Instead of a markup-level tagging system, Sony's system looks at how content is accessed and shared:
"In emergent semantics, a user's agent bootstraps the information and categorization of content, such as the classification of music in genres. Through interactions among agents trading 'favorite' songs, genres emerge that are common to sets of users. Such emergent semantics as self-organizing genres are automatically tagged onto the content as an extra layer of information rather than depending on people to do the tagging"
The W3C's Semantic Web home page is at:
Complexity and its Costs
The Economist surveys the state of the IT world in terms of one idea: complexity. The thesis is that complexity slows the adaptation and spread of new technologies, undermines the usability of existing technologies, and, most bluntly, increases costs:
"The Standish Group, a research outfit that tracks corporate IT purchases, has found that 66% of all IT projects either fail outright or take much longer to install than expected because of their complexity. Among very big IT projects—those costing over $10m apiece—98% fall short."
The survey is mostly a catalog of known debates such as the virtues of Linux vs. Windows or voice-over-Internet vs. "plain old telephone service," but it does pull together many different issues into a comprehensive pattern.
DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS
International Reading Association Relaunches Web Site
International Reading Association has relaunched their flagship Web site with a new interface design and information architecture created by Dynamic Diagrams.
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