Information Architects

The Spectrum of User Experience (1)

As we all perfectly know, designers are narcissists; programmers are nerds, and whoever wears a tie must be a clueless jerk. Designers, programmers and business people love to hate each other. That's why we keep them separated: Can't we just all get along? Or leave each other alone? We can't. The ...

Introducing webtrendmap.com

Where is this year's clickable version of the Web Trend Map? And the screen savers? And the background images? And the PDFs? Answer: Forget about that. We have something way better in the making. Currently iA is building an interactive version of the Web Trend Map under webtrendmap.com. The idea ...

Web Trend Map 4: Coolest Gift For Geeks

The beta version has been featured all across the web from TechCrunch to BoingBoing, and Gawker. Now the latest version of our popular Web Trend Map is up for grabs. The Web Trend Map plots the Internet's leading names and domains onto the Tokyo Metro map. Domains and personalities are carefully ...

Kill Blog Comments?

Blog comments have an innate communication problem: You can't discuss and moderate the discussion at the same time. Moderating blog comments I often feel like being pushed in the role of the understanding father that needs to calm down his rebellious teenage son. Blogs comments are useful to evaluate how ...

Web Trend Map 4 - Final Beta

Here it is, posted in a panic: Web Trend Map 4. We'll give you a week for final feedback before we send it to the printer. Download: For the final feedback round, we only offer a PNG (2.6MB). There are more formats to come. Feedback: Use the comment section below for feedback ...

Social Media Marketing? Kaboom, Baby!

Last week on twitter, writing the dirty draft for this article, I claimed that social media marketer is just another word for spammer. If that upset you, don't read the following text. First, what are we talking about here? What is marketing? Marketing is "the commercial processes involved in promoting and ...

New and Dirty: Tweet Blogging

We all waste too much time reading (and writing!) boring text. Here is one solution to the problem. One might speculate if the true reason for boring text are the boring writers... but I prefer to blame it on the word processors. Word processors are all about orthography, grammar, editing, and ...

Designing Firefox 3.2

In January 2000, T-Online asked us what we'd do if we could design a browser from scratch. Our answer was "Tabs". Eight years later Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, asked me what I think a new tab should look like. The answer after days of mailing back ...

Web Trend Map 4: Preview

Hey, Web Trend Map Version 4 is now available. While the first map was hacked together in an afternoon, the second took a week, and the third devoured a month of concentrated work, the fourth Web Trend Map (due in February) has already taken more time in preparation than all previous ...

Redesign of Doodle

Doodle is a simple Web app that allows people to "find a date and time for a group event." It's free and requires neither registration nor installation. With over 2 million users a month, it's one of the most successful Web apps outside Silicon Valley. iA was asked to redesign Doodle's ...