Thinking and Making

Internet piracy

Austin Govella — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:10:07 GMT

Aiden, age 2 and 5/6ths.

He loves pirates more than he loves ice cream or puppies.

(More) tips for writing well

Austin Govella — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:16:27 GMT

As an editor, I’ve noticed several ~~recurring bad habits you heathens would do well to disabuse yourselves of immediately.~~

~~Almost without exception, these bad habits instantiate themselves as a series of stock~~ phrases and constructions that reflect a lack of focus, a lack of fully developed argument, or the kind of intellectual laziness that sets in as you slog through your first draft.

These things happen, ~~That’s ok. Editing helps you save yourselves from these offenses before your thoughts hit the world and everyone knows your dirty secrets.~~ but you can edit yourself, and you should. Use the following ~~checklist as a~~ guide to tighten~~ing up~~ both your words ~~as well as~~ and what you mean.

16 things to check when you edit

Be vicious when you edit. Vicious. Follow these recommendations with zealous fervor. They help your writing say what it should in a way we’ll understand.

1. I think, I’d say, im my opinion, what I’ve found, in my experience… Yeah. We know. You wrote this. These are your thoughts. If they’re not, provide a reference. If they’re yours, the byline is enough to remind us.

2. Delete all adverbs and adjectives unless they’re absolutely, totally, inherently necessary. Each unnecessary word weakens your impact and clarity.

3. Remove prepositional phrases. Prepositional phrases are less important than your main point. If it’s not important enough to deserve its own sentence, it’s not important enough to read.

4. Active not passive. Kill “to be” verbs. All of them. Always.

5. Kill -ing words. Restructure your sentence so the -ing is an active verb.

6. Lead with the bottom line up front: BLUF. Then include an example, re-state the bottom line, include an illustration, and when you end restate the bottom line. For every point you make, follow this pattern. That’s bottom line, example, bottom line, another example, and then the bottom line (again).

7. Telegraph and signpost what you will say and why we care. We’re not reading mystery novels. We want to know who died, how, who killed them, and why we care up front. That way, we know why we want to read before we begin.

8. Use clear, informative headers. Cute or artsy might be pleasant on the first read, but when we reference it later, the cute header makes it a pain to find things. What you’re writing is worth going back to, right?

9. Introduce new terminology in the intro. If you’ve created a new term or applied a new phrase to describe something, define it at the beginning, and use the new terminology throughout your writing. Readers need the entirety of your piece to learn and assimilate the new phrasing.

10. Typically, sometimes, often times, usually… Yeah. We know. You don’t have to tell us.

11. Say “you” and “your”. Don’t use nouns when talking about your audience (like “User Experience Practitioners”). And don’t use “one”. Speak to us.

12. Ditch clunky words. Instead of “via”, write “using”. Instead of “upon”, say “on”.

13. Remove cliches and common phrases. Every time you take a common phrase shortcut, you’re telling us it’s not worth our time.

14. Use contractions. Write with proper grammar, and people will read. Write like you talk, and people will listen.

15. No pronouns. Repeat the noun over and over again. If you get tired of that, use synonyms.

16. Delete your best lines. We don’t care about poetry, wit, or slyness. We care about what you want to say.

After you edit…

The finished piece should be so tight, terse, concise, and clear that it’s boring.

Boring.

Then sand off the rough edges.

Write like you talk. Where the concise feels awkward, add conversational. Where tight lacks nuance, tease details. Where terse is cold, be warm.

The first 16 recommendations remove fluff and force you to think and communicate. Once you’ve finished editing’s intellectual work, go back and make sure you write like you talk. Writing begins a conversation. If we feel like you’re talking to us, we’ll listen.

UX Health Check presentation from Redux DC

Austin Govella — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:13:00 GMT

Livia Labate presented the UX Health Check at RedUX DC last month.

Livia’s created a website for the UX Health Check where you can keep up with developments, news, how-tos, and tips. And she’s posted the video presentation and slides from RedUX DC.

For those of you too lazy to make with the clicky to a new site, you can make with clicky right here to watch Livia’s presentation

Agile + UX: (un)Synchronizing UX and development

Austin Govella — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 10:34:00 GMT

On “Six strategies for more agile user experience,” Dave Nicolette left an awesome comment. So, awesome, instead of responding there, I’m responding in a new post.

Unsynchronizing UX and development

Dave makes a good observation about how I advocate UX be unsynchronized with development:

What you call “Synchronize UX with development” actually strikes me as unsynchronizing them. A basic goal in an iterative agile process is that a work item is delivered in the same iteration in which it is started. This doesn’t mean the same iteration in which the work item is defined (that is, added to the Product Backlog); it means the iteration when work is started on it. Many agile teams track a metric called story cycle time… it simply means the average number of iterations it takes for the team to complete a story. When that number is above 1.0, the metric signals a problem. The strategy you describe … forces story cycle time to be greater than 1.0 every time.

A comment by Dave Nicolette on Six strategies for more agile user experience

Dave is correct: doing the UX work one sprint ahead of development is not really synchronized. They’re one sprint out of phase, and they should remain synched one step out of phase.

However, this isn’t a problem.

Keeping UX and development in synch assumes engineering and design are the same kind of work. This isn’t true. Holistic, contextualized user experiences require time to frame and synthesize the experience. This synthesis happens long before you can start coding features.

If story cycle times over 1.0 are a problem, then adjust expectations so story cycles should be over 1.0, or move UX to separate stories in a previous sprint.

To create good products, you need time to think about and iterate on the user experience, follow its rabbit holes, and communicate the experience to both product owners and engineers. There’s a lot of UX work that happens prior to sprint planning and the backlog.

Separate, but equal

The more I think about it, the more I think you must move user experience to separate stories and separate sprints. The story of how something is designed is different from how something is developed. Stakeholder participation is different, the process is different, the deliverables are different. Even the expectations are different.

If agile is a way to manage engineering, it’s silly to assume it would be a good way to manage the user experience. Design and architecture can’t be managed using agile methods. UX and engineering are on the hook for different things.

That’s kind of a 360 from where I thought I was on this topic. I didn’t think I’d end up here, but I think that’s the where the path leads: User experience can help agile teams build better experiences and better products, but you can’t manage design and architectural activities the same way you manage engineering and build activities.

Don’t ask me. Go ask Anders.

I met Anders Ramsay years ago at Asilomar. He’s a smart guy. This year in Memphis, while we moseyed from Beale up to the Peabody—ready to call it an early night—Anders persuasively explained some of his thinking on agile and UX.

I’m pretty sure Anders would disagree with me. That’s why you need to watch his presentation, “Agile for the rest of us”. It’s packed with good thinking about how agile teams work together, where they work, and how UX does and doesn’t fit in. He published a slidecast of the presentation on his blog.

Peter Drucker’s been ringing in my head for weeks now: “What gets measured gets managed.” Agile doesn’t measure experience.

I think that’s the million dollar question: how do agile development methods measure user experience?

It's just "User Experience"

Austin Govella — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:12:00 GMT

During the closing plenary, Jesse James Garrett made a pretty strong argument for abandoning titles like “information architect” and “interaction designer” in favor of “user experience designer”.

Following this, Richard Dalton has started an online petition for the same at itsjustux.org. If you are so inclined, please stop by there and take the five seconds to add your name.

If you are so inclined.

IA Summit 2009 presentation slides

Austin Govella — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:58:35 GMT

The Non-linear Creations blog has scoured the internet far and wide to collect a list of IA Summit presentations that have posted their slides.

You can see the aggregated list over at their website.

The User Experience Health Check, quantitative metrics for the qualitative user experience

Austin Govella — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:27:00 GMT

Livia Labate and I presented on the User Experience Health Check at the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis, TN this last weekend.

The UX Health Check is a technique for UX professionals to express the quality of a product or service’s experience and convey it in terms that are familiar to business stakeholders, creating a common ground for discussion and exploration.

I developed the original concept while working with Livia Labate and team at Comcast Interactive Media. It emerged from a real need from a product team looking to convey how the user experience improvements were evolving over time in a way they could show progress to executives.

Livia has started a site at uxhealthcheck.com where you can view the slides, as well as the poster we presented.

We’ll be adding more and more Health Check related content to the site over the next several days and weeks (including templates and presentation audio).

Random collected thoughts on design

Austin Govella — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:14:18 GMT

Collecting a couple of random thoughts where I can find them again. Considering this a crazy check as well: chime in if you think any of this is crazy.

In design, we model four constructs:

Actors (direct and indirect stakeholders)
Interfaces
Interactions
Systems

Actors use an interface to engage in an interaction bound by a system.

We place these constructs in four contexts:

Mental (user’s mind)
Spatial (place, layout)
Temporal (sequence, prior- and next-steps)
Social (community)

Our methods help us accomplish one (or several) of three activities:

Generate data (discover)
Analyze (model)
Communicate (validate)

Things you need to do to write a book

Austin Govella — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:00:00 GMT

If you ever find yourself writing a book, there are a few things you’ll want to make sure you have lined up.

Set a wireframe and diagram style – If you might be using wireframes, diagrams, screenshots, or photos, you’ll want to settle on a style for each. This includes how closely they’re cropped (or not), how they’re annotated (if at all), the text size for labels, and the style for lines, object strokes, and object fills.

Define a style for URLs, navigation, and links that appear in text – You or your production team will probably already have a style for displaying URLs. But make sure. For Blueprints, we spend a lot of time talking about navigation, links, and labels, and we found we needed a style to differentiate a link from a label.

Write an introduction, foreword, and conclusion with serious purpose – The introduction, conclusion, and first chapter significantly frame the readers perception of the book. Christina and I jumped right in to working on the meat of the book. The intro and conclusion are competent and get the job done, but we didn’t spend nearly as much time on them as we spent on other chapters. They’re ok, but I think the entire book would’ve been better if we’d provided better framing.

Styles for call-outs – This ties in with identifying a style for wireframes, diagrams, and screenshots. Sometimes you’ll include something and then want to call attention to a specific portion of the page. Of course, it’s better to crop down to the area of importance. A couple of times, we specifically included a shot of an entire screen with a small call-out just so we could show more context.

Phone convos/f2fs regularly (weekly or bi-weekly) – Writing a book is a serious, group activity. I think weekly phone conversations or face-to-face meetings help the team occupy the same headspace. Your readers will read the book in one headspace. On the scale from schizophrenic to extreme, singular vision, the latter is easier to read.

Edit, edit, edit, rewrite from scratch, edit, edit edit – Edit, edit, edit, rewrite from scratch, edit, edit edit. Edit, edit, edit, rewrite from scratch, edit, edit edit. Edit, edit, edit, rewrite from scratch, edit, edit edit

Once you’ve taken care of these six steps, the last thing you’ll need to do is edit.

The secret to writing well

Austin Govella — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 02:32:49 GMT

For several months, Christina whipped my writing into shape with three incessant questions asked from the audience’s point of view:

# What are we about to learn? 
# What's the core argument?
# Why do we care?

And after all of that, she’d delete my introductions and ask “WAYTTS”: What are you trying to say?

So now you know the secrets to writing well.

A 21st century primer

Austin Govella — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:22:03 GMT

Four pieces of required reading (and watching) have popped up over the past couple of weeks. They explore how society and cities will change after the crash and how design must also change.

Umair Haque delivers a fantastic presentation on Constructive Capitalism where he accomplishes two things. First, he synthesizes a pretty stunning critique of 20th century capitalism , why it doesn’t work, and why it inevitably leads to the types of crashes we’re seeing in societies today. It’s material you’ve heard or read many times, but he provides a synthesis that ties everything together into a nice, tidy, frame that shows how 20th century capitalism actually destroys value. There’s an amazing conclusion:

Strategy is a commodity. We have to reinvent these economics before we can reinvent this strategy.

Umair Haque from “Constructive Capitalism”, 2009.

He goes on to reinvent those economics and describe a 21st century capitalism that pursues five different values:

Tomorrow is today
Connections, not transactions
People, not product
Creativity, not productivity
Outcomes, not incomes

Again, you’ve heard this before, but Haque ties it together into one nice frame.

Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 – Constructive Capitalism on Vimeo.

In a similar vein, Richard Florida writes a great article for The Atlantic: “How the Crash Will Reshape America”. Florida describes how the crash and a new, rising economy brings along a new geography for the U.S. He explains of how and why our key regions and cities will change.

Florida’s article and Haque’s presentation are intriguing enough on their own, but a couple of other interesting bits have popped up recently.

Adam Greenfield delivered the table of contents for his new book as a Valentine. Far from limiting itself to a grocery list of material covered in the book, Greenfield’s table of contents reads more like an overview for how cities will emerge.

Barely a week prior, Mike Kuniavsky offered the table of contents for his own book. Though more of an outline, it reads like a checklist of how objects and services can and should be created.

Haque reveals the high-level economic and social change, Florida shows how these changes will drive the shape of cities, Greenfield talks about how the cities function, and Kuniavsky outlines how one builds devices for this new geography. They cover both the new urban centers where design will flourish, as well as the new ghettos where design must flourish. Taken together, they’re like a primer for design in the 21st century.

Frank Gehry interview from TED

Austin Govella — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:30:00 GMT

I really loved this interview with Frank Gehry from the TED Conference. He talks about why he does the work he does and some of his experiences.

Presentation - Faceted seach best practices - Wed, Feb 4

Austin Govella — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 11:23:00 GMT

I’ll be presenting with two others Wednesday, February 4, as part of the Taxonomy Community of Practice series of teleconferences presented by Earley and Associates.

I’ll spend 20 minutes looking at ways to identify and then prioritize user mental models as a way for directing and improving the search experience. For the finale, I’ll demonstrate how you can combine these methods to benchmark and the evaluate your search experience over time.

The call runs from 1-2pm, EST. Registration is $50. Check the website “for more information and to register”:http://www.earley.com/_February2009.asp.

Here’s the description from the website:

Faceted search depends on well organized taxonomies. However, in some cases, the organization has not done the upfront classification work needed to fully leverage facets for search and guided navigation. The approach is “let’s just use what we have and let the engine index our content”. That approach may provide some benefit, (if the bar is low enough to begin with) but how can you get the most from investments in tools and technologies and fine tune your taxonomy to produce a better user experience? In this session we’ll review practices around developing taxonomies as they are specifically applied to faceted search. We’ll discuss do’s and don’ts and show you how to get more from faceted search and create an intuitive user interface that will improve usability and result in increased conversions.

The User Experience Health Check

I’m making a firm effort this year to spread the word about the UX Health Check as far and as wide as possible. The Taxonomy Community of Practice Call is this year’s first volley. I’ll post more information about this process and method here, but look for articles and conference appearances as the year winds on.

However, if your interest is piqued or you’re dying to know more now, drop me a line (“austin@grafofini.com”:mailto:austin@grafofini.com). I’m looking for as much practice with the elevator pitch and description as I can get.

EVENT: Steven Heller at the Museum of Fine Arts, Wed Jan 21

Austin Govella — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 16:43:00 GMT

You’ve seen or read his stuff. Steven Heller is the author, co-author, and/or editor of over 100 books on design and popular culture, and he’ll be speaking at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts as part of the Rice Design Alliance (RDA) Spring Lecture Series.

The lecture starts at 7pm in the Brown Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts (1001 Bissonnet). Tickets are $10 for the public and less for RDA members, students, and some others.

A pre-lecture wine reception starts at 6pm in the MFAH Foyer. I suppose I will be there at at 6pm. Wine! Museum! Design!

Check “the Rice Design Alliance Spring Lecture Series website”:http://rda.rice.edu/index.php?topgroupid=6&subgroupid=36&groupid=78 for more information. “Steven Heller is also on the web”:http://www.hellerbooks.com/index.html.

Design Camp - Bryan/College Station - Sat, Jan 17

Austin Govella — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:35:00 GMT

I’m heading up to Bryan this Saturday for Design Camp, “a free conference put on by creative people for creative people”.

If you’re a creative person interested in sharing your ideas and passion, then you should attend! This includes designers, photographers, illustrators, writers, fine artists, and anyone else in a creative field. However, all talks should focus on something pertaining to design or the field itself. Several other Houstonites will be heading up to meet with designers from Bryan, Austin, and even Dallas.

Check the “Design Camp wiki”:http://designcamp.pbwiki.com/ for more information. If you’re interested in going, “RSVP on their Facebook page”:http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=115202080248. Looks like it’ll be pretty fantastic.

If all goes well, I’ll do a presentation on Web Page Design for Print Designers based on new material from “the new book”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321600800?ie=UTF8&tag=thinkingandma-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0321600800.

EVENT: Web-based startup school - Wed, Jan 14

Austin Govella — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:07:00 GMT

Josh Tabin, Startup Houston co-founder, speaks at this Wednesday’s Web-based Startup School at the Houston Technology Center. Josh will talk about some of the web trends for 2009 that he sees emerging.

The Web-based Startup School is a monthly brown bag lunch designed to host speakers and topics of interest to companies that live on the internet, with a focus on startup technology entrepreneurs.

The event is free but requires you “register in advance”:http://www.houstontech.org/en/cev/804. Presented by the “Houston Technology Center”:http://www.houstontech.org/.

Austin, the social object, destroyer of worlds.

Austin Govella — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:34:00 GMT

Warning: This is a mostly useless post of little interest listing my current socially networked obsessions for your co-obsessing pleasure.

Locational awareness:

Assorted quip-presence:

Twitter

Profil-actics:

LinkedIn – connecting with people I’ve met or am working with.
Plaxo – I dig Plaxo for some reason. Not sure why.

Little sites I couldn’t put down:

Tumblr – aggregates my Twitter, blog, and Flickr feeds
Flickr – mostly screenshots

Link brothels:

Delicious
Magnolia – feed republished as a link blog at Thinking Links

I publish identical links to Delicious and Magnolia. I do all that extra work because my friends won’t all choose just one place to hang out. Plus Magnolia has better social features and Delicious has better tag browsing.

Other places you may find me?

The book website – being redesigned to coincide with second edition
Boxes and Arrows

Of course, I keep updated contact information posted here on Thinking and Making.

EVENT: Houston NetSquared w/ Carlos Lama - Tue, Jan 13

Austin Govella — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:45:43 GMT

I’m planning on attending this next Houston NetSquared. Carlos Lama of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (and the Aurora Picture Show) will discuss the history of the museum and talk about some of their education programs.

For full details, including the address, and to RSVP see the “Houston NetSquared Meetup Group”:http://netsquared.meetup.com/3/calendar/9279542/.

We’ll be meeting at the Stag’s Head pub near Richmond and Shepherd.

The producers, making things, and monsters

Austin Govella — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:58:00 GMT

I’ve been _producing_ things for a long time. In college, I managed an art gallery and produced art shows and openings and cultural events. Haranguing a capoeira group, a grip of Brazilians on percussion and beer, an artist, his hangers on, catering, press releases, reservations, hanging and lighting the show, designing posters, ads, and a brochure for the show… that’s an event of some scale. Lots of moving pieces, a chess game where you move each piece across the board until the day of the opening when you hope it’s checkmate.

I’ve produced several club nights where success depends on a long line of successful experiences that slowly build off each other so the community grows until you’re overflowing a space full of happy, sweaty, sparkling people having a great time. Book shows, book DJs, book artists, celebrate birthdays, play requests, bounce assholes, guest-list nice people, smart people, special people. Pick films, drink specials, wardrobes, dates, event names, ticket prices… that’s an event of some scale. Unlike an art show, this chess game is much longer, and instead of worrying about schedules, promotion, and competition on one day, you’re looking at six months, and then a year, and then two years. And you don’t need checkmate every night, but you need to maintain checkmate—as much as possible—over that entire period of time.

Nothing I have ever done has ever matched the scale of putting together a book. Life-consuming. Grab a handful off your shelf and flip through the dedications. There’s a reason so many are dedicated to spouses and families. These kind people pretend to look the other way for months while you read, write, research, celebrate, mourn, write again, edit, re-edit, start over, re-research, edit again, scream, stare mindlessly at the screen… and then? Then you go into layout where you edit, edit, annotate, change, delete, redo pictures, diagrams, captions.

You repeat this process for every chapter.

I’ve produced many things of some scale—art shows, zines, literary journals, web applications, club nights, a poetry festival, concerts—but nothing has prepared me for the massive scale of a book. And to be clear, it’s really only half a book. The sheer amount of work, the vast expanse of detail, from commas to cover, pictures to precepts.

It’s not the writing. I wanted to be a writer when I was younger. I wrote a lot. My last semester at U.T. I produced a novella, two one-act plays, and two research papers. And it’s not the editing. That same semester, I edited a literary journal, a zine, and a newspaper. It’s not the design. That semester I produced a series of posters, newspaper ads, brochures, postcards, and several websites. It’s not the quantity of work. It’s the size of the body the work creates. I could fit a bunch of small things inside my head, comprehend their wholeness. But I can’t fit a similar amount of work for a larger body inside my head.

I can’t fit the book in my head, much less all the moving parts that need attention. My entire life, that’s how I’ve worked: cram everything about something into my head, take it part, reassemble it, and produce something. This project has been immune to that approach. And it’s been driving me nuts.

An important part of my writing process up till now was to read and re-read the entire piece from start to finish over and over again looking for the rough places. Where is the reader bumped out? What’s too cute, too academic? What’s not clear? What’s missing? Does it flow from start to finish? I can’t do that with this book. We can do that with individual chapters, but not with the entire thing.

I expect that’s what really scares me. The first edition was this wonderfully wrapped story about designing better websites. I know each chapter is pretty good. The content’s fucking awesome. But, what if instead of one book it’s just a collection of chapters? I think that’s what worries me most. On the scale from the world’s most beautiful man to Frankenstein’s monster, I have no clear sense of where we are.

I’m still going to bolt the neck on. And I think we’re sewing on a different, nicer pair of hands. But I have no clue of whether the townspeople will scream or smile. Madness is always a matter of hindsight.

Methods for our madness

Austin Govella — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:00:04 GMT

I’ve always loved the phrase “supposed former infatuation junkie” since it seems to encapsulate my dirty little love of “process”. I’m a process junkie. You have a process, I want to know about it.

And of course, as one of those little IA heathens, when it gets cold and dark on snowy nights, I can’t help myself but start organizing and classifying all those processes and their attendant design methods into some kind of unified theory of design. It’s a sickness, and a design, and damn interesting, and this is something I’ve discovered:

All design methods apply a limited set of problem solving methods in a design context. Design is problem solving. That’s pretty obvious and not the point. The point is that there are seven basic problem solving activities.

Generate
Disambiguate
Deconstruct
Synthesis
Affinity
Priority
Context

Of course, I’ve been classifying methods with these “seven habits of highly effective methods,” but that kind of intellectual onanism only gets you so far. The entire point is that if you know where you are in the problem-solving “cycle”, and you know what kind of problem you’re solving, choosing the proper kind of method becomes more science than art, more conscious than unconscious.

Dolly Parton is playing just now on iTunes. As you read, I recommend you cue up some readin’ music.

Generate

This is the first thing any one must do when solving a problem: generate a solution. While the entire design process might be seen as _generative_, that’s not what I’m talking about here.

Generate refers to the class of activities where you generate several somethings. The most basic form of generation is the brainstorm where you literally generate what the fuck ever. Generation doesn’t necessarily require you explicitly imagine more than one thing. However, anytime you recommend a change to an existing idea, it’s because in your little designer head, you’ve generated an alternative model you think might work better.

Vaguely, this may be like grabbing your drink off the bar, taking a sip, and then turning to scan the establishment for potential seducees.

Difference/Disambiguate

I wanted to call this chunk disambiguate because that’s just so dead-sexy. However, the purpose of this chunk of methods is to understand what makes something something. You _disambiguate_ the one from the others you’ve generated.

A basic form of disambiguation might be that annoying part of the content inventory when you write a little description for every page in the site.

I can’t imagine disambiguation being anything more than comparing and contrasting the various items you’ve generated. You define what constitutes their thingness, and what doesn’t. In the bar of design thinking, you’re noting blondes, brunettes, talls, shorts, crazies, meeks, and exes.

Deconstruct

In my honest opinion as a child of the swingin’ 20s, there is no technique more valuable to the information architect than to tear things apart and see what they’re made of. This includes assumptions, interfaces, goals, orders, workflows, puppies, designs, but never kittens.

When you take the BRD and rip out all of the features and intuit the business and user needs, you’re deconstructing. Regardless of how much you may drink, this is never recommended in a bar.

Synthesis

Of course, once you’ve torn things apart, you want to reassemble them into something better. This is synthesis, taking several pieces and making one whole.

When you take disparate marketing demographics and imagine your persona, Sarah Carlson, the leggy brunette who’s just your height, that is synthesis. Of course, this person is rarely ever in the bar, but that’s ok. Synthesis creates the possible (or impossible). If it created the existing, then it wouldn’t really be synthesis.

Affinity

IAs love affinity. Except with interaction designers.

A card sort is an exercise in determining affinity, the chat up of design. When grouping like with like, make sure to give them “the eyes.”

Priority

Priority is the haven of the intellectual lazy and those who would settle with good enough. Instead of accomplishing that perfect world where everything synchs together in sweet, sweet harmony, you satisfice and choose what is more and less important. Satisfice for satisfaction.

Any kind of rating is an exercise in priority. Selecting a personas primary goals is an exercise in priority.

Context

A lot of a thing’s thingness examines those intrinsic things that really thingify a thing. Context examines a thing next to other things.

We like to contextualize in different spheres: mental (user’s mind), spatial (place, layout), temporal (sequence, prior- and next-steps), and social (community). Scenarios, use cases, flows, wireframes, site maps contextualize.

Tanya Donnelly is singing now. How she isn’t queen of the world… well, it just boggles. Any ideas on why this is?

Or what about that break down? How you like that list? Missing an activity? This is a public call for an intergalactic crazy check. Sanitize me!