Sacca, Twitter and why should we care?
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Last month, at The Next Web 2009, Chris Sacca – investor in Twitter, was interviewed on stage and also chaired a panel about the Twitter ecosystem. The following post is a combination of his comments. Before being a major investor in Twitter, Sacca worked for Google, where he ran the the alternative access division, whose ambitious aim was to get everybody connected to the internet. They mostly focused on user experience and solving user problems. |
Tipping point – beyond 2.0
 Jeff Jarvis (left) and Andrew Keen courtesy of Ann Helmond
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Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do?) and Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) painted opposing views of the techno-cultural landscape. Keen actually regarded Jarvis as a ‘cheerleader’ for Google although Jarvis himself said he used the company as an example for changes in the real world. |
Impact of Web 2.0 on Search
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Ricardo Baeza-Yates gave us Yahoo’s view that they do not believe in black boxes as a way to solve the complexities of search but that its more about what can be learnt from users.
Of course nothing new here but he gave a holistic view about how Yahoo is addressing the different areas of the conundrum. |
Being that UX team of one
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Leah Buley – How to be a UX team of one If there was an award for the most enthusiastic and passionate speaker I think Leah Buley would take it.Her presentation, How to be a UX team of one was a real hit, at the recent IA Summit in Miami. Anything with cartoons immediately gets my vote. It was engaging and inspirational with the hand drawn elements serving to convey the speaker’s personality and it was a refreshing change to the usual slides. Read more… |
IA convergence and emergence
 Andrew Hinton (Inkblurt) – |
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Ok a bizarre word to start off with. That grabbed the attention and yes, the talk covered links. But it was more about an explanation of IA, and as Hinton stated, ‘moving the conversation about it forward’. From the start Hinton mentions emergent theory and I think that’s a very good place to start. If you look at the practice of Information Architecture it is very much in an emergence. It is only as old as web design itself. |
Raising hackles at the IA Summit 2008
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Jared Spool: Journey to the centre of Design Jared Spool’s opening keynote was perhaps deliberately inflammatory. If you go into a room of IAs and say UCD is dead you probably run the risk of losing half the audience within the first two minutes. |
However, provocations aside, Spool raised some important issues that we need to figure out if we are working in a commercial environment where IA and usability are often questioned as being expensive luxuries.
Information Architecture 3.0 - Peter Morville
A holistic view of where we have come from and where we are headed was outlined from a founding father of IA. A notable comment was;
‘Iterative design is good but you need a structured method to stop going around in circles.’ Read more…
IA Summit 2008 - Yahoo! Pattern Libraries
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Whilst still getting over the jet lag, today marked the start of the IA Summit 2008 for me, here in Miami. The first day has been excellent in terms of knowledge sharing from the Yahoo team – Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish and Lucas Pettinati. They have also designed templates for wireframing using patterns from the YUI library which will be publicly available very soon. I’m already really impressed by the community spirit exhibited here and there is a great feeling of togetherness and transparency. I will go into the details of what was said in a later post but its going to be a good five days of insight and inspiration. Apart from design patterns, there are loads of other talks I will be attending, I will cover a synopsis review and my take on each one in subsequent posts (that will take me into May no doubt)… |
