Archives for January 2005
Anti Copyright Arguments
Seth David Schoen has done an interesting hatchet-job on a statement from the Business Software Alliance that shows (rather long-windedly, but that’s what Americans are like) exactly why there are issues with defending copyright law on the grounds that it allows the software industry to get richer.
Nice of them to clear the air so… clearly!
Axure/Ubiquity
I find myself doing what I think might be an unhealthy amount of thinking about the tools I use to do stuff, and regular readers of this blog will know that one of my ambitions is to discover – or better still help to make – an Information Architecture IDE. So one of the things I’ve been meaning to blog about is the latest release of what was called Ubiquity RP, now Axure RP, by a company called Axure. Peter van Dijck published an interview on his blog with the creator, Victor Hsu, when the first version went golden. I had a look at that and corresponded with the creators about a few things. My verdict at that point was that it wasn’t ready for industrial use, and sure enough, the IA world hasn’t exactly buzzing about it. But version 3.0 shipped a couple of months ago – so is it a quantum leap or an incremental change?
Blood, Sweat and Nothing
Amazing. I get in to work on Friday, and the senior PM comes in to say that the client has decided to go for an ecommerce deployment so that £250,000 they’ve just given us to redesign their site along non-ecommerce lines (because originally they weren’t up for that) is canned. Well, maybe about 20% of it can be salvaged for re-use, but all the work I’ve been doing for the last three months (along with two other IA’s, some graphic designers and a PM) is definitely never going to see the light of day.
Well such is life. Good for our balance sheet, crap for job satisfaction. It’s the off-shore developers I feel sorry for though. We only handed them our designs at Christmas!
Inane, Rambling, Rarely Updated
Should have got this for Christmas. Maybe next year…
I’d Rather Stick a Drill in My Thumb
Standard & Poor’s site is larded up to the eyeballs with JavaScript and Flash, and (surprise!) is a broken wreak of a site because of it. Firefox users can’t sign up for one thing. I mailed them about that, naturally, while the chances of them replying properly are of course zero. At least they show you a warning – and a picture of somebody attacking their thumb with a dentist’s drill. Are their designers trying to tell you something?
Friends Provident’s Customer Registration
When I started this blog I told myself it would be a good place to critique online experiences of various kinds. I’ve actually done very little of this, mainly because it’s unexpectedly difficult: you only realise you’ve got a badly designed experience on your hands when you’re some way into the journey, and back-tracking to record the process is usually not possible. I’ve half caputured this mess of a customer registration journey though – it’s really terrible though.
Clipboard Thoughts
I’ve been too busy with things over the past month to blog much, but I thought I’d make some time to get some (typically) half-formed thoughts down about the clipboard. There are a number of things about the clipboard that I’m interested in, both in terms of HCI, historical influence on things like content management, and various other aspects of this incredibly influential invention (no, really).
Onion Routing
From time to time I get a reminder that the future isn’t somewhere you travel to, it’s something you create. As a teenager, my grandfather made a crystal radio set and let people listen to broadcasts from Paris at church fetes (this was before the BBC existed). He must have felt good about that. I feel the same sort of thing about onion routing.
