January 2006 Archives

I got a request a few days ago from Assistant Professor Donald J. Patterson at the Informatics Department of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. He runs a blog for the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction at the University of California at Irvine.

Don had found the notes I took during the IA Retreat '05 and wanted to make an audio version of the notes from Adam Greenfield's talk of Everyware. He said it was an excellent example of "stream of ubiquitous consciousness." So you can now listen to my notes. (Though it doesn't seem that you can view that page via Firefox on the Mac. Safari works though. Weird.)

How cool is that?

I know I said I was going to post here about practices and methods and all I've been doing is posting about events lately. Well, that's cause there is a lot going on. I've been reading some interesting stuff over at InfoDesign via their RSS feeds. But I haven't had a chance to think upon what they've shared yet. So, until then here's more events info.

I will be running the Adaptive Path CMS workshop in April. It's called Making Your CMS Work for You and will be held on April 27th here in San Francisco at the AP office. I'll be updating and overhauling the workshop based upon from when Jeff and Peterme used to lead it. Use the code FOCF when you register and save 15% off the cover price.

I just received word that my proposal for a session for the IA Summit 2006 has been accepted. Yippie! Last time I presented at the Summit was when Peter and I both talked about re-architecting PeopleSoft.com (ZIP: 1.6 MB) in Baltimore in 2002.

I'll be talking about content analysis, how to do it, and also how to teach it to a non-IA. We've done a number of projects here at AP where the client has wanted to do the content audit and analysis themselves. It's a place where they see they could save some money since it is time consuming. It's also a great way to get someone on the client team to be intimately familiar with the site.

The problem comes when you go to merge their content analysis (often taking the form of a content map) into say, a mental model diagram. Sometimes it works great. Sometimes it's not so great. I've been working on what I can do to help mentor and teach the client the skills so they can make a content map and do analysis that we can build on for the rest of the project. That's what my talk will be about.

Adaptive Path is busy with events again this year. We have four upcoming events in the next month and a half. Woo!

Join us if you can. And remember that you can save 15% on registration by using the coupon code FOCF

January 25 - Los Angeles - Elements of User Experience with Jesse
January 26 - Los Angeles - Designing & Building with Ajax with Jesse and Dan
February 8 - Miami - Designing & Building with Ajax with Dan and Ryan
February 15 & 16 - Seattle - Beyond Usability: Designing the Complete User Experience with, well, I'm not sure who is leading this event. But I know it will be great.