week 8 :: message design & content creation ::

week 8 : 21 Feb

All the book reviews (missing one)
Software check-in. Dreamweaver folks, are we ready for Ch7-8 .... How's next Wed night for a Photoshop workshop or do you want to wait til the first week of Spring Quarter?
Agenda:
- First half-hour : team meetings
- Tasks, Scenarios, IA and Card Sorts - lecture
- Site Maps - usually present information in hierarchy - however information may appear in more than one "category" simply by virtue of linking patterns:
  - Site Map Pro - generates HTML site maps
  - Smart Draw - generates Visio style site maps for team use
  - Google - XML schema
  - Jakob Nielsen - Jan 2002
  - Catalyst Site Map - UW
  - SitePoint - Company site map
  - Gov't - AU - example
- Reading Discussion
- Food
- When technologies don't work : bad examples ... Validation tools (Bobby, W3C validation) and Guidelines
- Server Logs
  - Server Log Analysis from Usability.gov
  - Measuring User Motivation from Server Log Files - Microsoft Research
  - Software: Sawmill, Web Trends, Web Log Expert; Analog and Webalizer (for technically-inclined)
  - Sample Analysis - from Sawmill
- Team meetings

Quotables

"The best design is no design." -Andrea (for more, read Don Norman's The Invisible Computer)
"Nothing is ever as straightforward, easy or clearcut as one thinks." -Meg (for more, check out The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management)
"The customer is always right." -Drew (for more, read the complete Cluetrain Manifesto)
"The concept of categorizing different contents can make it easy for people to find what they want." -Erica (for more, poke around Boxes and Arrows)
"It seems design, at least user-friendly design, is about predictability." -Sakina (for more, see Homepage Usability)
"All the talk about Web 2.0 is "ultimately about empowering end-users to achieve their dreams on the Web without restriction." -Dian (another plug for Cluetrain Manifesto)
"The concept of organization ... seems like ... a simplistic concept -- we all have a sock drawer." -Alex (more in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web)

Assignments for Next Week:

Resources