Google is getting serious about its online groupware offerings, adding JotSpot to Writely (now part of their Docs and Spreadsheets offering). CNet has more as some analysis including a mention of Wetpaint the hosted wiki service that drives our client HTC’s user-community site.
Tim “Invented the Web” Berners-Lee on a way to evolve HTML without the abrupt disorienting changes characterized by the switch the XHTML: Reinventing HTML | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs
According to Jacco Niewland, swipr is “a toolset for Visio that allows the integration of sitemaps/screenflows and wireframes into one fully interactive HTML deliverable.”
Swipr is released under the GNU Open Source license, and is completely free. It “allows for one screenflow/sitemap document and multiple wireframe documents to be exported into one integrated HTML set, viewable by any browser; it also has the option of creating a simple prototype from all your wireframes.” It’s suited for collaboration by teams of multiple IAs and it doesn’t require any special plugins to view the HTML prototype output.
Niewland suggests that the prototypes created by swipr are suitable for early usability testing, and that the documents print well from Visio.
At swipr.com you can download the software (still in beta), see examples, and contribute to a forum.
Thanks, Jacco!
Austin Govella posted a link to the IA Institute mailing list the other day pointing to Yahoo Time Capsule, an intriguing project for gathering memories from users and making them browsable in interesting and innovative ways (that may break the browser in some use cases, but still… pretty cool).
For pictures of information architecture in everyday life, check out the Everyday Information Architecture group on Flickr.
Users can create customized search engines for their sites to focus on any kind of content.
In another round of battle against Yahoo, Google has introduced a customized version of its search engine that will enable bloggers and other web site operators to offer a specialized form of Google to search for specific kinds of content, like a favorite sports team, actor, or hobby. The service, dubbed Google Customized Search Engine, allows users to select which web pages they want to include in a Google index, how the content should be prioritized, whether other users can also contribute to the index, and what the search results page will look like. The Mountain View, California, search giant is upping the stakes in its rivalry against Yahoo, which offers its own customized search engine, Search Builder. Other search vendors also offer such features, like blinkx, which recently introduced a customized version of its video search engine.
This article in UX Matters talks about designing breakthrough products and offers some interesting ideas on innovation and solving problems that sometimes people don’t even realize they have. Bonus Extractable content: One of the case studies is Vocera, a client of ours that makes a Star Trek-like ubiquitous communication system. The homepage of the website we redesigned for them serves as an illustration for that part of the article.
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen defuses Apple’s large display sales ploy with an insightful article here. So much for my new 30″-er on the company tab.
Extractable’s Director of Strategic Services, Christian Crumlish, was recently named to the board of directors for the Information Architecture Institute.
The Information Architecture Institute is a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. Founded in 2002, the Institute has over 1000 members in 60 countries.
Christian will serve on the board from 2006 through 2008. He will be the primary owner of IT and Web Operations for the group.
