My experience design manifesto
17 June, 2013
My experience design manifesto is based on the idea of experiences being floopy, gloopy things suspended in the flowing stream of our lives. Picture life as a river, and imagine cleaning a paintbrush in it (which isn’t very environmentally friendly and the imaginary version of yourself should feel ashamed of being bullied into it by a blog post). The speed of the water pulls the colour from the brush and…
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Linked data – a beginners guide
11 June, 2013
linked data / Ontology / semantic web
“Linked data is the superstructure over which content is stretched” I said this once, but I didn’t really elaborate on this definition. I moved quickly onto the benefits of Linked data. In this post I’m going to try to go right back the basics and describe exactly what linked data is. So what is linked data? I like to think of the internet as being made up of two separate…
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Heuristics isn’t a dirty word
23 May, 2013
Design / heuristics / information architecture
Jargon annoys me. Especially when someone tries to “namify” a process in a way that seeks to own and obscure the method rather than reveal it. I’d love to find it funny and be flippant that professional practise gets obscured by jargon. But too often giving a name to a process implies that the thing is an artefact, a finished product, rather than a living process. I remember being on…
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What did linked data ever do for us anyway?
20 May, 2013
linked data
I’ve recently written about navigation, user journeys and content, and I haven’t really mentioned linked data all that much. That’s a shame. Because linked data is the super-structure over which content is stretched and experiences flow. Linked data can power the online journeys of the future. It can switch our taxonomic thinking into ontological thinking. And it can turn the telescoping corridors of the web into grand cathedrals. Here’s how……
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What’s navigation anyway?
16 May, 2013
menus / Navigation
Navigation is a funny old thing. Maybe it’s because it’s both a noun and a verb. Navigation is the action we take as we traverse the web. It’s also the furniture that enables us to make those journeys. I’m currently interested in the different types of navigation (noun). Navigation, in the form of menus, buttons, interfaces and other things makes the web work. Lots of the time these are the…
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You don’t get anything for free
1 May, 2013
aggregations / Dynamic publishing
We’re doing more and more with content these days. There was a time when you wrote a page for the web and that was that. Hyperlinking created the webbyness of the net. But basically, a page was on the web, with a URL to locate it, and that was that. Since search engines came along and started breaking pages up and detecting meaning, the experience of the web has started…
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Turtles all the way down
15 April, 2013
For some time I’ve had this bon mots rattling around in my head, like an earworm, infinitely repeating as if it knew it’s own meaning. When this happens it usually means either that my brain has made a decision and it’s waiting for the rest of me to realise, or it’s a request for more brain resources on a particularly tricky problem. I like to think that it’s the brain…
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