IA for Tiny Things – Martin Belam

Martin gave an amusing and neat talk on designing widgets.

This talk examines what makes a successful widget from an information delivery point of view. It also looks at how information professionals can help develop more ‘playful’ ways of representing and structuring the information presented. These examples will illustrate how to develop a more engaging user experience, one that stands out from the all-too-common formula of ‘information feed + logo + home link = marketing widget’.

http://www.iasummit.org/proceedings/2008/ia_for_tiny_stuff_exploring_de

 

Search Patterns – Peter Morville

Peter Morville is collecting examples of search patterns on flickr. You can see them at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/collections/72157603785835882/

He presented some examples from the flickr collection and explained his search categories at the 2008 IA Summit, presentation can be found here:

Search is among our most important and complex challenges. As the choice of first resort for many users and tasks, search is a defining element of the user experience. And, as a unique amalgam of content, metadata, technology and design, the search results interface demands intense cross-disciplinary collaboration.

In this fast-paced session, we’ll describe a pattern language for search that explains user psychology and information seeking behavior, highlights emerging technologies and interaction models, illustrates repeatable solutions to common problems, and positions us all to design better search interfaces and applications.

http://www.iasummit.org/proceedings/2008/search_patterns

 

Designing your reputation system in 15 easy steps – Bryce Glass

This presentation discusses some ways that reputations can be used in community sites to gain buy-in from users.

Leaderboards, Levels, Points, “Top 10 Reviewer”, Elite Status, Gold Member, Badges and Trophies—the options for representing a person’s reputation within a community are almost as varied as the reasons you might want to do so.  

Reputation can incent users to higher-and-higher levels of contribution, motivate them to stick around longer and form a deeper relationship with your product, but tread lightly: research and common usage have shown that specific reputation patterns lend themselves to some fairly specific contexts and—when used inappropriately—can harm your community dynamic. Ugly side-effects like increased competitiveness, lowered quality of contributions and petty squabbles may result. This talk presents 15 questions to take into account when designing your reputation system…

 

http://www.iasummit.org/proceedings/2008/designing_your_reputation_syst

 

IA Summit 2008, Miami

I visited the IA Summit in Miami on 12-14thApril 2008. As ever it was rammed with interesting presentations and conversations. I will post some links to some of my favourite talks.