James Keller & Sean Cowne

A new approach to web design.

It all starts with a quiz:

Product demo - best UI?

1. animaion + 100 words text
2. animation + voice and 100 words (my guess)
3. animation + voice

… but they won’t tell us until end…

Some Definitions

IA (information architecture) - is the art and science of organizing and labeling information to support findability and usability.

ID (instructional design) - is the art and science of knowledge transfer and retention.

Well are they alike???

Scholastic pursuits. Need to have a love of the philosophical. upon cognitive psychology. Constructivism, behaviorism and other big words are used :)

It all boils down to: A need to connect user with an end goal. Making sure a string of action happens easily.

Brings up “Don’t Make me think”.

Looks like only 2 people in the room haven;’t read the book. No comment on where I stand.

• users scan, they don’t read
• users don’t make optimal decisions - look for first reasonable options
• users muddle through

Blink thinking

Thin slicing: make decisions based on a very small section of information.

<rant>Sean name drops too much for my taste: gladwell, krug, nielsen, klein, zeldman, big bird, count chocula, blah, blah, blah… OK, I get it… you’re well informed.</rant>

Gladwell is the father of viral marketing? OK, that’s cool.

James just used the word “automagically”, +1 for her.

Oh, and she hates talking on the internet, but…

Back to original question

Narration is good for retention.

• Animation and Sound = Visual and Auditory
• Animation and Sound and Text = Visual and Auditory and Visual (too much Visual)

“Minimize on screen text.”

<another rant>I want to write “or give it as alternative”, but Sean just disputed that. He then goes on to tell a story where he tried to convince a bank to not include close captioning in a video. WTF? If I was blind - I would be insulted, actually I am still insulted. If CC text is an option, but you think that it gets in the way of retention, then you design is flawed! Visually-abled users might retain better with only visual and audio, but why not give a text alternative for other users???</another rant>

The give an example: star wars trading card game site that they designed.

When to look at your sister discipline

ID people need to look at IA and visa-vera.

A big weekend.

On Saturday, we went urban-lumberjacking again. On Monday, Fish flew out to his new home in Land-o’-lakes Florida. Between those two, I found some time to do a little paddling.

Jamie and I went to the Elk Rock Island dock that is about 5 minutes south of my house.

When you launch here you have two good options.

• Head south, toward Willamette falls the clear waters of the Clackamas river (7 miles).
• Turn north, toward OMSI, the bridges and the brown waters of downtown Portland (7 miles).

Instead (for some strange reason) we choose to paddle up the tiny flow that is Johnson Creek.

This trickle flows through SE Portland and is notorious for yearly flooding. Near my home, it joins up with the Crystal Springs and becomes an actual stream.

At the mouth it is about 20ft wide, but as we found, it quickly narrows and could easily be jumped in places.

It is also very shallow at many of the “rapids”. However, this increase the fun as we tried to crawl up them. My only regret is that I banged up my carbon-fiber paddle when pushing myself up river.

On the way down, we surprised some teenagers that were trying to sneak a beer on the bank. They quickly tossed the cans as we approached. “Hey”, I yelled… “Don’t Litter!”