andrea resmini - English

The Second Italian IA Summit

vector — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 07:11:25 -0700

We did it again.
Last year in Rome, this year in Trento.
Last year a one-day gig, this year a two-days opus. What didn't change was the enthusiasm: 230 people attended the free conference, and it looks like they loved what they saw and heard. After some long planning and kung-fu fighting, the Second Italian IA Summit is now behind our back, and it's been a success. Let me tell you why.

From Digital to Physical Spaces

vector — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 06:21:59 -0600

Information architecture is not just for the Web: information architecture has a larger impact on many offline activities and affects our daily experience in many different ways.
Its contribution becomes crucial where complexity, unfamiliarity and information overload stand in the way of the user.

We would like to outline a unified model of information architecture able to traverse the diverse contexts we encounter daily, from digital to physical spaces, providing a conceptual framework for the design of cognitive and informational continuity between environments.

Tagging in Las Vegas

vector — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 05:58:43 -0600

The 8th IA Summit closed down yesterday in Las Vegas, Nevada. This year FaceTag was part of the Research Track and our man on a tagging mission, Emanuele Quintarelli, was appointed Chief Evangelist Maximum and sent there to tell the more-than-800-IAs crowd what's all this top-down bottom-up affair.

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Taxing interfaces

vector — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 13:15:29 -0700

In Italy, like in most other countries I believe, we have what is called the bollo auto, in the English speaking world car tax, or road tax, or even vehicle license fee. That is something you pay on a half-yearly or yearly base because you own or drive around a car. In darker ages you had to suffer time-consuming queues in some murky and crowded place where after showing handful of dubious-looking papers to a bored clerk you ended up paying the wrong amount, but this is the Internet Age: we have the Web, we have automated procedures, we do it online, we do it better.
So climb in, ladies and gentlemen, let's go pay some bollo auto.

Of CMS and WYSIWYG editors

vector — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 04:11:24 -0700

Should writers and contributors using CMS have a say in how a web site renders text and paragraphs?

Opinions differ. I consider this a much tougher question than it seems at first, even in these times of UX and Rich Internet Applications.

Fetch'em the geeky way

vector — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 02:15:27 -0700

Now suppose you found a web page that is really a pageful of links, say some PDFs.
A sharing soul decided to offer some documents off her web site, so these are nicely embedded in the (X)HTML code. They could be interesting, even helpful, but you have that gut reaction that clicking through each and every one of them is not an option.

FaceTagging

vector — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 13:15:40 -0600

FaceTag is a working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool conceived for bookmarking Information Architecture resources using a rich faceted classification scheme based on the CRG guidelines to improve the browsability and findability of the flat keywords space of user-generated tags.

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So little, so much

vector — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 08:47:19 -0600

So far, this is probably my preferred example of what could often be used as the official usability motto: so little, so much.
This is your run-of-the-mill ice-cream freezer stand, the one with the long glass window and plenty of ice-cream flavours behind to choose from.
Just take a look at what stands on the floor, directly in front of it: if you can't figure it out, let me explain that this is a small podium much like those used say for the Olympics or any sports event.

MX backups and MTAs

vector — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 05:16:03 -0600

Now, I know that backup MXes (or is that MX backups?) have become somewhat questionable in the eyes of many a mail administrator, mostly because it seems quite unlikely today that a primary MX can be allowed to stay offline for more than say 24 straight hours.
After all, they do have someone doing IT there, don't they?
And I couldn't agree more, but you know, some businesses still like to think along the blessed lines of better safe then sorry and not my fault, so, as a consequence, I recently had to install and configure a backup MX server.

Implementing facets in Drupal

vector — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 15:36:22 -0600

Take a peek at the forums at Drupal's website and you are granted a first hand experience on the actual meaning of infoglut: the pages host the official documentation and the most popular forums and so much information is available on so many interweaving topics you have a really hard time finding out what's relevant for you.