The fundamental purpose of an article page is to read the article, not read or click on something else.

Continue Reading: Breaking the fundamentals

What are personas good for?

Continue Reading: Personas and the Advantage of Designing for Yourself

Why opinions from anybody but users rarely matter.

Continue Reading: The hidden lives of MySpacers

How “information architecture” is defined much too broadly, frames design in the wrong way, and suffers from infoprefixation.

Continue Reading: More Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture

Last week I wrote about How to prevent valueless design in social web sites. My main point was that most of the value people get from the sites comes over time from the interactions with other people, not from the sublimity of the visual design.

In that post, I used an analogy that pissed people off. I used the analogy that great-looking interfaces can at times be like a public speech out of touch with an audience…solidly executed but sending the wrong message…

Continue Reading: Can we talk about politics and design at the same time?

Kevin Gamble (via Dave Weinberger):

“Is there any living, breathing example of a taxonomic approach working (scaling) to keep-up with the hyper-efficiency we see in peer-production systems? I’m being quite serious here. Can you point me to a working model?.”

Why is this an important question?

Continue Reading: Is there an Example of a Scalable Taxonomy?

Gene Smith has a nice cheat sheet of this important article on tagging systems. He quotes the article (which I had read quite some time back, but now with renewed interest) “The motivations to tag can be categorized into two high-level practices: organizational and social. The first arises from the use of tagging as an […]

Continue Reading: Why do People Tag?

Update: Changed some wording…some folks thought I was arguing with Zeldman. Actually, I was agreeing with him, and finding that his post echoed what I’ve found to be true. Jeffrey Zeldman on how he softened up to usability: “Like many design professionals, I rejected usability when I first encountered it. That’s mainly because I first […]

Continue Reading: Zeldman on Usability

In The Most Frustrating Thing, Matt Mullenweg, who helped create the Wordpress software that runs this site, is frustrated about our geeky fascination with technology and design. So frustrated, in fact, that he claims they don’t matter…

Continue Reading: Different Context, Different Design

Paul Rand on Design:

“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.”

Note how Rand goes way beyond the common notion of design, incorporating not only the editing of content, but the embellishment of it. I think we need that sort of broad view of Web design, a field that is far too focused on the technical aspect of publishing, and hardly, if ever, focused on the verbs Rand was occupied with…

Continue Reading: Paul Rand on Design