Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
This book has been in the queue for a for few years now – there’s nothing to make be avoid reading a book than having it recommended it to me. Perverse of me, I know. If you’re unaware of the book’s structure, the first section’s content and pace might weaken your resolve. Well worth your perseverance.
4D Software Process, taken from “How Do You Design? A Compendium of Models” by Hugh Dubberly.
Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The Savage Detectives: A Novel
by Roberto Bolaño
An excellent book by Roberto Bolaño – who’s work I only know from short stories published in the New Yorker. Not to be mistaken for your average crime or detective fiction – although there is an element of mystery. As a translation this book’s all the more impressive. The term Visceral Realists makes smile.
A few things struck me when I looked through the Information Architecture Institute Salary Survey, 2009 recently: there are a lot of different names (User Experience Planner/Designer/Architect, Information Architect, or Interaction Designer/Architect being the most popular) to describe roughly the same set of tasks/skills (Wireframing/Sitemaps/Process flows, Interaction design, and Audience definitions/Persona development being the most common).
I wish they’d gone a step further and mapped specific tasks/skills to each job title since there’s to be a lot of confusion as to what the difference is between an IA or an ID, or and UXD. The activities outlined in the Wikipedia definition of user experience design – for example – could easily apply to any of the above.
I think it also would have been worth while to have respondents indicate the environment they work in (interactive agency, consulting company or inhouse design team) and their primary focus (micro-sites, web sites, web apps, software or hardware development). The later particularly would have done more to distinguish the respondents than some highfalutin job titles.
The two pieces of data I’m referring to (below) and the survey results:
4. Which of the following job titles best represents your current position?
12. How much your time do you spend on these tasks:
Flow Chart Fun from loveallthis.com.
Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services
Kim Goodwin
This 740 page book is phenomenal! An excellent reference with lots of sensible advice and insight.
Later: The Research section of this book alone is phenomenal! And no where is the process of conducting interviews, modeling data and developing personas outlined in such detail. Proof – if proof were needed – that personas are based on research, not pulled from thin air.
For as long as I have been using OS X – when you tried to eject a disk that had an application running or a document open you would see the following ambiguous error. If you happened to have a lot of different applications running or documents open, finding which was preventing you from ejecting the disk was a guessing game.
I upgrade to Snow Leopard this past week… I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the many tweaks that made it’s way into 10.6 was this clarification as which application or document was culprit. And if there is more than one cause, both are listed.
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
A new book from Thomas Pynchon. I’m not sure what I think so far – except that it’s strange. Here’s a recent review from The New Yorker which seems to be as ambivalent as I am about it.
Much, much later:
I read about pre-release book teasers or trailers in a NY Times article, and the article referred to teaser made for this very book, scripted by Pynchon and narrated by Pynchon. The trailer was pitch perfect – and Pynchon makes a credible ‘Doc. My first and last video embed – I swear!
About Face 3 Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin