“…we must explore many disciplines, since the most promising knowledge frontiers typically exist at the boundaries between fields rather than at the fields’ respective centers.”
— “How Customers Think: Essential Insights Into The Mind of the Market” by Gerald Zaltman.
At first, this quote made me think about how I have been reading books more rooted in psychology, marketing and business lately.
But then it also made me think about where all the web disciplines like design, information architecture and usability intersect. I think that anyone that is a web designer should have a good understanding of IA and usability. Sometimes I feel that we are still back in the dark ages of web design and designers are still solely focused on the visual aspects of design and just making stuff look “COOL!” instead of thinking about the entire user experience. Just what is a good web designer anyway? How should we define that criteria?
In my opinion, designers should be hanging out with IA’s and usability people and asking them tons of questions. Be curious about everything they do! Sometimes seeing things from another role’s perspective can change the way you solve a design problem. It could give you fresh ideas or even a whole new way of approaching things. I believe it will also make you a BETTER designer. So there, I’ve said it: you can NEVER learn too much about IA and usability. Just get out there and talk to IA’s and usability people. They don’t bite (usually).
Don’t let knowledge get lost in the boundries between disciplines. Everyone has something they can learn from everyone else and there is almost always some knowledge that you can take back and apply to your own job.
P.S. - I’ve done it again. I went to the bookstore yesterday and blew $60 on books! I got the one I quoted above, a book by Tom Peters on leadership and “Flow” (which was recommended by Kathy Sierra at SXSW.)
I used to think of Technorati as just a search engine for blogs, but since I met some people at SXSW2006, I decided to check out their site again. It turns out that they offer some other neat services that I was not away of.
What is Technorati? Technorati is a search engine that searches frequently updated content on the web, such as blog postings. Unlike traditional search engines, content can often get picked up in ten minutes or so. Check their FAQ for more info.
First, I claimed my blog, gave it a description and created a member profile. This allows your photo to show up when people search for your blog.
This also allowed me to associate tags with my blog. I had never used tags in the past. Tags are a way of making content searchable by key words that may not be apparent in the content. So I could be blogging about “web design” however it may also relevant to the “user experience”. I can add a hidden tag in my code so that my post will come up when people search for “user experience”. You can also search by tags in their search engine.
Then I created a “Favorites” list. There are two cool things about creating a Technorati Favorites list. The first is that you get a page with brief descriptions of all blog postings from your favorite blogs sorted by chronological order. So you will see the first few sentences of all blog postings posted that day. Then you can easily scan them and determine what to read. It’s definitely a timesaver for blogs that you read daily. The second cool thing it does, is that it will take your favorites list and consolidate them into one RSS feed. I like having my most frequently read items all at the top of my MyYahoo! start page.
You can also enter a blog’s URL and see all the sites that link to it (which can be cool or not, depending on how popular you are.)
There’s lots of other neat things about Technorati, so check it out!
