Bobulate

Is saying goodbye really that hard? Apparently, yes: yes it is. Instead of following through and cutting ties properly, I have to admit, I’ve been taking the easy way out.

For longer than I feel comfortable discussing, I’ve been relying on Apple Mail’s Junk filter to be the bad guy. Instead of taking the few extra seconds to unsubscribe from unwanted email newsletters, I’ve trained Junk to inauspiciously hide mail I’m too lazy to deal with myself.

I’m well aware of Training Mode and respect Mail’s ability to learn. But no matter. The Flavorpill newsletter I signed up for in hopes of being the first to know? The Daily Candy list I subscribed to in hopes of being first at the sample sale? The Threadless announcements I subscribed to hoping to never have to deal with Women’s Medium being sold out again? No slight against these fine texts (and they really are), but I just lost interest. They’re all junk to me now. More…

Today, the School of Visual Arts in New York City is unveiling a project we’ve been working on for some time: a new Master of Fine Arts in Interaction Design, a program to launch in Fall of 2009. The program was jointly concepted by Steven Heller, co-founder (with Lita Talarico) of the renowned MFA Designer as Author program, and me over the last several months. I’ll be charting a new path of sorts in coming months, taking on the position as Chair of the program, while continuing to foster my own information architecture and user research practice in parallel.

The program is in the early stages of development as we shape the curriculum and work with faculty and potential faculty. The caliber of the instructors so far is quite staggering even to me, and I’m thrilled to see what is emerging with each new component. More…

For as far as we’ve come, are we just evolving back to where we started? As part a panel for The HappyCorp’s publishing workshop for New York’s Design Week recently, I helped field questions from an audience of online publishers. Their primary questions were about “RSS,” focused on ways they can improve the reading experience of their content through feed readers.

As I listened to my co-panelists answer, I heard them describing not new ways to design for reading in social environments, not new strategies for user engagement, but something pretty pedestrian: how to improve the isolated reading experience.

Designers are becoming more masterful at creating social experiences, yet reading with most feed readers is still much like reading a magazine or a book: isolated but portable, modular yet somewhat sequential. While that timing and sequence is controlled by the reader, it is still a solo experience. More…

If you’ve been thinking more about web forms recently, you’re not alone. Luke Wroblewski has been actively campaigning for better-designed forms, educating and evangelizing about a topic hardly considered before: the design of forms. Even if you’ve been unable to catch his worldwide talks (and even more so if you have), you need to drop everything. Right now. Because his book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, is now available for sale. More…

Despite popular opinion, vocabulary can actually be pretty volatile. Take “innovate,” for example. At one point in the not-so-distant past, “innovation” had some pretty positive connotations. We aimed to be innovative; books on innovation crowded our reading lists; we bookmarked and emailed articles mentioning the topic. But somewhere along the way, “innovation” became dirty. The word has lost its way. More…

I’ve always been that person who brings a something to write on to every meeting — a sketchbook specifically. But for years I never used it to sketch; instead, I fill it with fairly rigorous notes of every meeting detail. Almost ten years of sketchbooks are archived neatly nearby (by size, then date), and their notes, historical artifacts of meeting narratives for later reference.

But last year, I had the pleasure of working with Jonathan Harris. After meetings with Harris, I watched my 10-year-old sketchbook-tradition change: what used to be pages of fairly rigid text notes evolved into charts, scatterplot graphs, four-quadrant diagrams, and Venn diagrams. More…

A quick Monday note to mention a recent project I’m quite excited about. WordPress fans may already know that the redesign of the administration panel has been talked about for some time. Well, this weekend saw the release of WordPress 2.5, which included improvements far and wide, including the redesign of the admin.

I’m honored to have been a small part of its redesign. WordPress approached Happy Cog to streamline WordPress’ information architecture and design. We worked with the valliant Matt Mullenweg, who in turn gathered feedback from the team at Auttomatic, while we developed a new structural and design system. More…