Oz-IA, one of my favourite Australian conferences, has announced a call for proposals. And they’ve made it super-easy - it is a call for expressions of interest, rather than full, detailed proposals. But the hitch is that they need to be in soon (25 July). So if you have an idea for a talk about IA, [...]

I don’t know if this is such a good idea, but I’ve been watching Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares, re-reading the Cluetrain Manifesto and helping a client write a set of guidelines for social media . And I just realised what each has in common… Voice Ramsay, when you remove the f*** word, talks always about authenticity and simple, [...]

Someone asked me recently how many items were ‘too many’ to have in a navigation bar on a website. Of course, there is no definitive answer to this (and please don’t ever believe it if someone tells you 7+/-2: the research behind that is completely irrelevant). I don’t think I’ve seen reliable research on this, [...]

Here’s my presentation from Web Directions User Experience, titled ‘Getting content right’. | View | Upload your own The description for it was: “We all know that great content is a core part of the website user experience. So why is it so hard to find content that isn’t dull, lifeless and uninteresting - blah, blah, blah? Web [...]

Yet another workshop announcement… On 7&8 August, I will be teaching a 2-day master class on information architecture and collaborative design, run via Ark Group. The thing that is slightly different about this workshop compared to my IA workshop is that, duh, it includes a lot of collaborative design. I’m adding more material on user research, design [...]

In my last post, one of the things I most criticised Peugeot for was providing navigation based on a series of numbers, and making me decipher the numbering system before I could start to learn about their cars. This numbering system (or strange names) problem exists throughout the car industry. It is just one of the [...]

… any car other than a Peugeot. The back story … I’ve recently started to think about buying a new car. I don’t mind my current one (it’s a Nissan X-trail) but it is a bit bigger than I need and sort of just not me. I’ve been thinking about buying a Peugeot for well over a [...]

As I mentioned recently, I am changing my name back to Donna Spencer. Last time I changed my name was pre-internet and it wasn’t terribly hard. But now I have identity spread out all over the web, and am wondering just how easy it will be to change my name, and how important name is to [...]