carriegarzich.com

This is troubling

2009-04-05T08:04:00.000-07:00

Looks like email scammers have caught on to "email this" features. I forwarded to the New York Times web editor and to Consumerist. Has anyone else received an email like this?

The New York Times is definitely a trusted source for me, and I don't want to block emails from them, but I also don't want to get a giant pile of spam.

Ajax vs. Scope

2009-04-01T16:47:00.001-07:00

I don't have any April Fool's pranks for the Internet, so this is my piece of hilarity for the day -- my new cube decoration. Blame Target for selling the foam swords.

IA existential crisis...err, Summit

2009-03-31T17:38:00.001-07:00

The existential crisis

I have to admit that there was far more spirited discussion and angst at this year's IA Summit than I have ever seen (or would ever have expected) at a professional conference.

General themes: Big IA vs. Little IA; IAI vs. IXDA; big documentation vs. little documentation; and, of course, what does it mean to be an information architect?

There was a central thread to the discussion that felt very circular to me, and I futzed around in InDesign a bit to try to capture it:

It's probably healthy to discuss these things in public. I think some of the tone of the debate was concerning, though. And I'll admit I went to the sessions that were likely to prompt debate. Once a journalist, always a journalist -- I felt compelled to follow the story, and this was the story of this IA Summit.

Whether we call ourselves IAs or something else, many of us started in this career by categorizing and defining things. But our nebulous-by-nature career doesn't fit well into any one bucket.

We may never define IA. This debate is not going to change the fact that some of us are innies, and some of us are outies; some of us are agile, and some of us are waterfall; some of us need heavy documentation, and some of us can do light documentation; some of us have huge business constraints, and some of us have lots of freedom.

Everyone's reality is a little different. Eric Reiss put it best in his "House Divided" session: The true definition of IA is whatever you do.

In many ways my day-to-day responsibilities might better fall under the definition of interaction design or user experience design. But it doesn't bother me to be called an information architect, and when people outside of the industry ask me what I do, I tell them I help make the web site easier to use. I think any of the job titles you hear bandied about for what we do can be boiled down to that description.

All of the fuzzy-bounded disciplines, and their knowledge sources and conferences, are places to meet cool, smart people, and learn things that help me become better at my job. I think that's why most people go to the IA Summit. Those of us who go for those reasons, I think, could happily find ourselves at a 20th IA Summit, still getting the same benefits.

Hopefully by then the debate will have progressed.

The sessions themselves

I had a chance to see some really good sessions, and some of the best stayed completely above the whole IA debate. Some of my favorites:

"Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon" (Jared Spool) - Jared pulled out YEARS worth of Amazon.com screenshots in this presentation that was both highly entertaining and full of nuggets to make you think. The room was packed for this one and I hope everyone found it as worthwhile as I did.

"Strategies for Enabling UX to Play a More Strategic Role: What Will Work Where You Work?" (Richard I. Anderson and Craig Peters) - Some of the most important moments at the IA Summit are over lunch, dinner, or drinks, not in the sessions, and that makes me wonder why more sessions aren't structured like this one. We sat in round table groups, and led by the instructors, discussed UX's strategic role amongst ourselves. I really hope they do more sessions in this format in the future.

"ROI - Retaining Our Interest" (Eric Reiss) - Aside from the obvious entertainment value of a session that starts out with bloody mary sales, this one also had some important lessons. My main takeaway: sometimes proving your case is more about emotion than numbers.

"Unify Your Deliverables!" (Nathan Curtis) - We already use EightShapes' documentation system at Marriott, so I didn't learn as much from this session as I'm guessing others did. But I was still excited to see the new Unify system unveiled.

That's about all I've got. A slush pile of IA Summit and Memphis pictures and video are posted on Flickr.

Aw snap!

2009-03-25T12:58:00.001-07:00

I feel like "aw snap!" is already stale, but I still have to give Google Chrome credit for a much more awesome load error page than Internet Explorer will ever come out with.

Ode to my StationMasters map

2009-03-17T19:45:00.001-07:00

So this weekend I was in DC's Golden Triangle district, aka the Golden Carrie is Disoriented district, and needed to walk from a store near the red line stop where I'd gotten off to a non-connected orange line stop. Why these two stops, which are in one place only a block apart, aren't connected by a below-ground pedestrian walkway is a Metro mystery.

At any rate, I had to do a quick map check. One of the helpful Golden Triangle tourism people asked me if I needed help.

"Nope," I said. "I've got it."

And I really did, despite my very fuzzy sense of direction. When I first moved here, this might not have been the case. I was persistently coming out of Metro stations and heading in the wrong direction. But since then, I've discovered the StationMasters map.

If you've come to visit me since then, I probably gave you one. If I didn't, remind me next time. They are the best maps I've encountered for getting around a city because they actually orient you around the way you've been traveling -- by the subway.

Stations aren't marked as some median point on the map (I'm looking at you, Google Maps); instead, every exit is displayed, including the direction you'll be heading in when you make the exit. No more walking a block to discover you'd been heading towards 11th St instead of 9th and instantly marking yourself as lost bait. And each mini-map is oriented around an individual Metro station, which makes the map you need easy to find -- just flip to the Metro stop you used.

As an IA, I think this is a perfect use of information to help explain a physical space. But as a traveler, I mostly just wish StationMasters would take their excellent maps to other cities. They could start with Boston -- I'm heading there in May and sure I'll be walking the wrong way out of the subway without fail.

You can check out the Station Masters map here. They also sell them at the Metro Center Barnes & Noble (and probably other Barnes & Nobles in the area).

Whatever happened to the hamster dance?

2008-07-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

A co-worker and I got into a discussion the other day that somehow ranged into the hamster dance, which I can't say has crossed my mind in many, many years.

Out of curiosity, I went to hamsterdance.com to see what had become of one of the best pointless Internet phenomena ever. Gone is the tinny audio and goofy animated gifs. Instead it's all techno and merchandise. How sad. I went to the "Hamster Classics" section to see if I could find the old dance. But the original dance was definitely lacking the full cheesy audio. Even years later I can still remember there was far more to the song.

Attempts to find the original version via Google first led me to this technofied version which at least had the original gifs. A little further down in the results, though, were several versions of the original original. Pure, unadulterated, pointless hamster dance. Sometimes, that's just the way the Internet should be.

Bordering on creepy

2008-07-22T19:44:00.000-07:00

I got this email from World Market that I've been meaning to post for awhile. I'm pretty sure I wasn't signed in when I added the items to my cart, so I'm assuming I was in a remembered state.

I love personalization, but this is crossing the line. It made me feel like one of my fundamental rights as an ecommerce shopper -- to put something in my cart and then leave the site without hassle -- had been violated.

A friend and I were joking that the bricks and mortar equivalent of this would be for the sales associate to chase you out of the store, shouting, "Wait, are you sure you don't want that teapot you were looking at?!?" To me, that's very different than a sales associate or a web site knowing you and saying, "Hey, I know you buy a lot of tea. We just got these really great looking teapots in if you want to take a look."

Beyond the creepiness of it, it's so ambiguous it's not really serving its purpose. What did I put in my cart that's so great I should go complete the checkout process? Not that I'm advocating doing that, but somehow creepy and unhelpful is much worse than just plain creepy to me.

And "Dear Customer"? You know I have stuff left in my cart and you know my email address, but you can't be bothered to call me by my first name? So now on top of everything else, I'm also a little bit insulted.

Netflix profiles

2008-07-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

My favorite blog right now is The Consumerist, which features a nice combination of consumer news and customer service tales of woe.

One of the stories they covered this week was Netflix's decision to remove its customer profiles feature, presumably to help simplify the site and free up more room for new features. Profiles are used only by a small portion of Netflix users, so it seemed like a good decision.

The problem is, for that small portion of users, profiles were central to their Netflix experience. They allowed husbands and wives and kids to maintain separate queues within the same account, managing their DVDs independently. Enough of them wrote and called Netflix that the company reversed and is now keeping profiles.

Like many Consumerist posts, the comments are quite interesting. Kudos to Netflix for listening to customers. For the rest of us in the ecommerce world, it's a reminder that the numbers aren't the whole story when we're trying to evaluate whether a feature stays or goes.

GPS Luddite

2008-01-27T14:59:00.000-08:00

I love new web sites and gadgets. But the one thing I really haven't been able to get behind is GPS navigators. When I first moved to Rockville, MD, my parents loaned me their Magellan. I used it a little bit, and then I spent an extended period of driving, mildly panicked, around Potomac, while the Magellan attempted, unsuccessfully, to connect to the satellite. Eventually, I retraced my steps until I found the interstate, and thus am not still driving around Potomac, waiting for the thing to connect. The Magellan stayed in its bag until I gave it back to my parents.

Aside from the fact that it failed me miserably in Potomac, I didn't like the way I drove when it was attached to my windshield. I spent a lot of time watching the little Magellan screen that I should have spend watching the road, and a lot of time tensely waiting for the Magellan's next direction.

When my mom asked if I wanted a GPS navigator for Christmas, I said no (yes, I was quick to suggest a replacement gadget — an external hard drive — that I would actually use). I told her I was perfectly happy with Google Maps, which have never gotten me lost. I print the paper directions (admittedly, I am thinking about going to the mobile solution, to be a bit more green and flexible on the go), I reset the trip odometer at each intersection, and I watch the road the rest of the time.

Obviously, though, there are a lot of people out there who have really embraced GPS devices. It makes me think a bit more about this article, and whether my dislike of GPS devices has more to do with whether I flat-out don't like the technology, or I just don't like the way it works currently. If the "turn left in point five miles" voice spoke only when absolutely necessary, and there was no tantalizing screen of exactly-where-my-car-is-right-now to look at, I might be quicker to embrace it. Then again, what's the difference between that and my Google Maps directions, aside from a couple hundred bucks?

Oops

2008-01-22T20:46:00.000-08:00

I really feel like smoke should have come out of my computer or something to back this one up.

Three from the NYT

2008-01-21T20:02:00.000-08:00

Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike — The central premise is that as you get more knowledgeable, you get less innovative. The solution? Bring in people who don't have knowledge in your field. They'll have innovative ideas, and as you explain things to them, you will too.

The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace It? — What's the difference between the Picturephone and the Prius? People saw the Prius as being worth changing for.

Noontime Web Video Revitalizes Lunch at Desk — The trend: Videos and Web surfing over lunch.

"Over the Edge of the World"

2008-01-05T11:22:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine occasionally likes to bring up this debate: Has the pace of progress in our time been faster than in other times? Her contention is yes, and she has great arguments for why, but somehow in my gut, I've always felt that the answer is no.

While advances like personal computers, the World Wide Web, cell phones and GPS have been enormous, they have built on the knowledge and technologies of the past — and I don't think any of them looms any larger, for their time, than the invention of movable type, or the discovery of new lands.

I felt that way even before I read Laurence Bergreen's Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe.

Magellan's journey boggles the mind — when he set off, he didn't have an exact location for the strait that would allow him to cross into the Pacific, only a notion that it existed, somewhere. And when he finally reached the Pacific, no idea as to the vast size of that ocean, or how to find the Spice Islands after he sailed across it. In our era, it would have been the same as the Apollo astronauts saying, "we think the moon is up there, so we're going to set out and see if we can find it and land there, and then if we can, get back."

Magellan himself didn't live to see the Spice Islands, or to return to Spain. Only a fraction of his crew, and one of the five ships that had originally set out, actually completed the circumnavigation. But the ship, Victoria, was so laden with spices that the mission was a financial success, to say nothing of what it contributed to knowledge about the world.

This was the other element that amazed me — this daring expedition, which so many men lost their lives for, was all for what we take for granted in our chai lattes from Starbucks. This was, really, the birth of globalization, of global trade on the seas.

The book itself is a fascinating read, a tale of horror and discovery. But more importantly, it's a reminder of the proportion of our own advances. We build upon the accomplishments of those that come before us, and Magellan's journey was one of the largest ever.