Jackson Fox’s Weblog

My first blog post on the Viget Advance strategy blog is live!

• Initial Impressions of Silverback

This Monday marks my last week as a designer at Lulu.com. I’ve been there about 3.5 years — including the time I spent doing work-study as part of my master’s degree — and I’ve had a fantastic time. I’ve had the chance to work on virtually every corner of the site at one time or another, and I’ve worked on a few pieces more times than I can count. I’ve been lucky to work with a pretty great group of designers and developers, and I’ve learned an amazing amount in working with them. It’s been a really hard decision to leave — I think Lulu has a pretty bright future — but I’m pretty excited about what’s next.

In July, I’ll be joining Viget Labs as a User Experience Designer at “Viget South” in downtown Durham. But before that happens, I’ll be taking two weeks off to recharge my brain, including a trip out to California to see my brother before he moves to Australia.

Download High-Resolution PDF (612KB)

This is the poster Alla Zollers and I presented at the 2008 IA Summit.

Abstract

Tag clouds are becoming increasingly popular with websites that utilize social tagging to categorize ever expanding collections of digital information. Tagging has been found to be more adaptable than traditional classification, as well as more prone to serendipitous information discovery. The flexibility of tagging systems allows users to rapidly adopt new terms and engage in extremely dynamic tagging practices, yet tag clouds are not able to represent agile shifts in tagging patterns. Over time, semantic and linguistic changes can modify the meaning and form of tags, and changes in tagging behavior can create disconnects between related tags. By conceiving tagging as a triad: object, user, tag, we completely miss the critical notion of time. Time leads to changes in semantics, vocabulary, behavior, and syntax. In order to address the problem of aging tags and aging folksonomies, we really need to include time as a critical facet of tagging: object, user, tag, time. The adaptive behavior of tags requires that there is a constant influx of new descriptive data about an object, but time-related changes have to overcome the weight of the pre-existing tags. In this poster we propose a new tag-cloud visualization technique that attempts to address these issues by including a dynamic factor: the changing weight of tags over time.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally got around to making a stencil of little people to use at work.

Download OmniGraffle People Stencil

To Install: Copy the stencil file into /Users/username/Library/Application Support/OmniGraffle/Stencils/

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Slides from my presentation on Research Driven Design at the DC Design Talks at the Viget Labs HQ in Falls Church, VA.

So, while I might be pretty awful at posting here, here, or here, I’ve started posting over on the official Lulu blog. My first two posts focus on some of the widgets I helped build while with the community team at Lulu:

• Customizing the Lulu Mini-Storefront with CSS
• Meet the Lulu Mini-Storefront Widgets

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Slides from my presentation on remote usability tools (UserVue and Ethnio) at the last TriUPA event of 2007.

Note: Since I gave this presentation, Ethnio has re-launched focusing on live recruiting. While Ethnio doesn’t really facilitate remote usability tests anymore, it’s a very nice complement to tools like UserVue.

I gave a talk last week at the inaugural meeting of Refresh the Triangle called “Building User-Centered Web Apps in a Crunch.” The main part of talk was based on Jakob Nielsen’s “Guerilla HCI” ideas, with a sprinkling of ideas from the Agile UCD movement. It was, more or less, my first public speaking gig, and I don’t think it was too bad. I need to talk a bit slower, and I could probably do better than this for a closing statement:

So, um, yeah. That’s it… Thanks!

The slides are online on Slideshare:

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You can also check out photos from the event on Flickr.

I realized after the fact that my slides don’t stand well on their own, so I though I would share some resources and references I used in compiling everything. So, I’m putting together a page over on Jottit with notes on the talk.

Khoi Vinh:

There’s also another, more formal idea at work on A Brief Message: the notion that online publications don’t necessarily need to be decorated databases. They can be art directed, too.

This past week Liz Danzico and Khoi Vinh launched a much lauded new site called A Brief Message. The goal of the site, as stated on the about page, is as follows:

A Brief Message features design opinions expressed in short form. Somewhere between critiques and manifestos, between wordy and skimpy, Brief Messages are viewpoints on design in the real world. They’re pithy, provocative and short — 200 words or less.

As one would expect from a site founded by designers, written by designers, and featuring writing about design, A Brief Message is well illustrated, impeccably typeset, follows all of the modern thinking on grid-based web design, and even features tasteful ads from The Deck. The first piece touches on a subject near and dear to the hearts of many designers: The Death of Print. Honestly, I feel somewhat unworthy of writing about the site. I find myself pondering every punctuation mark and scrutinizing every sentence a dozen times.

The problem is that I don’t feel welcome at A Brief Message. I don’t mean to say that I feel unwelcome at just this site, in fact I feel the same way about Design Observer and many other design-oriented sites. Nor do I mean to imply that the individuals that write, run, and comment at A Brief Message make me feel unwelcome. I feel unwelcome because I don’t understand their Design. It simply isn’t my design.

Recently, I’ve noticed a marked change in the language that is used on the websites that I frequent. “Art direction” seems to be popping up everywhere now, names like Michael Beirut are getting dropped, and everyone seems to be a member or leader in AIGA. Maybe it really isn’t the discourse that has changed, maybe it’s me, but I’m finding it harder and harder to relate. I have never worked for an “agency.” I did not go to design school. In fact, I majored in Computer Science. What I know of typography, color, and grids I learned from the web (much of it from Khoi’ s blog).

I consider myself to be a designer. I have called myself a web designer, a user experience designer, and an interaction designer, but regardless of how I couch the term I consider myself a designer. My job is to create a pleasurable and usable experience for our authors. I spend a lot of time creating page flows, wireframes, reviewing alternative designs, collecting feedback on designs, and then communicating the sum of those parts to our development team. I work for a smallish company, so I get to do my fair share of coding as well. Honestly, I’ve come to dislike the term design because it is so hard to define and because it belongs to so many traditions (old and new).

I don’t see my experience reflected in design writing online. Most likely I’m looking in the wrong places, expecting too much from people who have no obligation to conform their views to my own. It’s just that I don’t feel like it’s always been this way.

Of course, if I so rarely contribute to the discussion, how can I expect others to?

PS — My apologies to Khoi and Liz, A Brief Message is a wonderful site and it’s unfair of me to single it out like this.

PPS — This was probably the wrong time to ditch my old theme and revert to the Wordpress default.

I decided to jump on a bunch of bandwagons all at the same time, so I updated my homepage using jQuery for some amazing (stupid) animations and hCard to embed my contact info in to the page. Check out the site for yourself, or convert the hCard to vCard.