pbwiki says that “making a free wiki is as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich.” Their recent step in updating their web editor is a step in the right direction for the wiki community. It’s still a nerdy little application but it demonstrates a few people thinking about the right things. pbwiki is worth a try for those just getting acquainted with the power of the wiki and is much easier to start than most. pbwiki is a hosted application but seems to have some horsepower. Looks like we can even add our own css.

Newsflash: Just as I was about to hit the submit button, I saw the post on the pbwiki blog about raising a couple of million bucks. Now we gotta sharpen our pencils and submit our wish list. Maybe now someone can de-nerdify wikis and make them work for my dad (a metaphor I use to relate to communications and technologies that need to pass the usability barometer….if they can be used by my dad, then they have a fighting chance!(I love my dad, but he’s not ready for most wikis yet))

Great work by the pbwiki team on this. And, by the way, the “nerdy” comment is a sincere compliment. Respect…

Managing expectations through the creative process of presenting online concepts can be tricky if you don’t think carefully through the objectives you want to achieve. To create communications that excite users while providing meaningful business benefit, we have to carefully control what we put in front of users and when. I love how this article talks about something we believe in. The design process is to be handled carefully, where we provide incremental thoughts and executions making sure the building blocks of what we are trying to communicate are solid. Great read on “Don’t make the Demo look Done…”

Good article on page description diagrams (PDD’s). A process we like here at RD2…

“The page description diagram is a tool to allow designers and information architects to stay comfortably within their own realms without compromising communication.�

Where the Wireframes Are: Special Deliverable #3

Andy made a great post today that was very timely. It seems this post perfectly addresses the question of the past several weeks for me where people we work with are asking the questions about getting started and how to plant content. Andy hits this one between the eyes on how the lines could easily begin to blur between the independent blogger as a medium at risk or possibly on the brink of transformation. I am planting this one in the nostalgia files, tagging it, putting it on our wiki, seeding it in Technorati, and categorizing it. Excellent!

Oftentimes, we will need to design and even develop for unknown content. Maybe a client has a copywriter that is still in the process of producing the content. Maybe the project is a blog that will have regular content additions or a white paper template. When this happens, designers and developers do what we’ve been trained to do; reach for lorem ipsum.

Lorem ipsum, originally uploaded by missha

So what’s the big deal? Why am I picking on the placeholder text that has been used for over 400 years? The problem is not with the text itself; in fact, it excels at shifting the focus from content to presentation. The problem is that it only represents a single type of content, the paragraph.

Writing good content isn’t easy; a challenge that is only exacerbated by the hyperlinked nature of the web. What does good content look like? Good content is varied and rich, like the content on LogLogic’s site. Rich content is written using element beyond paragraphs such as bulleted lists, numbered lists, glossary lists, hyperlinks, emphasis, citations, quotations, pictures, pull-quotes, and data tables. Lorem ipsum, as-is, neither explores the design of these elements nor encourages their use.

Anyone familiar with markup semantics will recognize that most of the above list is represented in HTML as various elements. That’s not simply because I think in markup semantics; it’s because the goal of HTML isn’t to create web pages, but to create hyperlinked documents with rich content.

In case you couldn’t already tell, I’m advocating putting together new standardized dummy text, a richer dummy text, “Lorem Ipsum 2.0” if you must. Content changes and the design and implementation should be ready for it. We’d love to get some input on the format this should take, or better yet, even invoke the lazyweb. After all, the results should end up being creative commons licensed. We, the industry, need to get started on this right away; we at RD2 will be.

I am always impressed when working with the team on the Verizon SuperPages “Advertise With Us” site. They are very consumer focused, taking every large move they make into user testing to ensure that their product works for the maximum audience.

When Verizon SuperPages released a new marketing style guide with a new color palette, it was time to refresh Advertise With Us and add additional focus on new product areas.

RD2 came in to provide Information Architecture and Design support to the team. After assessing the requirements for the various pages, looking at competitors and other market leaders, and creating the IA plan, our design team set to work. Our approach is typically to have all of our designers take a shot at creating a design with little outside influence other than what is provided in the creative brief and business strategy. Their only requirement: work the new Verizon SuperPages green into the piece. The result of that exercise was eight unique designs that we presented to Verizon.

Here’s where my respect for the team at Verizon went up even more. They picked four of the eight designs and said, “We’ll let the users choose the design from these.”

Let the users choose.

We took the four designs into a quick user testing scenario, where several people were shown the designs and asked to choose their favorite overall and pick and choose their favorite elements from each design. Almost overwhelmingly, the users gravitated to the design that ultimately became the new Advertise With Us site.

The implementation of the new site is a great example of not only doing it well, but doing it right. In our business, we have to approach design scientifically. Research and user testing enable us to do that. When a site is made with the user in mind, a company will mazimize the reach and impact of their message.