Etech – Peter Morville about Ambient Findability

Posted on March 7, 2006 under blog ,

A rather calm but still very interesting presentation and it has a lot more to do with what this conference is about. Some notes:

do provide multiple paths to the same information
not making choices but embrace the genius of the “and”
give people tasks to solve
people have a problem taking a step back to see the conceptual picture
Book recommendation Women Fire and dangerous things
the more we can bubble up the words, the better
do they care more about the precision or recall
improve performance through reducing the clutter
second used interface on a page after the homepage: the search result page
user experience honeycomb: usable useful desirable findable, accessible credible and in the middle valuable
you need at least a foot in the past and one in the future to design new things
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” Herbert Simon
when somebody wants to find our product, shouldn’t we enable them even more.
book recommendation: David Brin, The Transparent Society
he is interested in: how in this world of bigger and bigger haystacks do we create bigger needles?
visualization is cool but not really useful and will not solve the problem
Google maps is great but in the end we still will use the text
how about tracking behavior like how to get from point a to point b, so we could use this collective intelligence
who is going to help us? the revenge of the librarian! and it happens. people can shut up on meta data! meta data has become sexy!
let’s not throw out the old with the new
don’t throw out the tree altogether – take the new and leverage it over the long term, strike a balance
look at the flickr clustering – to him that just looks like hierarchy! :)