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Boxes and Arrows just published Enhancing Dashboard Value and User Experience, part 5 of the building blocks series that’s been running since last year. This installment covers how to include high-value social and conversational capabilities into portal experiences built on top of architectures managed with the building blocks. Enhancing Dashboard Value and User Experience also provides an explicit user experience vision for portals, metadata and user interface recommendations, and as tips on making portals easier to use and manage / administrate.

Thanks again to all the good people who volunteer their time to make Boxes and Arrows such a high quality publication!

Thanks to Facebook’s public mistakes and apology to those affected by Beacon , as well as a number of other ham-handed attempts to monetize the social graph, the intersection of ethics, design, and social networks is receiving overdue attention. Two talks at this year’s Information Architecture Summit in Miami will look at ethics as it applies to the daily work of creating social networks, and user experiences in general.

First is Designing for the social: Avoiding anti-social networks, by Miles Rochford, description below.

This presentation considers the role of traditional social networks and the role of IAs in addressing the challenges that arise when designing and using online social networks.

The presentation discusses philosophical approaches to sharing the self, how this relates to offline social networks and human interactions in different contexts, and provides guidance on how online social networking tools can be designed to support these relationships.

It also covers ethical issues, including privacy, and how these can conflict with business needs. A range of examples illustrate the impact of these drivers and how design decisions can lead to the creation of anti-social networks.

Related: the social networks anti-patterns list from the microformats.org wiki.

The second is The impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design – experiences from the Norwegian woods, by Karl Yohan Saeth and Ingrid Tofte, described as follows:

This presentation discusses ethics in IA from a practical point of view. Through different case studies we illustrate the impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design, and sum up our experiences on dealing with ethics in real projects.

If you’re interested in ethics and the practicalities of user experience (and who isn’t?), both sessions look good. I’ll be talking about other things at the summit this year. In the meantime, stay tuned for the second article in my UXMatters series on designing ethical experiences, due for publication very soon.

Quick update on spring conferences: I’m speaking at Blogtalk 2008 in Cork (Ireland) February , and the 2008 IA Summit in Miami (SOBE – it’s sort of the US, but not entirely…) in April. This is my first Blogtalk conference! I’m looking forward to meeting some new people and getting closer to the social software community.

At Blogtalk, my session is titled “The DIY Future: What Happens When Everyone Designs Social Media? Practical suggestions for handling new ethical dilemmas”

Here’s an excerpt of the description:

Both traditional design professionals, and the growing ranks of DIY designers, must be prepared to address the increased ethical complexity of the integrated experiences of the future. This presentation will share practical suggestions for the design and architecture of ethically sound social media using familiar experience design methods and techniques.

Full details for the session and the rest of the program are available at the Blogtalk site. I’m following Salim Ismail’s opening keynote. (Note to organizers: No pressure in that at all, thanks…)

At the IA Summit, my session is “Effective IA For Enterprise Portals: The Building Blocks Design Framework”. If you’ve been reading the series of articles on the building block in Boxes and Arrows, the talk will tie in nicely. If you’re new to the building blocks or they’re outside your problem space, consider this a great look at a design framework in action.

Here’s an excerpt of the description:

Portal design efforts often quickly come to a point where their initial information architecture is unable to effectively accommodate change and growth in types of users, content, or functionality, thereby lowering the quality of the overall user experience. This case study style presentation will demonstrate how a framework of standardized information architecture building blocks solved these recurring problems of growth and change for a series of business intelligence and enterprise application portals.

Full details for the session are available from the IA Summit website.

Both conferences look good. Make sure to say hello in the hallway!

Boxes and Arrows just published Part 4 of the Building Blocks series, Connectors for Dashboards and Portals.

We’re into the home stretch of the series – just two more to go!
Stay tuned for a downloadable toolkit to support easy use of the building blocks during design efforts.

I’m excited to be speaking at the Italian IA Summit 2007, in Trento Italy, November 16th and 17th. Organized by Alberto Mucignat, Emanuele Quintarelli, Andrea Resmini, Luca Rosati and many others, this is the second Italian IA Summit. It’s great that so many events like the German IA conference, the EuroIA Summit, and OZ-IA related to design, information architecture, and user experience, are happening around the world.

The program is posted (in Italian). My closing keynote is Saturday, right before five-minute-madness, which allows plenty of time for a long and leisurely afternoon lunch following the conference.

Hope to see you there!

All (well, almost all) of the EuroIA Summit presentations and proceedings are available online now. If you couldn’t make the conference, then definitely take advantage of this great material.

View the presentations here.

Download the proceedings here.

Jumpchart – the online sitemap service – is about to move from beta to subscription pricing.
Anyone who like to try it out, or who wants 3 free months of service should drop me a line to get an invite code.
Good luck to the Jumpchart team!

Related posts:

My presentation slides from the Ethics Panel at EuroIA 2007 – titled Designing Ethically – Communicating Conflict: Design For the Integrated Experiences of the Future – are available from Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/moJoe. Ethics was a challenging and fascinating subject to take on, and it prompted some great discussion with the audience (even at 7pm, after a full day of sessions…)

Many thanks to fellow panelists Olly Wright and Thom Froehlich, and all who planned, organized, attended, spoke, volunteered, or otherwise contributed to EuroIA 2007. As you can see from the flickr photostream, it was worth the trip to Barcelona! I’m already looking forward to next year’s event in Amsterdam.

Here’s a quick description of the presentation:

“What does the future of design hold? Greater ethical challenges. In the coming world of integrated experiences, design will face increasing ethical dilemmas born of the conflicts between broader, diverse groups of users in social media; new hybrids such as the SPIME which bridges the physical and virtual environments simultaneously, and the DIY shift that changes the role of designers from creators of elegant point solutions, to the authors of elegant systems and frameworks used by others for their own expressive and functional purposes. To better prepare designers for the increased complexity, connectedness, and awareness included in the coming future, here are some practical suggestions for easily addressing conflict during the design of integrated experiences, by using known and familiar experience design methods and techniques.”

Boxes and Arrows has published part 3 of the Building Blocks series, describing the Container blocks in detail. Next in the series is part 4, which describes the Connectors in the building block system in detail.

If you’re working on a portal, dashboard, or tile based design effort of any kind, the building blocks readily serve as a common language and structural reference point that allows effective project communication across traditional discipline boundaries. These two articles in tandem (parts 3 and 4) provide details on how the Building Blocks can provide a strong, flexible, and scalable usr experience and information architecture framework for the long term.

My current plan is to release a toolkit at approximately the same time as part 4 of the series. Part 4 is in the editing stage now, so this a good time to ask readers for suggestions on what should be part of the toolkit, and what form it should take. Suggestions?