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I had the pleasure of listening to a talk with George Lakoff, introducing the concepts of his new book, The Political Mind. He argues that the political divide in the United States is not just about the usual arguments of money, power, social structure and history, but that that the ultimate source is in the brains of its citizens.

He goes on to explain the amazing new research has shown that much of our reasoning is unconscious. We all use frames, prototypes and metaphors to rationalize our ideas and decisions on a subconscious level. Previously it was thought that emotion stood in the way of reason, but it is quite the opposite. Emotion is required in order to be rational.

I was so inspired by Lakoff’s 60-minute talk that I immediately bought the book and began reading it as I waited in line for a personalized autograph. I hope to be able to use this book to gain a better understanding of how people make decisions and how we can use empathy, understanding and language to bring about new ideas and new perspectives. I look forward to finding interesting symmetries between his work with linguistics, cognitive science and political theory to the world of information architecture and user experience.

Be one of the first to get a sneak peek at the new Morae scheduled to release in Summer 2008. TechSmith will be demonstrating the interesting new capabilities that bring this usability testing software beyond just website testing. Come and check out Morae and UserVue and ask TechSmith all the questions you like.

For more information about the event: http://phillychi.acm.org/?p=69

To register for this FREE event:
http://upadelawarevalley.org/events/event_register.php?id=9

I will be off to the fantabulous 2008 IA Summit in Miami tomorrow! This is *the* yearly event for information architects. I’m soooo excited to see everyone and participate in some much needed and inspiring discussion about the world of information architecture, user experience, interaction design and usability.

My highly anticipated sessions include:

• IAs, language and lego - an introduction to semantic analysis with Matthew Hodgson
• Peer coaching: support for UX managers with Margaret Hanley
• The business of experience: the experience impact framework with Jess McMullin
• The long wow with Brandon Schauer
• Testing for advertising effectiveness with Margaret Hanley
• Making the leap from practitioner to manager: confidence building strategy and common pitfalls with Samantha Bailey (my mentor)
• Storytelling - a compelling design tool with Dorelle Rabinowitz
• Becoming and IA/UX coach: Proving success one champion at a time with Yvonne Shek
• Designing with patterns in the real world: Lessons from Yahoo and Comcast with Christian Crumlish and Austin Govella (my co-worker)
• Linkosophy (Closing Plenary) with Andrew Hinton

Can’t wait!

Please join us as for our PhillyCHI and IDSA Joint Happy Hour. Stop by, have a drink and see what fellow PhillyCHI and IDSA folks are up to.

Date: Thursday, April 17, 2008
Time: 5:30pm - 7:30pm
Location: The Black Sheep, 247 S 17th St (South of Locust St), Philadelphia, PA
RSVP: phillychi@gmail.com (not required, but nice)

About IDSA

The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) is the voice of the industrial design profession, advancing the quality and positive impact of design.

IDSA is dedicated to communicating the value of industrial design to society, business and government. IDSA provides leadership to and promotes dialog between practice and education. As a professional association, it serves its diverse membership by recognizing excellence, promoting the exchange of information and fostering innovation.

Date: Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Time: 6 - 8PM (social time from 6 - 6:30PM)
Location: Messagefirst
230 N 2nd St. Suite 2C
Philadelphia, PA 19106
(215) 825-7423
Map: http://tinyurl.com/yqsvqv
RSVP: Please help us plan & sign up at phillychi@gmail.com

About the Presentation
Any site with a search engine captures users’ search queries. This is real data that’s plentiful and inexpensive to acquire, and not necessarily difficult to analyze. Site search analytics tells you what users really want from your site—in their own words—and how well you’re meeting those needs. This session covers the basics of search analytics for web designers, showing how you can identify, diagnose, and fix major problems with your site’s content, metadata, navigation, and search functions.

About the Speaker
Louis Rosenfeld is founder of Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house focused on short, practical books on user experience design. As an information architecture consultant, he has helped numerous Fortune 500s and other large, messy, political enterprises make their information easier to find. Lou is co-author of “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” (O’Reilly & Associates; 3rd edition, 2006) and the forthcoming “Site Search Analytics: Conversations with Your Customers” (Rosenfeld Media, 2008). Lou co-founded the Information Architecture Institute and UXnet, the User
Experience Network. He blogs regularly at louisrosenfeld.com.

About Our Sponsor
Messagefirst is Philadelphia-based design research consulting firm. We work with companies to help them increase revenues, decrease costs, and ultimately improve the user experience of their products or services. Our goal-oriented data-driven design process improves performance and creates compelling experiences that solve business problems in a beautiful way. And unlike other consulting firms, we don’t just redesign products and service – we actually work with your
team to plan and implement the design solution.

To learn more about Messagefirst, please visit: http://www.messagefirst.com

I read on UX Magazine about AOL’s new beta home page. They were right. It looks surprisingly and embarrassingly like Yahoo’s. And for my visit, even the ads were identical. Check them out for yourself.

AOL Beta

Yahoo

I took the web design survey from A List Apart and you should too.

I took an online test to determine my creative problem solving profile. I leaned about this test from over at Todd Warfel’s blog.

An optimizer favors thinking abstractly and evaluation in problem solving. This person’s greatest interest lies in turning abstract ideas into practical solutions and plans. They do considerable ongoing “mental testing” of idea. An optimizer’s knowledge is organized in such a way that, through hypothetical-deductive reasoning, he/she can focus it on a specific problem. They are able to sort through large amounts of data and pinpoint “what’s wrong” in a given situation. Optimizers tend to be quite confident of their ability to make a sound, logical, evaluation and select the best option or solution for a problem.Optimizers are interested in Idea Evaluation and Selection and Action Planning.

See what you are.

Peter Merholz’s presentation on “Stop Designing Products” is music to my ears. It’s not news. I’ve been encountering this problem all over. To start designing for experiences and not products we need to be able to do is:

- understand people as people
- embrace and embed design approaches
- create and drive towards larger business strategies
- evolve our organizations to support these approaches
- embrace flexibility, adaptation and agile development
- contribute to and draw from the ecosystems of products and services already in use

My question is how do you evolve the organization to support these approaches?

Above points take directly from Peter Merholz’s slides.

A friend and colleague of mine has challenged me to come up the the communication/community tool to save the world. In preparation I’m doing a lot of research on how online communities and communication tools work today. I don’t usually get to mess around with this stuff so it’s a nice challenge. Right now, I’m trying to find out what all the hype is about on MySpace.com. Here’s my space :)