May 02, 2006

Card Sorting - The Book

A book in progress by Donna Maurer. Publisher: Rosenfeld Media. Anticipated publication date: January, 2007

Donna has been writing her weblog, DonnaM, since 2002, and is a Very Sharp Cookie. Donna says that many of the existing resources on card sorting don't answer the majority of questions practitioners face, so she's focusing on card sorting as a practical technique to be used in the design of information environments. As a practitioner who's had to learn most of what I know about card sorting by doing it, I love the focus she's got for this book, and I know Donna can pull it off.

If you have experience running card sorts, you might consider helping Donna by completing a survey on card sorting that she's running.

Donna has written a number of articles for Boxes and Arrows, including a "definitive guide on Card sorting".

Donna is also an active member of the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA), is a local ambassador for UXnet (the User Experience Network), and is very active in the IA Institute.

More Info: Rosenfeld Media - Card Sorting Book


Additional Card Sorting Resources:
- STC's Card Sorting Resource List
- Card Sorting at IAwiki
- Card sorting at iaslash

May 01, 2006

Online Photo Editor - A Lightweight PhotoShop Anywhere?
A new web application called Phixr (pronounced "fixer") is pretty slick. After playing with the online demo a bit, I'm impressed. You can do basic photo editing:
- resizing
- cropping
- red-eye removal
- rotating
- sharpening / blurring
- adding borders
- adding text
- and a number of other functions

What's impressive is it looks like the designers boiled photo editing down to the key 20% of functionality people need 80% of the time. The result is a nice, lightweight web app that does what many people need to do. It's also (for a photo editor) a pretty simple user interface - with nice previews of changes before they are executed, as well as undo and redo functions.

There are a number of improvements that can be made to the app, but it's still noteworthy as a rather simple photo editor, that's free, and requires no software installation.

Try out Phixr