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Matt's lookin' out fer ye. Posted on 08/07/2001.

Some great links to be found over at Matt's site. One points to an article, "Wayfinding is Not Signage," which points out that there is more to communication than just visuals, and also that the most important element to successful wayfinding is the construction of a space that makes sense in the first place. (This was reminiscent of Don's point (I forget in which book) about how explanatory signs posted on devices rarely help, and just show up the device's bad design.)

Matt also leads us (in a link he got from Lou) to Marti Hearst's chapter "User Interfaces and Visualization" in the forthcoming book Modern Information Retrieval. I'm a fan of Prof. Hearst's work, ever since reading her "Next Generation Web Search" article, which has a great introduction to metadata and multifaceted classification. She's the principal of a research project, FLAMENCO, attempting to design such metadata understanding into search interfaces.

2 comments so far. Add a comment.

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Comments:

COMMENT #1
I seem to recall an illustration of a telephone with voluminous instructions printed on its faceplate in POET.
Posted by jjg @ 08/07/2001 03:24 PM PST [link to this comment]


COMMENT #2
In case anyone missed it, here's an article I found interesting. It's not really about "wayfinding systems" themselves, but the politics of a small town committee on choosing someone to make them: Sign Committee, Council At Odds Over 'Wayfinding' Recommendation
Posted by Ben @ 08/08/2001 07:18 AM PST [link to this comment]


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