Overview: Online Architecture

"How open source projects can balance Makers and Takers: lessons from Drupal's contribution credit system" by the founder of Drupal, in reaction to the Wordpress/WP Engine debacle, tackling "two key challenges that many open source projects face" and which could impede the development of opensource:"The imbalance betw…

how "Mastodon fits into the much larger concept of the Fediverse... visualisation ... many different use-cases and benefits of different services".Good intro to the Fediverse as a whole, plus the visualisation in png & pdf, and some Q&As covering multiple accounts ("a user preference"), Nextcloud (adding ActivityPub end…

4 ways Mastodon doesn't optimise for enragement.On Mastodon’s "home timeline... posts don’t have metrics ... you have to click through ... makes you judge a post first by its content, rather than the score attached to it... the whole dynamic [being "ratioed"] doesn’t exist... leads to more thoughtful engagement rather than ... …

A new app and protocol to give "people full control over their interest graphs ... there was no standard, decentralized repository for online media and its derivatives... culture that is readily available for anyone to annotate, remix, compile, create new editions of or link together in archives. Mediagraph [protocol] will let developers buil…

Marc-Antoine Parent's project: HyperKnowledge.

Via FotL I discover "Canonical Debate Lab (CDL)... researchers, developers, and system thinkers who have independently been working on collective intelligence systems for several years... goal is to aggregate contributions of diverse stakeholders into a unified information space, which can be accessed through multiple views... tailored to a s…

New Public "spent two years reviewing the literature and talked to over 100 experts from disciplines ranging from social psychology to urban planning about the qualities of flourishing public, or semi-public, spaces" for their Building better digital public spaces report. The goal: "to support engineers, designers and builders who w…

Systems with Design from Trust: assume most (not all) people have good intent."initially feel counterintuitive, even risky...social: they rely on human relationships. appealing: once you wrap your head around them, you want more."The discomfort is a symptom of how today's default setting is mistrust: "we’ve internalized the ass…

Good starting point on pattern languages, ends with useful links.As a definition of what a pattern is: "a proven solution to a problem in a context. Each one documents a reusable solution, encapsulates knowledge about successful practices, and provides information about its usefulness and tradeoffs... Connected sets of interrelated patterns …

An interactive knowledge visualisation providing a graphical overview of interrelated online concepts, edited dynamically with an Excel file. Featuring an accessible version driven by the same content.

We've tweaked the navigation phrase so that the default is to show "All the" resources on your home page, rather than just "The Best". More tweaks are on the way.

Having fun using Andy Matuschak's wonderful site to explore his innovative ideas on note-taking, zettelkasten, writing, etc. This link opens a number of his interrelated notes, displayed horizontally using his innovative 'stacked notes' information architecture.Key ideas from this stack:the importance of 'task division' in…

Andy Matuschak's working notes "are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment... But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment ... [see] Work with the garage door up... Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience)... there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some start…

"User friction ... prevents a user from accomplishing a goal in your product... three levels: interaction friction, cognitive friction, and emotional friction"Interaction friction: do usability testing."When cognitive load is high ... there is significant cognitive friction ... encompasses all aspects of the experience that result …

Approach to visualising Wikipedia category pages and their interconnections.

Privacy Zuckering... when “you are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to... Facebook... paid a $5 billion fine for making “deceptive claims about consumers’ ability to control the privacy of their personal data.” ... “dark patterns,” ... particularly insidious “when you’re deciding what privac…

how Roam’s first prophet organizes his life... I think of Roam as a low friction database oriented around tying ideas together over time... other note-taking app... work kind of like a filing cabinet... each project I do gets its own page in Roam... at least two tags to it: #Projects... #Active ... I’m actively working on it... automatically …

There are about 175 known cognitive biases to date. I will share some of the ones that I think are the most significant for designers... It is important that we not learn about biases to simply point out errors in others... we [need] to spot errors in our own thinking ...confirmation bias ... conservatism bias ... [influence us] to select and use …

to investigate ... notion that websites are starting to look the same ... data mining ... scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites... of the Russell 1000, the top U.S. businesses by market capitalization ... Alexa’s 500 most trafficked sites... sites nominated for Webby Awards ... how many pixel-by-pixel edits ... to transform colo…

If you’re a User Researcher ... Baymard can probably provide you some value ... an “independent web usability research institute”... founded on the central thesis that design decisions are often made subjectively ... a more evidence-based approach is possible...Baymard sells research ... based on tens of thousands of hours of their own in-house us…

In this era... design was the product. Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design, and all the design looked the same... Ever since modernism brought industry into design, tastes have cycled ... A forward-looking, high-tech style obsessed with mass commercial appeal ... to one that’s backward-looking, handmade, authenticity-obsessed…

Our scientists are publishing sophisticated data visualisations for policymakers to use. But are policymakers using them? ... I interview Annie White and Nil Tuzcu of Harvard’s Growth Lab about their use of data visualisations for policymaking... summarise the resulting guidance we’re giving Knowledge4Policy publishers.

Most cookie consent pop-ups ... are likely to be flouting regional privacy laws... another piece of research ... also concluded a majority of ... cookie notices offer no meaningful choice to Europe’s Internet users — even though EU law requires one...if it’s configured to contain pre-ticked boxes that opt users into sharing data by default — requi…

Some sites are a victim of their own initial success. A decade after launching, an EC community platform was struggling to remain relevant. Over the intervening years it had offered a flexible, powerful publishing solution to many different parts of the EC...

some practical tips on how to carry out moderated think-aloud usability testing. It’s based on what I’ve learnt from academic research and from practical experience, both inside and outside government.

free online ratings are less trustworthy than those that have some cost to them... In ecology, costly signaling theory argues that displays that “cost” more — like elaborate peacock tails, or strenuous displays of hunger from baby birds — are more likely to reflect reality... making rating goods or services as easy as possible... is counterproduct…

show how the nature of diversity in our urban areas around the world has been changing over the past few decades... the use of sentences in data visualization is one of my favorite things. You’re adjusting a sentence using these dropdowns, which gives it a narrative component and tells you some really basic things... there’s no reason to not use t…

We’re about to start testing new online designs to make scientific evidence more accessible to policymakers. Volunteers needed! - recruiting wireframe testers via K4P

the primary battle many Content Strategists fight every day... While the boarding pass was the single most important thing to the passenger... it seemed to be the least important thing to the airline. The passenger became more frustrated with the airline with each passing offer and informational screen thrust in their way... We need to shift our …

novelty and newness of these teams has worn off... growing acceptance ... that these teams are useful tool in driving new practices ... Less clear... is whether these units can enable the deeper digital transformation... ~ two key pieces of the puzzle: ... creating common platforms to power governments services is key to digital transformation o…