Hey Everyone,
Man, today I am posting a lot of stuff that isnt characteristic of what I usually post, but I have been excited by a few things and want to get this online and commit to it because once I say I am going to do something in public like this, I am sure I will.
I saw a really cool IA documentation technique used today. Instead of the traditional treeview Site Map, this looked like a solar system. It was colorful and very easy to look at. I asked the Designer if there was meaning behind the orbital lines, and she said that there was a relationship there for sure, but had trouble articulating it further.
We spoke at length and it turns out that we were able to fashion a Site Map that had at it’s center (the Sun position of the solar system) the homepage. It is a MOSS site, so this was the MySite. Orbits around the MySite bisect “bodies” (pages/planets) with an interface on the MySite, but functionality off of the page in some intermediary realm – usually in it’s own page or in a page designed in a dashboard-like fashion.
It strikes me now that I could visually document WS calls this way as well. Just for kicks. And many times, clients and non-techie folks can understand things that they sort of recognize better than things that look completely new, like UML State Machine Diagrams. Those are not easily leveraged to instill confidence. More often, they instill a sense of foreboding.
I want to post what we came up with, but I am sure that it would break some sort of confidentiality agreement. Instead, I am going to mock one up and post it for comments. Maybe this has been done before? Maybe it hasn’t. I very much enjoy learning from people who read my blog and being told when I have something wrong… but I like it when people email me and say that they used a template or applied something that I wrote about just as much.
I will upload this soon. Maybe tonight. I have to draw it first and there are many tasks between here and there. Life is pretty crazy for me now but should calm down a bit within the next few days.
I apologize for the gossipy Microsoft Buys Facebook post. Even though it still might be true. I dont like to gossip, but I love the concepts behind Social Networking and the new iteration of web technologies.
Thanks again,
Josh Milane