Checking Your Calendar and Talking on the iPhone at the Same Time

Palm Pre

I was watching a demo of the Palm Pre which shows multitasking features and really great “Synergy” which allows you to check all your email in one place or view all of your contact information from one place and much more.  See: Palm Pre Video.

iPhone Calendar

With my iPhone I can talk on the phone and check my calendar at the same time.  BUT it’s hard because I can’t hear the person talking to me very well when I’m looking at the calendar.

Apple- can you please make the volume higher on the iPhone?

Using Search Keywords to Help Determine Site Architecture

Visit Eric Enge’s post How Keywords Help Determine Site Architecture to see how to use search engine keywords and their popularity to help organize information on a website. 

Organizing Web Content à la Moreville & Rosenfeld

In “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” Moreville & Rosenfeld list the following organization schemes that are used to organize website content:

Exact Organization Schemes

• Alphabetical
• Chronological
• Geographical

Organizing your information this way makes it fairly easy to decide which category your item or topic belongs in, but it does require that the users know the name of what they are looking for.

Ambiguous Organization Schemes

• Topic
• Task
• Audience
• Metaphor
• Hybrids

Since items are grouped in meaningful ways, these ambiguous schemes can be more useful to the user that does not know exactly what they are looking for.

These organization schemes are applied to organization of information in websites.

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It is interesting to compare this list with another list I cited earlier in this blog that I applied to ordering items in a list.

From an IXDA post by Chauncey Wilson’s which cites Deborah Mayhew’s book “Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design“.

Here’s a list of common ordering schemes:

• Alphabetical
• Task order
• Frequency
• Numerical (font size)
• De facto standard
• Legal order
• Complexity (simple to hard)
• Semantic similarity
• First-in, first out

Giving LJVCC Individualized Style

Challenge

The La Jolla Village Community Council is a group of neighbors who have been active in improving their neighborhood since 1989.  With all the development in the area surrounding UCSD, the La Jolla Village community has been instrumental in insuring that residents of the area meet and have a voice in what happens to their neighborhood.

LJVCC Neighborhood Link Page

The free service they use for their “website” http://neighborhoodlink.com/sandiego/ljvca/ contains their content, but when you are logged into the website, it’s hard to tell what website you are on and it’s hard to find the key content because there are too many ads and extraneous links.

Approach

I made the following recommendations to the group:

1. Investigate other ways to share the LJVCC info on the web that are also free.
2. Conduct competitive analysis to see what works for other neighborhood groups.
3. Organize Content and make it clear what the LJVCC has to offer.
4. Suggest using graphics that represent this particular area in North La Jolla.
5. Create and use a prototype page.

Results

A new La Jolla Village Community Council website was created.

LJVCC  “About Us” Page

A WordPress blog was used to host the website. WordPress allows graphics and videos. It also allows up to 35 contributors and allows editors to approve comments posted on the site.  Although it is free and simple to use, it doesn’t display ads on the pages.

Tabs were created for the following key content: About LJVCC, Meeting Announcements, & Newsletters.

LJVCC  “Next Meeting” Page

More content can be added at any time at the discretion of the blogs editors such as LJVCC board member contact Information, Regional Development Planning Reports, LJVCC’s History and past accomplishments, Local Links, Membership Signup Form and Newsletter Archives