Bruno Pinheiro

August 4, 2008 7:27 pm

categories:
Business, Design & Marketing, Information Architecture, Usability

ESPN Brasil lauched it new website last week. Only today I took notice of that, reading Silvia Melo’s post about it.

Despite the new audacious interface design (I’m not pretty sure about it’s efficiency), the central question is that it lacks the basic: content. After the first impression, when you start to use it, there’s no new offer. Taking Google as a benchmark for user navigation behavior seems to me a little misconception. A so hidden navigation menu is a rupture that I’m not sure people are ready to face.

The new ESPN Brasil Homepage. Audacious interface design, but is it efficient?

An internal page, built upon searching a pre-configured tag. Impressive, but lacks rich related content

The only thing that seemed to me an interesting feature is the related content ‘mind mapped’ at the end of the page, with the related tags represented with photos. That’s a cool navigation system I would like to study more deeply to check it efficiency. Choosing Tags as a central navigation system without a semantic tool or controlled vocabulary to support it is quite a risk. Specially when you have a very poor relation between the items (volley has only three related terms).

The mind map navigation system for the topic Volley

And there are some implementation problems. As you try to break the tag search, you may reach a page that has no picture to illustrate it, and you get the content left miles away from the top of the page.

A fragile URL building rule system makes the page miss the opening background image

At the end, the new ESPN Brasil website intends to use a (somehow) new user interface design, but fails on offering clear navigational paths. Using search is not as fluid as pointing and clicking, and putting all the bets on related tags doesn’t guarantee a flow. Nice work, good experiment, but still with lot to be improved.

May 19, 2008 12:13 am

categories:
Information Architecture, Technology

As I wrote before, I’m at the Semantic Technology Conference or SemTech2008 to simplify. The first day was only to align concepts and put everyone up to date of where we are.

Dave McComb, from Semantic Arts opened with a presentation basically highlighting the basic concepts that would be discussed along the event. Some are pretty old, like False positives and False negatives on search results, but the approach was obviously how semantic apps could help improving these questions. The shift from the web as we know is inevitable, due to the great amount of unstructured data is generating noise and it’s getting hard to work with the relational data model. Data must shift to Information, as information means knowledge. And some of the most recent efforts are on the Entity Extraction, with lots of tools for finding and associating entities found in text with concepts on ontologies. At the end, these information would allow the systems to make inferences and discoveries that wasn’t initially declared.

Ivan Herman, specialist from W3C on semantic web, made a broad presentation of what they’re focusing at the W3C, which are the discussions that are burning at the community and talked about some technologies that they are putting their bets on. As far as I saw, Dublin Core and FOAF are a common sense at the vocabulary level, as they appeared as good examples in both presentations and in every book about semantic. SPARQL is the Query Language that with RDF and WOL OWL seems to be under the spotlight now.

Ivan talked a little about an interesting project called the ‘Linking Open Data Project’, which Goal is to ‘expose open databases in RDF’, setting RDF links among data items from different databases and setting up SPARQL endpoints to query the data. The first practical project One of the projects of this initiative is the DBPedia: by extracting data from that “infobox” on wikipedia pages (right columm) from a City, for example, and integrating with the city information on the US Census database they can build a stronger an richer knowledge of that city.

At this elaboration stage there are still lots of issues, but these were the ones Ivan talked about: security, trust, provenance; ontology merging, alignment, term equivalences; Uncertainty. The most important for me were the ontology merging and uncertainty. The web as we know was build on sharing and linking documents. Now, on the Semantic wave the same concept must be applied. There’s no need to build a complete new ontology on geonames, for example. Just link to an existing and build one just for your own knowledge domain. I firmly agree with this vision.

But was we already know, documents published on the web are hard to control, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be there forever. A 404 result for a document search is no big deal, but when it comes to build an application based on an external ontology maintained for a third part that you have no relation, there’s a huge difference. That was an issue that I personally asked Ivan, and he said everybody is asking the same question, that’s a big problem that the W3C itself is worried about, but unfortunately there’s no light at the end of the tunnel yet.

Who’s gonna take care of the integrity of all these dependencies?

Ivan’s presentation for the SemTech2008 is available for download at the W3C website.

updated: Daniela Barbosa shared on her delicious some links from this first day.

May 15, 2008 5:45 pm

categories:
Information Architecture

Just a quick note… tomorrow I’ll fly to San Jose, California, to take part (as an atendee) of the SEMTECH - Semantic-Technology Conference 2008. I’ll see if I can post some notes about what I’ll see, but can’t guarantee that.

March 11, 2008 11:16 am

categories:
Design & Marketing, Information Architecture

This morning folks here at globo.com launched the new EGO, the celebrity news product. As part of the global redesign, the new version follows the same principles of the previous products upgrade (like g1 or the globo.com homepage) like simplicity, cleanness and interface grid, but brings a better information architecture with new navigation schema, very focused on themes and topics. There’s a demo tour that highlights the new features and improvements that surely worth the click. Congrats to all people involved, and there’s more to come!

March 10, 2008 2:41 pm

categories:
Information Architecture

Jorge Arango, Director of Events of the Information Architecture Institute, asked me to share this information with all the IA Community here in Brasil. So here it is:

The 2008 IA Summit will be held in Miami, Florida from 10-14 April. Miami is a major point of entry to the United States, which makes it a very convenient meeting point for many people traveling from abroad, especially those coming from Latin America.

The IA Institute has obtained a special discount with Copa Airlines of 20% of the airfare to Miami for registered Summit participants. To use the discount, passengers must go to their nearest Copa Airlines ticketing office and present discount code D01818, as well as proof of participation in the Summit (e.g. registration letter). The discount is valid for travel to Miami (and back) between 5-19 April, and cannot be applied on top of other promotions.

Carol Leslie has also posted a note about that:

Pensando em diminuir os custos de viagem para quem vai de longe ao IA Summit, o pessoal do IA Institute conseguiu um desconto de 20% nas passagens de avião via Copa Airlines. Funciona assim:

Para pedir o desconto você deve ir a um escritório da Copa Airlines e apresentar uma prova de inscrição no IA Summit e código de desconto D01818

O desconto vale para viagens de ida e volta a Miami entre 5 e 19 de abril.

The more we spread the word, the more people will have the chance to know it! Unfortunately I will not be able to go this year. Just have to wait and see if I can go in 2009!