CNCNews Ask Your Lawmaker website

As the elections in US heats up, I checked back on one of my last projects at Forum One, Ask Your Lawmaker (I was the lead information architect). It went live last November and it’s good to see it is finally gathering some steam.

Ask Your Lawmaker is a site created by Capitol News Connection (CNCNews) which supplies news of the goings-on in the US Congress to NPR news stations. As the instructions for the site suggests, the idea for the site is simple:

• You Ask. (Users submit questions to ask congresspersons and senators)
• You Vote. (Users collectively vote of which questions are worthy)
• We Get Answers. (CNCNews reporters track down the lawmakers and record answers, then post to the site)

It uses a Digg-like interface to encourage visitors to vote and filter which questions submitted by users, effectively using the wisdom of crowds to be the arbiter of quality.

What differentiates this site from the Digg’s of the online world is that this site has a physical component. The CNCNews reporters actually go out and accost lawmakers in the corridors of the US Capitol, waiting for them in various strategic locations, where they know they will be passing through. Armed with intimate knowledge of the architecture and how the lawmakers must be present in certain locations at certain times or events, the reporters are supreme hackers the Capitol for their single-minded purpose.

During a guided tour of the Capitol by one of CNCNews veteran reporters, I saw him spring into action interviewing a senator during a trip on the underground monorail that connects the Capitol with the adjacent administration buildings.

Ask Your Lawmaker supplies a valuable service that empowers the users (citizens of a democratic society) to supply the questions / question authority. We have seen citizens use YouTube to provide questions to presidential candidates. But what is often overlooked is that gathering quality information often takes a lot of effort.

Even in a digital world, we are still very much at the mercy of the physical world.

The news we read on BBC News or The New York Times are supplied by reporters who must go out and gather the information often risking their lives in the process.

We place orders on flower delivery sites, scanning numerous arrangements, comparing pricing and quality, finding that perfect bouquet of flowers for that special occasion and sweating over how to edit the delicate message down to the 200 letter limit as required by the site. But at the end of the day we still have to depend of underpaid part-timers for the final-yard delivery of our most intimate expressions of love.

AIA's America's Favorite Architecture website

The American Institute of Architects (aka the AIA), celebrating its 150th Anniversary, put together a website of America’s favorite architecture. The list was compiled by polling its members. The result is a collection of 150 buildings, bridges, monuments and memorials which users can vote on.

What’s nice is that they have added models to Google Earth, so user can see the location, and see the landmarks in 3D

My personal favorites? (from the list provided by the site)

1. Grand Central Terminal, New York
2. The Vietnam War Memorial, Washington DC
3. Brooklyn Bridge, New York
4. The Getty Center, Los Angeles
5. Seattle Public Library, Seattle

Of course, my selections are skewed towards building in New York that have personal significance and buildings I have actually visited.

One glaring omission in my opinion: National Gallery of Art‘s East Building, Washington DC, by I.M. Pei. This building is by far my favorite in Washington DC.

Go and vote!

I recently noticed traffic on this site looking for my Using Wireframes article (my most popular post to date) posted on my old, now-retired blog, strangesystems.net. The article provides an overview of what wireframes are (from a web design, information architecture point of view), some guidelines on how to create them and some Visio and Omigraffle templates and stencils.

I think the issue rose from the fact that at some point both strangesystems.net and strangesystems.com both mapped to this old site and people have links pointing to when strangesystems.com was strangesystems.net.

There were two versions of this article, the original and the revised. I provide here links to both.

Also worth mentioning is Scaled Visio Wireframes Stencils & Templates, one of many articles I wrote on the User Experience & Design blog while I was at Forum One Communications. This is more like a follow up to the Using Wireframes article, taking into consideration feedback from our developers who complained that wireframes are often misleading and hard to implement since they aren’t properly scaled.

Center for Global Development's CARMA website

CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action) is a project by the Center for Global Development that I was peripherally involved in at my old firm, Forum One Communications.

It recently came online and tracks the CO_² output of carbon emitting sources around the world. (Carbon dioxide being one of the causes global warming) It attempts to reveal who are the worse offenders in an effort that through public pressure and resulting market pressure (investors will be turned off by bad publicity) the offenders will clean up their act.

A case of information leading to action.

Data-driven personas

Todd Warfel has an inspiring presentation on persona creation. Go to the presentation on slideshare and view it full screen. In case you are wondering what those geen and blue lines are on his personas, here’s the answer.

Another of Todd’s persentations I enjoyed was, Goal Oriented Data Driven Design which incorporates parts of Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice in explaining design based on usability not capability.