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James Kalbach
Areas of Expertise:
  • experience design
  • information architecture
  • usability
  • interaction design
  • speaking
  • writing

Biography

James Kalbach has a degree in library science from Rutgers University, as well as a master's in music theory and composition. He is currently a User Experience Designer with LexisNexis and previously served as head of information architecture with Razorfish Germany. He is an active speaker and author on information architecture and usability in Germany, where he helped co-found an IA community.

Books

Blog

James's blog posts are hosted at:
http://experiencinginformation.wordpress.com/

Designing Web Navigation in Electronic Format

July 16 2008

O’Reilly just annouced the distribution of 30 titles in e-book format. Designing Web Navigation is among them. I don’t have a copy yet, but am really interesting in seenig how it looks as an e-book. Also, for reason I couldn’t install the Adobe e-book reader (Digital Editions) on my work computer.… read more

Designing Web Navigation auf deutsch

July 08 2008

Designing Web Navigation is now available in German under the name Handbuch der Web-Navigation.  Apart from a different cover (without an O’Reilly animal) and a few updated screenshots, the content and flow of the book is the same. Thanks to Michael Gerth for his very thorough translation of the text. I… read more

The Taxonomy and Folksonomy Cookbook

June 27 2008

Daniela Barbosa put together The Taxonomy and Folksonomy Cookbook, which available for a free download. It’s fairly basic, but makes some really good arguments and points about taxonomies and folksonomies. The writing is direct and very accessible–more for non-professionals. But if you’re trying to put together arguments for and against taxonomies… read more

Split Tab-Dynamic Menu Navigation

June 21 2008

This isn’t an earth shattering observation, and you’ve probably already seen this, but I just wanted to point out a navigation technique that seems to be spreading around quite a bit. I’m calling the “split tab-dynamic menu navigation.” Basically, there is both a tab (or main navigation link) and a dynamic… read more

People Notice More When Browsing

June 11 2008

There is an interesting study from the folks at SURL this month. See “Eye Movement Patterns on Single and Dual-Column Web Pages” by Sav Shrestha & Justin W. Owens. The focus of the study is on eye fixation patterns of 1-column versus 2-column text layouts. I’m not a huge fan of… read more

Book Review: Subject To Change

May 12 2008

Subject To Change, by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba, and Todd Wilkens (Adaptive Paths), O’Reilly, 2008 In 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger formulated their 95 theses into what became the Cluetrain Manifesto, which was then published as a book i read more

Navigation Menu Trends

May 11 2008

A few months ago there was an interesting story in Smashing magazine that spotted some new trends in web navigation menus. By and large, the trends identified are seen from a visual design standpoint, including some style trends. I’ve been noticing two other navigation mechanisms and styles that seem to gaining… read more

Search Radar

May 01 2008

Around 1980 Nicholas Belkin proposed a new model for understanding information seeking, called ASK: Anomalous States of Knowledge. (See Part 1 and Part 11 of this landmark article). A key tenant of this model is that information needs are difficult to precisely expressed. Seekers, sometimes even experts in a given… read more

GapCasts - Information Visualizations

March 02 2008

I previously blogged about Gapminder and Hans Roslings talk at TED demonstrating this tool. I learned that you can see more eye-opening visualizations on a regular basis with GapCasts, a video blog from Hans and Co. These short videos really show the potential power of information visualizations in enhancing understanding. One… read more

PreCYdent Legal Search

February 23 2008

Just got wind of a relatively new open web legal called PreCYdent. Their mission is clear: “PreCYdent is based on two fundamental principles. First, we at PreCYdent believe that all lawyers, law librarians, law students, and the general public should have access to state-of-the-art search technology to help them navigate through… read more

Managed Q Search

February 11 2008

Just came across Managed Q, a search application the inventors describe as “dedicated to helping you manage your entire Search Experience: from the keyword, to results, to previewing, to refinement and repeating with a new query.” The entity extraction around person, place, and thing seems fairly good. But I’m particularly interested… read more

Better Than Free

February 07 2008

Kevin Kelly has a very interesting post in his book in progress The Technium. Victor tipped me off to this (thanks Victor). Check out Better Than Free. The internet allows for easily made and distributed copies: copies of documents, music, photos, whatever. Kelly asks some good questions: “If reproductions of our… read more

Review of Myths of Innovation

February 03 2008

I read The Myths of Innovation a while ago and am now just getting around to reviewing it. Originally, I wanted to review it for Boxes and Arrows, but James Robertson beat me to it. See his review on Boxes and Arrows. (Ironically, but not coincidently, I edited that review… read more

Mingus Quote

February 02 2008

“Making the simple complex is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” -Charles Mingus read more

Information Behavior of the “Google Generation”

February 02 2008

Just came across the results of a new study commissioned by the British Library and JISC about information behavior of the “Google generation.” These are people born after around 1993. Here is a direct link to the full report. Broadly, the intent is to see if younger people search for information… read more