Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Noah Iliinsky

Noah Iliinsky — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:18:33 GMT

My TC graduate program at the University of Washington ( http://uwtc.washington.edu/ ) had a lot of focus on documentation and technical journalism. We are also strong in the areas of user research and usability testing (due in no small part to our department chair, Judy Ramey, a respected usability expert). My personal focus, information, interface, and interaction design, was addressed, but not to the same extent as the research and documentation branches.

However, I think it all fits together well. When people ask what TC is, or what our department does, I have a standard response: it’s about understanding an audiences need for information, and then satisfying that need, whether by documentation, journalism, a web page, software product, or device interface. By that definition, we all fit under the larger TC umbrella. Anyone with good TC skills probably has a good foundation upon which to build a UX skill set.

Noah Iliinsky — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:46:48 GMT

Joe, this is a great lesson.

I’ve worked for several startups. One was an unqualified success: we were bought out for many millions of dollars and the founders are now rich. Two others languished or underperformed, despite brilliant ideas and dedicated, capable staff. They key difference was the willingness of the successful founders to change course and adapt to circumstances and feedback (changing our product focus while leveraging our underlying technology), rather than staying the unproven or unlikely but hoped-for course. ( I expand on this just a bit more here: http://blogs.exbiblio.com/2006/08/15/departure-noah-iliin… )

I’ll toss one more metaphor into play. Apply it to business, politics, or wherever you find it fits: they say it’s a bad idea to change horses in mid stream, but when the horse is in over its head…

Noah Iliinsky — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:25:42 GMT

Joe, I didn’t get stuck in the companies that weren’t doing as well. I had excellent, educational experiences, and got out when it was clear that there were better opportunities out there. Both companies are still around, but not (yet?) changing the world.

If I was to give one piece of advice I’d say make sure the leadership team is really more than one individual. The successful company had two excellent founders who very actively sought input from a board of investors and board of advisers. The other companies were each run by the individual founder, and in both cases had no real obligation to any investors or board, so they were allowed to drift, rather than proving themselves. Accountability is good incentive, it turns out.

Hope that’s helpful to someone. Good luck to all!

Noah Iliinsky — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:42:41 GMT

Hi Patrick,

This is an interesting approach. I really like the accessibility of the final map product.

I don’t know if you used consistent axes for each map and sub-map, but I’d be curious to hear how you chose directions for the various lines. My mental model says other intranet pages should be “sibling” pages, to the side (on a horizontal line), child pages should be below (on a vertical line), and external pages are “out there” (maybe at an upward diagonal). Of course number of nodes to manage will affect your layout approach. I do like the choice of colors for each line.

For deeper thoughts on diagram layout, please check out my master’s thesis, which is exactly about how to straighten up spaghetti diagrams: http://www.complexdiagrams.com/

Cheers, Noah

Noah Iliinsky — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:02:43 GMT

For such an application-oriented audience, I hope an article will be written more concisely than this summary. It sounds like you have good things to say, but as someone with limited time to extract value from a resource, it was hard for me to even locate the point of the proposal, as it didn’t show up until over halfway through the post.

Noah Iliinsky — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:53:52 GMT

Perhaps as another article, I’d also love a good comparative review of Tinderbox vs other popular outliner tools, Word, OmniOutliner, etc.

Noah Iliinsky — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 06:10:47 GMT

Hi Dan, and everyone.

Just chiming in here on the pixels in Visio issue. I’ve managed to coerce Visio into displaying pixel-equivalent measurements. For times when Visio is unavoidable, here is a simple fix:
http://complexdiagrams.com/2008/06/01/pixel-rulers-in-vis…

Cheers, Noah

Noah Iliinsky — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 06:12:17 GMT

Here’s the simple solution I mentioned above:
http://complexdiagrams.com/2008/06/01/pixel-rulers-in-vis…

Cheers, Noah