Chiara (Still Foxy) Ogan .com

I work with the best people.

I'm totally enjoying the blog Tales from Redesignland. He has an adorable little comic that he does that wouldn't be half as funny if it wasn't so true.

I'm tempted to decorate the halls of AP with his motivational posters like this one.

You may not have remembered it, but today is Women's Equality Day, the day that celebrates the passage of the 19th Amendment which gave women full voting rights.

I think that we forget that women didn't always have the freedoms that we have today. It was back in 1848 that women started getting together to work for the right to vote. Remember Susan B. Anthony and Seneca Falls, NY? The 19th Amendment wasn't passed until 1920. 1920! We've only had that right for 88 years.

I often wax nostalgic about past times, and yearn to have lived way back when. But then I remember that I probably wouldn't have been taught how to read or write. I wouldn't have been able to own property, let alone vote or be involved in government. I would have been married off at a young age and my principle job would have been to have sons. My husband would have been allowed to beat me if he wanted.

Of course there were women who didn't live lives as restricted as this, but they were fewer and father between than we like to think. No, I think I'll stick with the 21st century after all.

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Two Saturdays ago, I got married to an amazing guy. It was a lovely time and I can't be happier.

One of the post-wedding tasks that I'm working on now is updating my online presence. You see, Fox isn't my maiden name. My name originally was Chiara Berlingo, but I changed my name when I got married the first time. I was just starting out in my career and I didn't really think about it. It just felt like the right thing to do.

When I got divorced, I thought about changing my name back to Berlingo. But I was already published as Fox, and everyone in the industry knows me as Fox. Most people assume that it is my maiden name. Plus, having jumped through all the hoops to change my name the first time around, I wasn't in a hurry to do it all again. (They charge you money to change your name back, BTW, as if the cost of a divorce wasn't enough.)

I've been a Fox for 10 years now. I don't overly mind the name itself... it's kinda fun to call myself a foxy lady. Though it is annoying when people think it's a porn-star name. I do miss the heritage of the ethnic (if you can still consider Italians ethnic) name Berlingo.

But now that E and I are married, I don't really want the reminder of my previous husband to always follow me around. E has always said that he doesn't care what name I go by, but he would prefer that I don't keep Fox. I agree. I thought long and hard about what I should do. After all, it's been 10 years. I could go back to being a Berlingo, but most people don't know me as a Berlingo. It would be a new name for them anyway.

So, I've decided to take on E's name and become an Ogan. It still sounds weird to say... "Chiara Ogan." Like a strange coat I don't quite know how to wear yet. But I will get used to it, I know. I've decided to slowly transition to Ogan, going by Fox Ogan til the end of the year. My first name is unique enough (I've only ever heard of one other Chiara in IA or UX) so I'm hoping that will help people realize that I've made the switch.

I know it's going to take me awhile to change all the instances of Fox on the internet. I'm pretty much spread all over it. I'm not sure what to do about logins, as many of those are not changable. I have a feeling I'll be having a duel identity for awhile.

*** Originally posted on the Adaptive Path Blog ***

This week I joined 1100 other folks at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose. I attended this conference back in 2007 and I'm happier to say I really see a difference in the past two years. Back in 2007, everything about the conference was about the technology. What was the code that made this stuff go? I tried to keep up in a number of sessions where they kept flashing XML up on the screen. I'm happy to report that my experience was much different this year.

From the moment of the first keynote, folks were talking about the user experience. Yay! Our message is finally getting out there. It seems to me that they have finally gotten the technical bits mostly figured out on how to make this semantic web thing go. Now it's time for the fun stuff: using it to power things that make people's lives better.

There seemed to be two big uses for semantic technologies that I heard at the conference. First were the groups of folks talking about plug-ins and snippets of code that anyone can drop into their browser or onto their web pages to make an enhanced experience. Yahoo!'s Search Monkey and Google's Rich Snippets are both examples of simple XML bits that you can add to your pages to enhance your results listing on their engines. Adaptive Blue is a Firefox plug-in that let's you see your friends' reviews of books, movies and other stuff as you look at these items on different sites.

The other use is more like what I traditionally think of when I think semantics. There were lots of examples of vendors who can create ontologies and connections by parsing the corpus of unstructured text you give it, whether that text be email, Wikipedia or the Bible. These tools let you see what topics occur in given populations (such as football and the Longhorns in Enron internal email) as well as moving through those related topics. The guys at The New York Times talked about how they use semantic tools to publish their topic pages as well as their news alerts, widgets, RSS feeds and to automate their editorial process.

It was a fun 2.5 days. I learned a lot and am eager to update my personal sites with Rich Snippets, RDFa and microformats.

Join me on Wednesday, June 24 for my virtual seminar on the semantic web. I'll explain the basics of how this stuff works and why user experience folks need to be involved.

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same." — Suw Charman-Anderson

I signed up and pledged to blog about a woman in technology. Turns out 1832 other people have also signed up. I wanted to blog about Dr. Lene Vestergaard Hau, a Danish physicist who works in the field of quantum physics.

I worked with Lene Hau when I was a librarian at the Rowland Institute for Science in Boston, around 1997-2000. Lene ran the group working on atom cooling and Bose-Einstein condensation. While I and her team were working there, they slowed the speed of light! I remember walking into the Institute one morning, and the team had put up a spoof of those Volkswagen Beetle ads that said "0 to 60? Yes.", but with numbers for the speed of light: "300,000 km/sec to 17 m/sec? Yes!" Eventually they were able to stop it.

Lene now works at Harvard University. She has published numerous scientific articles and papers, and was honored with Harvard University's prestigious Ledlie Prize in September 2008. She was Elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on January 16, 2008.

In 2002, John Preskill wrote a poem about her, called Lene Hau.

I admire Lene for her amazing achievements. Physics is a branch of science that is still dominated by men. Lene is incredibility smart and talented. She has risen to the top of her field. I'm proud that I was able to work with her for the little bit that I did.

You can learn more about her on her lab's page at Harvard and on her wikipedia page.

--- Originally posted on the Adaptive Path Blog ---

About a year ago, Jesse came to me and suggested I change my title from Information Architect to User Experience Designer. He gave a number of reasons, but none of them resonated with me. I clearly remember commiserating with some dear friends at the IA Summit 2008 about this proposed change in title.

I didn’t want to give up the title. I considered myself an information architect first and foremost. I’ve called myself an IA for nine years now. I was proud of the name. It was who I was. So I didn’t change it.

In Memphis this past weekend, at the IA Summit 2009, I spent a lot of time talking with first time attendees and those new to the field of information architecture. I hosted a round table at lunch for those new to IA. They were a great table, with tons of questions.

One of the things they really wanted to know was how to become a great IA. My answers surprised me. I didn’t tell them that they had to master multi-faceted classification or be able to generate thesauri and controlled vocabularies from scratch. I didn’t tell them about stencils and templates for making better wireframes.

I told them how important it was to listen to the customers of the organizations they would be working for and to deeply understand their behaviors and motivations. I told them to be champions for the user. I told them to listen to the pain of their clients, and think about how their designs could ease it. I told them not to go in shouting about CVs and classification and indexing and how their clients were doing it all wrong. Be subtle, I said. Listen for their needs. Present classifications and metadata and all that cool stuff as the way to get your designs implemented, not as an end in and of itself.

And I realized… I wasn’t telling them how to do good information architecture. I was telling them how to do good user experience design. I realized while I love IA, and it is my core competency, it is also only a small part of what I do.

For that reason, I am taking on the title of User Experience Designer.

Today I am giving a talk at the IA Summit about the Semantic Web, called The Semantic Web: What IAs Need to Know About Web 3.0.

It's hosted here on Slideshare:

There's a brilliant little video over at AdFreak showing what it would be like if a stop sign were to be designed today using the typical big corporation design process. It's from the same folks who did the if Microsoft designed the iPod packaging video.

Designing a stop sign

It makes me more than a little sad that so much of this rings true for what life is like as a consultant.