For those of you that find User Experience Design interesting, I highly recommend the User Experience Podcast. It primarily consists of interviews with user experience professionals. One specific interview that I found interesting is #48, which is an interview with Jerry McGovern titled “Every piece of content matters” (MP3 – 15MB).

Speaking of Jerry McGovern, I highly recommend his article on The Long Neck. To quote his website, “5% of your website delivers at least 25% of its value”. This is very interesting and really ties back to the Podcast. I hope you find it as useful as I do.

I have been having quite a few conversation with my coworkers about redesigning our corporate website. It is long overdue for a touch up but I have been trying to convince the team that we need to complete the project iteratively – instead of a long drawn out redesign. Take a look at the Apple Powerbook or the Volkswagen Jetta; instead of redesigning from scratch they slowly evolve the design over time.

Obviously Apple and VW have well designed products from the get go and that is very important. If a strong foundation isn’t in place it is pointless, but even with all it’s problems, the MTS website actually has a decent structure in place. Since I started a year ago, we have implemented a css based layout and increased the site width to 960px (among a ton of other things).

There are a number of navigational items that need to be updated, which actually excites me quite a bit. I really enjoy doing Information Architecture work and improving the overall usability of a web site. Besides, if the site were perfect to begin with, I would be out of a job!