Research

"I was asked to participate in the beginning stages of Beehive, the newest IBM social networking project. The five core team members quickly introduced me to the project and their overall objectives of connecting and discovery.

"I only had a few weeks to provide some graphic design help to the team but soon realized that I couldn't take off my User Experience hat and ended up giving more focus around organizing principals. The team was really open to hearing different navigational structures and considered a lot of my recommendations. The two big design ideas that came out of the Beehive collaboration was the omnipresent stream of activity that provides users with a curiosity factor around what's going on to encourage investigation. The second is the idea of pivoting, a term coined (I believe) by David Millen to describe the overall navigational structure. Pivoting is based on the concept that most everything you need at any given moment is available without being overly cumbersome."

-- Jodi Large, Information Architect