March 14th, 2016
On March 12nd I held an introduction course on agile project management principles, tools and technques at the Order of the Engineer in Bergamo. Here is the supporting deck I used during the seminar (slides in Italian only).
September 6th, 2015
If you have some background in journalism or mass-media communication you probably heard about the popular rule of the 5 wh-questions: any news story should provide an answer to the questions “who?”, “what?”, “why?”, “when?” and “where?”. But you may not know that such rule was taken from Cicero’s De Inventione, a kind of handbook for orators containing lots of hints on how to do a public speech in the 1st Century BC.
In particular, Cicero wrote that any good speech should contain a set of 6 properties used to determine the completeness of the exposition (expositio). These properties, or loci, and their relative questions, represent a classical principle of rhetoric that can be very useful for evaluating a website in all its aspects, too. It may be surprising, but any website in 2015 can be not so distant – as a communication process – from a speech in the ancient Roman Senate.
This is the so-called 2QCV2Q Model, from the initial letters of the Ciceronian loci on which it is based, originally developed by L. Mich and M. Franch at University of Trento (Italy). It’s based on the fact that the design of a website, too, can be viewed as a series of answers to the question contained in Cicero’s rule. In fact, the original model identifies a set of evaluation elements for each of the 6 properties and the resulting checklist has 4 important features:
The following presentation sums up the whole methodology. Note that I updated the evaluation elements in order to include some modern principles of web design and UX that were not present when the original model was created.
August 2nd, 2015
Last night I was browsing some old documents on my Mac and I re-discovered a lot of Power Point presentations from my years at the university. I found some pretty good stuff that I would like to reorganize, update and maybe post here. But one thing really made me smile: the original slideshow I used to present my Bachelor’s thesis, focused on the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing and its effects on the music industry.
It was A.D. 2004 and Napster was shut down not long before. I remember that Kazaa was the most popular P2P client at the time and connection speeds weren’t as good as now. For that reason, Hollywood majors were still not heavily impacted by video piracy (it took weeks to download a movie), while music labels were stabbed to death by 3 killers: the MP3 format, the P2P file sharing and the iPod.
Of course I uploaded the presentation on SlideShare and here it is in all its glory (sorry for the Italian)!
I consider myself a WordPress evangelist, but for a long time I hadn't found a reason to install that glorious content platform on my good old website. Now that shame has ended. In this blog I want to share some interesting stuff about topics I love, such as UX design, digital project management and anything else I'd like to write about. Read More »
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