thatonegirl [dot] net

Ruby Tuesday has gone Green! And to announce the roll out of their new Green operation, they kicked it off with a bang. Literally.

Using a combination of online campaigns, Ruby Tuesday utilized the power of the internet to promote their improved restaurants. I don’t watch much tv, so I am not aware of any tv campaigns. As part of their online marketing, you could sign up for email updates and reminders of the impending event. For a few weeks before the launch of the new initiative, rubytuesday.com advertised the “Dramatic Destruction of the Only Remaining Ruby Tuesday Not Completely Remodeled,” scheduled to be broadcast live from their website 3pm EST on Wednesday, August 6, 2008.

And then it happened.

However, it turns out they didn’t acutally blow up a real restaurant. I received an email from them this morning with the subject line, “We have some bad news and some good news:”

“The news we’ve sent to you in the last few days about the demolition of the last old-style Ruby Tuesday and the building we “blew up” by mistake wasn’t really real (you already had your suspicions?)… Cheeky’s Bar & Grill, the other “restaurant” that was “demolished” by mistake was actually a scale model in a studio in Hollywood. We were joshing you a little, and we hope you’ll forgive us. We couldn’t help it, really.”

Today, the landing page from their site is a light apology letter from their Senior VP of Marketing, Jim Robbins, formally apologizing to Cheeky’s Bar and Grill for blowing the wrong restaurant. “We can all take solace in the fact that, with the sweeping changes that have taken place within our organization, it is extremely unlikely that a Ruby Tuesday restaurant will ever be confused for any other casual dining establishment again.”

You can watch the demolition movie and behind the scenes movie on their website.

Ruby Tuesday also created a very visual site, A Green Ruby, within the main architecture of their website (so we can’t call it a microsite) that explores what they have done as a company to go Green not only with in their restaurants, but also with their vendors and corporate offices. A few highlights of the Green changes they have made:

At their Support Center located in Maryville, Tennessee–
• temperature regulation: the building will be warmer and cooler accordingly when the building is empty
• copiers and printers will produce double sided copies on 20 - 40 percent recycled material and use refillable ink cartridges
• providing recycle bins

In their restaurants–
• All menus, including children’s menus, are printed using soy based inks on recycled paper that has been custom-sheeted to reduce waste from trimming
• “TueGo” bags and catering containers are made from recycled materials
• Sourcing green products and supplies whenever feasible
• Using new technologies when washing dishes
• Turning off ovens and fryers during non-peak hours
• Using sensors in restrooms and kitchens to reduce water usage
• Better insulated roofs and windows

For a complete list, visit A Green Ruby.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends!

I created mine using my del.icio.us tags, but you can enter your own list of words:

Go to Wordle to create your own. I think it’s pretty neat!

I’m not sure if you’ve heard of this, but I saw this on the news the other day, and a co-worker just sent me this link. Although it’s fictional, I still think it’s a pretty neat project.

As part of his graduation project, Erik Nordenankar, a student at Beckmans College of Design used a GPS device in a briefcase that was sent around the world as his pen to create a self portrait using Earth as his canvas.

After a year of working as the Project Coordinator in the Interactive Department, I’ve finally made the move into another discipline: Information Architecture. It really was more of a demotion- I’ve gone from being everyone’s boss, to having two Senior IA’s above me. I’m in week three of my new roll, and I’m really enjoying not having a clue what is going on with the rest of the agency or having to deal with those pesky job jackets.

So what is this new thing that I’m doing?

As defined by the Information Architecture Institute, IA is the art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability.

Elevator pitch:

“Information Architecture is about structuring information to make it easy to find. When it’s easy to find products on your website, people will buy more. When it’s easy to find information on your Intranet, employees will save time and have the knowledge they need. Information Architects are specialized in understanding problems that people face when looking for information and designing ways to fix those problems.”

The easiest way I have found to describe the role of the IA is with the following analogy:

Let’s pretend you are building a house. You need three things: an architect to design it, a contractor to build the thing, and a designer to make it look pretty. The architect doesn’t care how it’s built or how it looks, just how it works and how the people who are going to live it are going to use it. That’s what the IA does for websites. The IA acts as the user advocate, determines how the site will be used and organizes all the information that needs to be on a site into intuitive little buckets.

In the grand process of web site creation, we are the step right after the project is awarded to the company. We come in and create user profiles (examples of people in our target audience that will be using the site), the site map, process flows (how the user is going to use the site to accomplish each task) and wireframes. (I draw stick figures of websites all day.) First the IA develops the functionality. Then the Art Director puts a skin on it and makes it look pretty. Finally the Developer comes in and makes it work. Tah dah! You have a website.

Other titles for IAs include Usability Engineer, Interaction Designer, and User Experience Designer.

Currently IA is a very web-centric discipline. Almost all IAs work on web sites (though some are working on mobile/wireless, CD-ROMS, database systems, etc.). Because of this, most IAs are hired by companies with a large enough web presence to support a full-time information architect, or by service firms that create web sites for clients.

Think about everything you use on a daily basis: the phone, your computer, the remote, a stapler. All of these were designed in someway by someone with the user in mind. And after they finally perfected the design, it hasn’t changed much over the years. If a new phone is designed correctly, you should be able to pick it up and figure out how to use it without much thought because of your experience with other phones. Just like you should be able to use a new website you come across because it has been designed based on standards that have developed over the years.

Learn more:
Wiki description of Information architecture.
10 questions about information architecture.
Check out my del.icio.us bookmarks on the topic.