GUUUI - Visio - the interaction designer's nail gun (2nd edition)

GUUUI - Visio - the interaction designer's nail gun (2nd edition): "This second edition of the article includes a brush-up of the text and illustrations and a new and improved prototyping tool for Visio 2003. Unfortunately, the new tool isn't compatible with older versions of Visio. If you have a version of Visio prior to 2003, please refer to the first edition of this article, where you can download the old version of the prototyping tool."

Tags:
visio || information architecture

Battarbee, Katja - Co-Experience

Battarbee, Katja: "This dissertation introduces an approach to understanding user experience that departs from the more traditional user or product centric approaches. This approach, co-experience, builds on an understanding of experience as social interaction. It focuses on how in and through social interaction experiences and their products come to find their place in people’s lives."

CoFactors » Blog Archive » Net Rage: A Study of Blogs and Usability

CoFactors » Blog Archive » Net Rage: A Study of Blogs and Usability: "Catalyst’s proprietary test of the usability of blogs, conducted in late June and early July of 2005, can be downloaded immediately here. Our analysis sheds light on a variety of heretofore neglected, user-experience related design challenges associated with blogs’ potential to become a mainstream medium for Internet users."

Looks Good Works Well: Visio Wireframe Toolkit for Download

Looks Good Works Well: Visio Wireframe Toolkit for Download: "In an earlier post I mentioned a wireframe toolkit I wrote for Visio to make wireframe creation go much faster. Specifically I discussed one aspect of the kit-- animating wireframes with Visio. I wrote a fuller article that is just getting around to being published on boxesandarrows.com. It should show up this weekend.

In the article, I provide a reference to the fuller wireframe toolkit and they (at boxesandarrows) have agreed to host the installation files. Since I have not really explained the wireframe toolkit nor provided a way to download it before, I felt it would be important to provide a blog article about the kit and how to get it for your own use." [...]

Tags:
visio || information architecture

Looks Good Works Well: Nine Tips for Designing Rich Internet Applications

Looks Good Works Well: Nine Tips for Designing Rich Internet Applications: "Recently I was asked to provide input into a presentation. The question was asked, if you were going to provide some quick basic guidelines for designing rich applications what would they be.

Here were the nine thoughts as they originally came to my head."[...]

Tags:
rich internet applications || information architecture

Evolutionary information seeking

Evolutionary information seeking: "This article explores one question: what does Internet searching have to do with personal development? Personal development means that individuals improve their own abilities, skills, knowledge or other qualities by working on them. The paper reports on a qualitative case study, in which a single participant was interviewed and her Web searches observed. Information search strategies seemed to form a spectrum of developmental sophistication. Four major types of relationship were found:
a) the Internet in the context of development;
b) development in the context of the Internet;
c) development affecting Internet use; and,
d) Internet use affecting development.

There were some informational phenomena which exhibited regression, the converse of development."

Designing User Experiences for Applications Versus Information Resources on the Web

"The relatively recent adoption of user-focused design practices by the Web design and development community—including personas, participatory design, paper prototyping, and the like—highlights important distinctions between the user experiences of desktop applications and those of information spaces. With the growing desire for usable Web applications, these distinctions become more topical and important to understand. Though the process of designing and creating application and information space user experiences for the Web is virtually the same—even if the deliverable design documents may differ—their user experiences are fundamentally and profoundly different. For designers, business analysts, marketing consultants, and others who are sincerely interested in delivering the best user experiences online, understanding these distinctions can reduce the cost of design and improve the likelihood of user acceptance." [...] (Leo Frishberg)

Tags:
user experience || information architecture

Search Folders, Smart Lists, & Tags

"[...]“information about information” is guaranteed to play an increasingly important role in how we manage our home lives and jobs. For evidence, we need only to look at the proliferation of metadata-based organizational constructs within Desktop and Web-based applications. Search Folders, Smart Playlists, Virtual Folders, and Tags all group objects based on shared metadata and dynamically update their contents for efficient information retrieval through common attributes. In other words, files attributes in these instances “replace” typical hierarchical organization systems.[...]" (Functioning Form)

Tags:
information design || navigation systems||findability ||

Introduction to Information Architecture

Information architecture brings together how people think with how systems work. It's a strategy and a discipline.With information architecture covering so much territory, I've collected a
few introductory articles, books, and links to help you get started. [...] (Introduction to Information Architecture by Austin Govella)

Tags:
information architecture

Role of Information Architecture in Development

"As a consultant, I have had a few challeges with mind reading being a non-clairvoyant. Clients and consultants are seemingly diametrically opposed beasts who have evolved two very different evolutionary tracks. Scientists would term it "divergent evolution." How did we all get so far off track? Setting an expectation and staying the course are core project management initiatives that should be set in stone. However, it seems that in good faith projects, expectations, and goals get skewed. The question then becomes how can we mitigate this.[...]" (The Personal Blog of Michael T. Haynie)

Tags:
information architecture

Blog Interface Design 2.1

"Following the publication of our Blog Interface Design 2.0 article, a number of folks have chimed in with some additional suggestions for making the most of your blog’s content.

In the article, we highlighted Boxes Arrows’ practice of bringing valuable comments (as rated by readers) to the front of a list of comments. In response, Tom Chi suggested an interesting alternative. Rather than changing the order of the list based on quality –change the opacity. With this approach comments rated poorly are reduced in opacity so that really poor comments become almost unreadable. If readers find something of interest in a comment with low opacity, they have a strong incentive for rating it well –it becomes more visible." (Functioning Form)

Additional Resources:

• Weblog Conversations
• "Mullet"-style blog layout
• Y! Trip Planner & Web 2.0 Content Objects

Tags:
usability || interaction design || blogging

Semantic Typography: Bridging the XHTML gap

"In the Web Standards community we hear the words 'Semantic Markup' thrown around a lot as a concept—the right thing to do— but I know a lot of designers who are trying to learn this stuff are being confused by the whole 'semantic thing'. It's a difficult task for a designer, who primarily thinks very visually, to relate to a concept like semantics in a document when all they want to do is create something. After doing a ton of research over the past couple of weeks I've begun to notice links and patterns between typographic theory and Web Standards." (Mark Boulton)