Information Architecture According to Dinosaurs
“So what, exactly, do you do?” Every information architect dreads this question. Fear not, now you can just point your inquisitors to this little gem:
What I Do
Describing what I do for a living to people unfamilar with the UX profession often elicits confused looks and/or polite head nodding. With that in mind, a few months ago I asked several UX professionals whom I admire how they describe what they do for a living. I received some great answers, and one of my ...
Magical Weather
Magical Weather is a new weather app for the iPad, and I can already hear you asking if we needed yet another weather app. I thought the same thing, until I tried it. Magical Weather differentiates itself from other apps in its minimalist approach. Instead of trying to make the most of the iPad’s capacious ...
Follow the User
Are you trying to dictate the path your users will take through your experiences? If so, you might be making the same mistake as the urban planner who designed the right-angle-only pathway in the photo above. As the image shows, people have decided — quite correctly — that they can get from A to B ...
A Better Restaurant Website
If you own a restaurant, chances are your website is frustrating the customers who visit it. Restaurant websites on the whole are so bad that it’s actually become a bit of a joke in the user experience community (you know, those of us who design and build websites for a living). In fact, Matthew Inman over ...
The Backlash Backlash
We all know the story: Facebook introduces a new feature or revises an existing feature, and there’s a cacophonous outcry from disgruntled users. Then, time passes, and people get used to the changes. Or they don’t, but they get by anyway. But this time there’s a backlash backlash afoot, people who are frustrated by those ...
The Extra Step
Remove that extra step. Look for it…find the thing that isn’t necessary…and kill it. If you find more than one, kill ‘em all. Maybe it’s an extra click. Maybe it’s a bit of copy that needs to be read because a UI element isn’t self-explanatory. Maybe you’re loading a new page when you could have used ...
Musing on Muse
In case you haven’t heard, Adobe is about to release a new AIR-based website design and building tool code-named Muse (the actual product name hasn’t been made public yet), and it’s currently available to download in beta format. I spent some of this past weekend using it, and below are my impressions. The promise of Muse ...
Edge Cases
If you’re doing your UX job right, you’re spending a lot of time thinking about edge cases, perhaps far more even than on happy paths. Edge cases are what define the quailty of the experience under extreme circumstances, and that’s what really matters, isn’t it? But the problem is that most of us are forced to spec ...
Lorem
Some UX professionals will tell you never to use lorem ispum, aka greek copy, and their reasons are very valid. In the real world, however, project deadlines often require us to start work without final (or any) copy. What are we to do? Because I agree that a block of phony text isn’t very useful, I ...
Top 3 UX Design Principles
Over in the Linkedin User Experience group, someone asked members for their top three UX design principles. While my answer would probably change from day to day, below are three I came up with rather quickly tonight: Users should always know where they are, what they can or should do, and what’s coming next. Plain, ...
What is UX?
I’m often asked to outline the steps, phases, or activities that go into UX. Though others my have their own breakdown, here is how I often describe UX activities at a high level, and roughly in sequential order. User Research: Understanding the people who use a product or system through observations. Content Strategy: Planning for ...
UX and Me
The term User Experience Design or UX, as applied in a Web or mobile setting, can be confusing, as it seems to mean different things to different people. Some think of it as information architecture, while others consider it to be usability; some use it interchangeably with user interface design. The common mistake here is ...
Clever Receipt
Following my earlier post about a helpful 404 page, here is a better-than-boring Web receipt I received after purchasing a time tracking program from Stunt Software.
Great Design Anticipates
The building in which I work has nice, wood-paneled elevators. The elevators are one of the few places everyone in the building passes through, so they provide a logical location for building notices. Unfortunately, the architects didn’t anticipate this use, so now when the building staff need to make an announcement, they simply tape it ...
