Latest Episodes for this Channel
Wed August 27 2008
What makes for a great IA? ..."Donna (Maurer) Spencer is a recognized expert in the area of Information Architecture and author of an upcoming book ...
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What makes for a great IA? ..."Donna (Maurer) Spencer is a recognized expert in the area of Information Architecture and author of an upcoming book on Card Sorting. Jared M. Spool recently had the opportunity to talk with Donna about the specific skills that separate the best information architects from the rest. Here are the highlights of that conversation.Jared M. Spool: How long have you been... read more
What makes for a great IA? ..."Donna (Maurer) Spencer is a recognized expert in the area of Information Architecture and author of an upcoming book on Card Sorting. Jared M. Spool recently had the opportunity to talk with Donna about the specific skills that separate the best information architects from the rest. Here are the highlights of that conversation.Jared M. Spool: How long have you been doing information architecture work?Donna Spencer: I've been an information architect for nine years and have a consultancy, Maadmob. These days, I work primarily with government agencies, but I have also designed big business applications and focused on intranet work.In your experience, have you found certain skills separate the excellent information architects from the rest?All information architects need to think structurally, organize things well, and really care about labeling and language.I've found that excellent information architects do all of these things well, but they also excel at the human component, playing really well with other people. Information architecture is never an isolated, stand-alone activity. It has to be done with everyone on the design team involved. The excellent information architects work well on a team, communicate effectively with stakeholders and content authors, and do a great job of explaining to everybody how things work.I've worked with some less effective information architects who have their isolated box for accomplishing their work, and don't want to explain or justify their decisions. The great information architects explain things well, work nicely with people, and get the job done.Besides good people skills, are there additional skills the excellent information architects possess?They have ability to work in great detail. But, at the same time, they can focus on broad strategic issues. The best information architects take the user research, content analysis, business goals, and all of the other input information, and synthesize it into something that really works. They can see the big picture *and* keep an eye on all of the specific details.This is a unique skill that not many people have. Lots of information architects are really good at doing detail work and lots are really good at the strategy work. But it's a pretty amazing skill to accomplish both at once and to flip between them from second to second.A lot of information architects seem to have mastered the details but haven't done the strategy work. How do they get those skills?In many cases, information architects learn about strategy by getting immersed in the work and gaining the experience of seeing the big picture. I don't know how you would learn how to do the strategic work without going up a level and working it through. I've found that it's important to have a vision for the project in your head and think about the bigger picture.In order to do the detail work, information architects really should have understood the bigger picture. That's the bridge between doing broad work and detail work. It's understanding the big picture and trying to hold the big picture together, while you're also figuring out which content goes where and what a hyperlink should be called.If you're trying to do detail work at that level without the big picture in your head, you're going to miss the mark." (Continued via uie, Jared Spool) [Usability Resources]
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Wed August 27 2008
Before and after ...How Design Can Save Democracy" is AIGA's attempt to identify common design problems in election ballots and offer improvements.s...
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Before and after ...How Design Can Save Democracy" is AIGA's attempt to identify common design problems in election ballots and offer improvements.s it an improvement? Sure.But the real crime here is how terrible the original one is. Looks like a bunch of lawyers trying to figure out Quark. It's tough to have much faith in your government's ability to solve truly complicated challenges when it s... read more
Before and after ...How Design Can Save Democracy" is AIGA's attempt to identify common design problems in election ballots and offer improvements.s it an improvement? Sure.But the real crime here is how terrible the original one is. Looks like a bunch of lawyers trying to figure out Quark. It's tough to have much faith in your government's ability to solve truly complicated challenges when it seems so inept at dealing with relatively simple issues. Hasn't this been a known problem for eight years now?!It'd also be interesting to see what ballots look like in other parts of the world." (Continued via 37signals) [Usability Resources] Before Ballot Design After Ballot Design
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Mon August 25 2008
An extensive interview on the Microsoft Ribbon ..."Dan Harrelson, design technologist at Adaptive Path, recently spoke with Jensen Harris, Group Pro...
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An extensive interview on the Microsoft Ribbon ..."Dan Harrelson, design technologist at Adaptive Path, recently spoke with Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager of Microsoft's Office User Experience team. Jensen was one of the key designers behind the new Ribbon user interface introduced in Office 2007. Dan and Jensen chatted about Office's redesign and the techniques he uses to keep the focus o... read more
An extensive interview on the Microsoft Ribbon ..."Dan Harrelson, design technologist at Adaptive Path, recently spoke with Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager of Microsoft's Office User Experience team. Jensen was one of the key designers behind the new Ribbon user interface introduced in Office 2007. Dan and Jensen chatted about Office's redesign and the techniques he uses to keep the focus on user needs within an organization the size of Microsoft.Dan Harrelson [DH]: Hi Jensen, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. You are often credited with designing the Office 2007 Ribbon. Can you tell us what went into the interface redesign and what your role was?Jensen Harris [JH]: Creating the Office 2007 user interface was a team effort, and there were dozens of designers, usability researchers, developers, testers, and program managers involved in different aspects of the creative and engineering process. So many people contributed great ideas to the Office 2007 design that it is truly impossible to single out any single person as being the "designer" of the Ribbon.My team was responsible for delivering the shared user interface platform for Office 2007, including the Ribbon, galleries, Live Preview, the Mini Toolbar and the rest of the new user experience.I would characterize my role as most similar to that of an architect. I drafted the design tenets, and helped make sure that everyone's detailed designs gelled together into a harmonious whole.One of our fundamental goals was to make the UI "feel as if it was designed by a single person" — even though, practically speaking, we knew that it was much too big of a project to actually be designed by a single person. Achieving a coherent design at this scale requires coordinated, consistent decision making as well as a strong design philosophy.DH: The Ribbon has certainly garnered much attention and has been touted for the success of Office 2007. What other one or two UI enhancements would you also call out as critical to the software's success?JH: One of our success metrics for Office 2007 was that we wanted normal people to be able to make beautiful, stunning documents and presentations. We wanted the average user to have access to professional-level results with fewer steps than in the past.To help make this a reality, an awesome new graphics engine was built into Office — one capable of high-quality, beautiful effects, such as drop shadows, reflections, 3D lighting and surfaces, etc.We knew that we had to make harnessing the power of this graphics engine incredibly easy because, otherwise, most people would never spend the time to use it. This is where the new UI comes in.Based on our early user research, we embraced a model for Office's new UI called "results-oriented design." The idea is to show people a graphical representation of exactly what result they'll get as the primary way of surfacing the feature. Compare this to the old model, "command-oriented design" in which you show people a dry list of commands and let the user figure out how to string them together to get a good result." (Continued via adaptive path, Dan Harrelson) [Usability Resources]
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Sun August 24 2008
How innovation occurs - an interview with Scott Berkun ..."If you work in a larger company and you haven't heard a statement like this, you're going...
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How innovation occurs - an interview with Scott Berkun ..."If you work in a larger company and you haven't heard a statement like this, you're going to. Innovation has become such a buzzword, it's nearly meaningless. But that doesn't mean innovation itself is dead. In this week's show, we sat down with Scott Berkun, the dynamic speaker and author of "The Myths of Innovation."Innovation is critic... read more
How innovation occurs - an interview with Scott Berkun ..."If you work in a larger company and you haven't heard a statement like this, you're going to. Innovation has become such a buzzword, it's nearly meaningless. But that doesn't mean innovation itself is dead. In this week's show, we sat down with Scott Berkun, the dynamic speaker and author of "The Myths of Innovation."Innovation is critical, but it's not being defined for those folks challenged with implementing it. Innovation is hard work. Scott asks that we face facts here; to find big, new ideas that will change things for the better will never be easy.OK, how do we innovate? Scott suggests that the key word is risk. The best organizations (Google, Apple, Pixar and 3M are offered as examples) promote this through a culture where it's OK to take risks, where failure is acceptable if valuable lessons can be learned. Whenever risks can be taken in a safe environment innovation is much more likely to be successful.Often times middle management is actually the key to fostering this environment. They see the organizational "big picture" and can shield the front line workers who are challenged with focusing on the work. It allows for in-house entrepreneurship, allowing for creativity and flexibility outside of their traditional responsibilities. Google's "20% time" is a popular example of time where employees can branch out on self-made projects. In Google's case, it gave birth to products like GMail.Innovation happens in both small and large organizations, but in large companies, it takes dedicated resources, and the expectation of some amount of failure. Scott has found that in organizations resistant to change, you can find success in pitching that innovation is the tradition of the company.As for Innovation and User Experience, in the early design stage there's a delicate balance between collecting data from users and knowing where to take calculated risks that may run counter to the data. When taking a different approach, don't be afraid to step out on a limb. Then test to see if it works.Of course, this is just a taste of the half hour discussion we had, so you'll want to listen to the entire thing to get the most of Scott's insights on the subject." (Continued via uie, Jared Spool) [Usability Resources]
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Fri August 22 2008
Using breadcrumbs in website design ..."In last week's article, we discussed how site maps are a design cop-out. Cop-outs happen when the designers ...
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Using breadcrumbs in website design ..."In last week's article, we discussed how site maps are a design cop-out. Cop-outs happen when the designers focus on treating a symptom instead of addressing the root problem. This week, we look at a second common cop-out: breadcrumbs.Hansel and GretelAccording to the Brothers Grimm fairytale, two children of a woodcutter are abandoned in the woods. To ass... read more
Using breadcrumbs in website design ..."In last week's article, we discussed how site maps are a design cop-out. Cop-outs happen when the designers focus on treating a symptom instead of addressing the root problem. This week, we look at a second common cop-out: breadcrumbs.Hansel and GretelAccording to the Brothers Grimm fairytale, two children of a woodcutter are abandoned in the woods. To assist them at finding their way back to their home, the children ingeniously leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind them.Breadcrumbs on a web site serve a similar purpose. The trail found on the page is there to help the user find their way back to where they started. (Interestingly, Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs were eaten by the small animals inhabiting the woods, rendering them unavailable for the return trip.)Back in 2002, information architect Keith Instone pointed out that there were multiple types of breadcrumbs on a web site: * Location Breadcrumbs show the user where they are within the site's hierarchy. * Path Breadcrumbs show the user the path they took to get to the content. * Attribute Breadcrumbs show the user the attributes they've chosen while conducting a faceted search. * Application Breadcrumbs show the user the progress they've made in an application.Most sites that provide breadcrumbs show the location variety. In this case, each page displays the optimal path the user could've clicked on to get it. For example, the Energy.gov page, "A Brief History of Coal Use" displays the breadcrumb trail of "Educational Activities > Energy Lessons > Coal-Introduction > Coal History" even though the user could get there without clicking on any links in that trail.Even though path breadcrumbs are most like their fairytale ancestors, they are infrequently used on sites. It's rarely useful to display the oft circuitous route the user takes. Attribute breadcrumbs are more common now that guided navigational techniques, such as the camera selector on CircuitCity.com, have come into vogue. And, designers use application breadcrumbs to denote the completed steps in a multi-step workflow, such as checkout.Typically, each element in the breadcrumb is a link, allowing the user to click to go "back". But, it's not really back because, in many cases, the user never traversed those pages to get where they now are. Therefore, breadcrumbs really are a way to open up the site's hierarchy for inspection -- to let the user access a broader perspective of the site content -- and that's where the problem comes in." (Continued via uie, Jared Spool) [Usability Resources]
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