Analyzing Card Sort Results with a Spreadsheet Template

This article explains how to quickly derive easily-read, quantitative results from a card-sort activity by entering data into a spreadsheet template that is adaptable to any set of cards and categories.

Lamantia, Joe. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting

Building Block Definitions (Containers)

Dives into the components of the building block system. Each has a place in his design framework for dashboards and portals.

Lamantia, Joe. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Design>Web Design>Programming

Connectors for Dashboards and Portals

The building block system includes several types of Connectors that make it possible for designers and architects to link the different areas of a Dashboard together via a consistent, easily understandable navigation model. The system also ensures the resulting information architecture can grow in response to changing needs and content. There's no special stacking hierarchy for the Connectors. However, they do have an official stacking size (most are size 3) in order to keep Dashboards constructed with the building blocks internally consistent.

Lamantia, Joe. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design

Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future

Questions of ethics and conflict can seem far removed from the daily work of user experience (UX) designers who are trying to develop insights into people's needs, understand their outlooks, and design with empathy for their concerns [2]. In fact, the converse is true: When conflicts between businesses and customers--or any groups of stakeholders--remain unresolved, UX practitioners frequently find themselves facing ethical dilemmas, searching for design compromises that satisfy competing camps. This dynamic is the essential pattern by which conflicts in goals and perspectives become ethical concerns for UX designers. Unchecked, it can lead to the creation of unethical experiences that are hostile to users--the very people most designers work hard to benefit--and damaging to the reputations and brand identities of the businesses responsible.

Lamantia, Joe. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Community Building>Ethics

Designing Ethical Experiences: Understanding Juicy Rationalizations

Designers rationalize their choices just as much as everyone else. But we also play a unique role in shaping the human world by creating the expressive and functional tools many people use in their daily lives. Our decisions about what is and is not ethical directly impact the lives of a tremendous number of people we will never know. Better understanding of the choices we make as designers can help us create more ethical user experiences for ourselves and for everyone.

Lamantia, Joe. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Ethics

Introduction to the Building Blocks

Outlines the design principles underlying the building block system of website design, and simple guidelines for combining blocks together to create any type of tile-based environment.

Lamantia, Joe. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Design>Web Design>Methods

Improving Our Ethical Choices: Managing the Imp of the Perverse

Psychologists and ethics researchers say we can take simple steps to align our Want and Should Selves over the three phases of decision making and help keep the Imp of the Perverse in check.

Lamantia, Joe. UXmatters (2008). Articles>TC>Ethics

First Fictions and the Parable of the Palace

this column will take the form of a journey through a wide range of topics at the intersection of user experience design and everyware.

Lamantia, Joe. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Technology>Ubiquitous Computing>User Experience

Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality

While ubiquitous computing remains an unpleasant mouthful of techno-babble to most people who know the term, and everyware is still an essentially unknown idea, the visibility of augmented reality has surged in the last twelve months.

Lamantia, Joe. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Interface>User Experience>Information Design

Anonymous Cowards, Avatars, and the Zeitgeist: Personal Identity in Flux: Part I 

Governments and large organizations, with legal and administrative concerns like taxation and security typically address the practical aspects of identity we experience on a daily basis—issuing IDs and credentials and deciding the mechanisms for their verification. This division of responsibilities for defining and executing the construct of personal identity is nearly as old as the mind/body schism at the heart of Western culture.

Lamantia, Joe. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Privacy>Social Networking