Ease of Use Outside the Box

As user experience designers in an enterprise, we find ourselves knee deep in pixels. Should we use a dropdown element or a set of radio buttons? 10pt or 12pt size font? A broad-and-shallow or narrow-and-deep information architecture? While such design considerations are necessary and important, we miss huge user experience opportunities outside the webpage, outside the website, outside the browser. By tackling inter-application usability opportunities, user experience (UX) professionals can make things easier in a big way.

Padilla, Mike. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Design>Web Design>User Experience

User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing

Just as it is important to choose the proper knife when slicing-n-dicing vegetables, it is critical to prescribe a suitable user interface to support faceted filtering. Faceted filtering allows you to narrow down a large list of objects to a manageable size by applying flexible combinations of attribute filters in any order. Rather than forcing you down fixed paths within a website’s information architecture, faceted filtering allows you to multi-dimensionally slice-n-dice the information in a manner that best accommodates your specific needs. A user interface that optimally supports faceted filtering must expose its robust functionality in a way that expresses affordances, controls complexity, and follows existing standards that have been pre-established across the web.

Padilla, Mike. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Information Design