'Click Here': Needless Words

The words 'click here for...' and 'click here to...' serve no purpose within links. Unfortunately, many news sites still use them. According to Google, 'click here' is on about 8,970 pages at sptimes.com alone.

Ashby-Kuhlman, Nathan. ashbykuhlman.net (2002). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Usability

Essential Navigation Checklists for Web Design

These checklists pull together best practice in the disciplines of information design, usability and accessibility, into an easy to apply format. If you are already familiar with those topics, the checklists serve as a handy reminder that is easy to refer to and apply when planning navigation. If unfamiliar it's also a fast-track lesson - providing you with a head-start in getting it right and enables you to make better informed choices / compromises.

Eleniak, Marta. SitePoint (2003). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Usability

Global Navigation

97% of sites included global links to the site's top-level categories. While global links to top-level categories help reinforce the breadth of a site's offering, they also consume significant screen real estate for links that arguably are not as relevant to users as page-specific content. This is particularly true at the lower levels of the hierarchy, where there is a larger amount of semantic distance between the global links and the page content.

Adkisson, Heidi P. Web Design Practices (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>E Commerce

How Google Manages its Home Page

An average person can deal with only 7-10 choices on a web page, according to Google research. That's why it's so hard to get a link on the Google home page.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Usability

Helping People Find the Content They Want

Enabling people to find the specific information they require amongst the hundreds and thousands of other pieces of content available on a site can be a difficult task.

Barker, Iain. Step Two (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design

Improving Web Page Revisitation: Analysis, Design and Evaluation

In this paper, we distill several years of our research on understanding and improving how people return to their previously visited web pages. Our motivation is that web page revisitation is one of the most frequent actions in computer use, and consequently any interface improvements in this area - no matter how small - can have a very large effect. We report our findings across five categories of revisitation research: characterisations of user behaviour; system models of navigation and their impact on the user's understanding; interface methods for increasing the efficiency of the Back button; alternative system models for navigation; and alternative methods for presenting web navigation histories. The behaviour characterisation shows that revisitation is a dominant activity, with an average of four out of five page visits being to previously seen pages. It also shows that the Back button is heavily used, but poorly understood. Three interface strategies for improving web page revisitation are described. The first, a gesture-based mechanism for issuing the frequent Back and Forward commands, addresses low-level interface issues, and is shown to be both popular and effective. The second, a ‘temporal' behaviour for the Back and Forward buttons, aims to overcome the problems associated with poor understanding of the current behaviour of Back. Although the results do not conclusively show advantages for the temporal behaviour of Back, they strongly suggest that revisitation can be improved by providing temporally ordered lists of previously visited pages. The third interface scheme investigates how next-generation browsers could integrate the current tools for revisitation into a single utility, and how simple visualisation methods can be used to aid users in identifying target pages displayed in miniature.

Cockburn, A., Greenberg, S., Jones, S., McKenzie, B. and Moyle, M. University of Calgary (2003). Articles>Web Design>Information Design

Navigate on the Right? The Jury is Still Out

My own view is that we need more data before we can know whether right navigation is going to be a real improvement. To collect this data, we should allow users to work as normal and set them realistic tasks, with navigation being varied in both location and size.

Hudson, William. Syntagm (2002). Articles>Web Design>Information Design

Use of Faceted Classification

Unlike a simple hierarchical scheme, faceted classification gives the users the ability to find items based on more than one dimension. For example, some users shopping for jewelry may be most interested in browsing by particular type of jewelry (earrings, necklaces), while others are more interested in browsing by a particular material (gold, silver). “Material” and “type” are examples of facets; earrings, necklaces, gold, silver are examples of facet values.

Adkisson, Heidi P. Web Design Practices (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Creating a Site Design Plan

All the books tell me to set goals for my site. OK. They say that those goals need to be measurable and definite. Fine. But asking my client, “What are the site’s goals?” never seemed to get me what I wanted. It occurred to me that a better approach might be to get some background info from the client and then set the goals and present them to the client for approval.

Morrill-McClure, Karen. Digital Web Magazine (2005). Articles>Web Design>Planning>Information Design

Usability and Maintainability: Navigable Information

This post is part of a series on usability and maintainability. At first, meeting the needs of content consumers through usability can seem at odds with meeting needs of technical communicators through maintainability. My purpose in these posts is to discuss how technical communication best practices can satisfy both needs. I’ll use Gurak and Lannon’s usability criteria of users being able to “find what they need, understand the language, follow the instructions, and read the graphics.”

Gryphon Mountain (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Usability

An Information Architecture Perspective on Personalization  

Information architecture is the structural design of shared information environments (AIfIA, 2003). In terms of e-commerce web sites, the information architecture encompasses the organization of the content and functionality, the labelling system and the navigational scheme (Rosenfeld & Morville, 2002). Users interact directly with the user interface of a web site: scanning a list of links and selecting one, clicking on an icon to add an item to their shopping cart, and filling out a form. Users also interact with the content directly: reading introductory text to determine what each category is about, studying product details descriptions and pictures to see if this is what they want to buy, and comparing specific product features. The information architecture is the “invisible” layer between the user interface and the content.

Instone, Keith. Instone.org (2004). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Personalization

Taxonomic Distress: The Challenge of Developing Effective Taxonomies for Web-Facing Businesses

A good taxonomy is a win for both a company and its customers. It’s easy to see why taxonomy development is good for your users: The whole reason for creating a taxonomy for your site is to make information retrieval quick and easy by putting the information into a sensible structure that’s consistently applied. Well-designed taxonomies map out the base structure for your content, providing a navigation scheme that makes sense to your users.

Becker, Lane. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Taxonomy

Faucet Facets: A Few Best Practices for Designing Multifaceted Navigation Systems

Sometimes, content has many attributes that have different importance to different users. A hierarchy assumes everyone approaches these attributes the same way, but that’s often not the case.

Veen, Jeffrey. Adaptive Path (2002). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Taxonomy

Semantics in HTML 5

HTML 5, the W3C’s recently redoubled effort to shape the next generation of HTML, has, over the last year or so, taken on considerable momentum. It is an enormous project, covering not simply the structure of HTML, but also parsing models, error-handling models, the DOM, algorithms for resource fetching, media content, 2D drawing, data templating, security models, page loading models, client-side data storage, and more. There are also revisions to the structure, syntax, and semantics of HTML.

Allsopp, John. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>HTML5

The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

The W3C's Semantic Web project has been described in many ways over the last few years: an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, a place where machines can analyze all the data on the Web, even a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful. The problem with descriptions this general, however, is that they don't answer the obvious question: What is the Semantic Web good for? The simple answer is this: The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms.

Shirky, Clay. Shirky.com (2003). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Semantic

Semantics Continues to Not be RDF, But Enrichment, Classification and Taxonomy

Within the realm of computational semantics, there is still a fairly broad disconnect between triple pair semantics, the use of RDF (or turtle notation) to create atomic assertions, and the realm of semantics as reflected on the web. I do not expect this to change much in 2009, save perhaps that the gulf between the two will likely just get wider.

Cagle, Kurt. O'Reilly and Associates (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search

Flexible Fuel: Educating the Client on Information Architecture

Information architecture (IA) means so much to our projects, from setting requirements to establishing the baseline layout for our design and development teams. But what does it mean to your clients? Do they see the value in IA? What happens when they change their minds? Can IA help manage the change control process? More than ever, we must ensure that our clients find value in and embrace IA—and it’s is our job to educate them. If we want our customers to embrace IA, we must help them understand why we need it.

LaFerriere, Keith. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Information Design>Collaboration>Web Design

XML Transformation and Metadata Repositories Enable Information Integration

Among the popular emerging integration needs in the market today is information aggregation, normalization, and presentation from multiple back-end data sources to front-end applications. Termed Enterprise Information Integration by some vendors in the market, this type of solution relies on a centralized common object model to provide a data access interface to client applications. Applications can used this common interface to request data from one or more data sources in a single query, with the intricate details of resolving the query left to the integration tool. This session will explain the architecture of an enterprise information integration solution in general, highlight some of the vendors and their approaches in this market space, and explain the use of such as solution through a real-world example with a large financial services organization.

Gantz, Stephen. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Bulletproofing Web Services

As companies and consumers rely more on Web services, it becomes increasingly important for Web services developers to know how to properly design, develop, deploy, and ultimately manage a Web services system. However, because of the inherent complexities that can arise with a Web service implementation, it can be difficult to grasp practical fundamentals and devise a step-by-step plan for Web services development.

Ariola, Wayne. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML

Getting the Most Out of COCOON: A XML-Based Webs Service for a Registration Agency

Since 2005 the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) is established as a DOI registration agency for scientific content. Data providers transmit XML-files containing the DC-based metadata descriptions of the scientific data to a webservice infrastructure at the TIB, which was created by the Research center L3S during a project founded by the registration agency for scientific content. Data providers transmit XML-files containing the DC-based metadata descriptions of the scientific data to a webservice infrastructure at the TIB, which was created by the Research center L3S during a project founded by the German research association (DFG). This webservice infrastructure is based on the web application framework COCOON. We have however extended COCOON with full webservice functionalities. Using XSLT the webservice is furthermore able to transform XML-metadata files into well-formed PICA-files to insert the metadata information into the library catalogue of the TIB.

Brase, Jan. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML

Binding the Graphical Web (Component and Data Bindings with XBL, XHTML and SVG)

The emerging XML based web increasingly relies upon ways of presenting content in a just in time manner. Presentation technologies such as SVG and XHTML can do so, yet the power to properly harness them will likely lie in the emergent binding languages such as XBL, sXBL, and XTF. In this presentation, bindings and binding languages will be explored, illustrating how such environments as the Mozilla Firefox 1.5 browser are using XBL as a means for performing component binding into XHTML, SVG and XForms interfaces, looks at sXBL and the W3C's XBL directions, and details why such binding languages likely represent the future of XML presentation and interaction.

Cagle, Kurt. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML

Automated Mass Production of XSLT Stylesheets

Many have wished for a tool that would automate the creation of XSLT stylesheets. Building the interface alone to such a tool sounds like a tough job, and getting it to output working XSLT stylesheets that accomplish non-trivial tasks also sounds challenging. However, the comfort level of nearly all computer users with basic spreadsheet software actually makes the first task simpler than it once appeared to be, and the ease with which popular spreadsheet programs now save their contents in XML means that when you start with the right spreadsheet template, an XSLT stylesheet is not difficult to create from the XML version of a spreadsheet that uses that template.

DuCharme, Bob. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XSL

How Many Links Are Too Many Links?

To understand how much content effluvia we're subjected to, I wanted to see how many links are on the homepage of popular websites. For example, if I go to the homepage of the Huffington Post, I see 720 links, in one shot. Then click inside to a story and you've nearly doubled that number—it ads up pretty quickly. What about the tech blogs? BoingBoing Gadgets, 514. Gizmodo, 468. Engadget 432, all on one page. And on average, fewer than 1% of the links on news sites and blogs actually point to rich content, 99% are navigation and other article headlines. Aggregation site Techmeme has a whopping 1081 links.

Bilton, Nick. O'Reilly and Associates (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Hypertext