http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Design A listing of the most recently indexed works about Design in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Design http://tc.eserver.org/35759.html http://tc.eserver.org/35759.html This screencast will give you insight into HTML5 and CSS3 to help ease the pain that comes with transitioning to a slightly different syntax. http://tc.eserver.org/35761.html http://tc.eserver.org/35761.html Internet Explorer 6 is always a hot subject of debate. We’ve talked about it here many many times. The forums are full of folks trying to troubleshoot it. The CSS support is problematic and the JavaScript support is proprietary nonsense. The conversation is heating up a little hotter than usual lately, as major companies are starting to pull support for it. I thought I would start the conversation by covering the reasons I think people still use this browser. http://tc.eserver.org/35762.html http://tc.eserver.org/35762.html The popular JavaScript library jQuery is an amazing way to extend the design possibilities of your site beyond what CSS can do. But luckily, if you are already comfortable with CSS, you have a huge head start in jQuery! This is a very basic introduction to including jQuery on your web page and getting started writing a few functions. http://tc.eserver.org/35763.html http://tc.eserver.org/35763.html Starting off where we left off last time, we continue exploring the possibilities of jQuery. We revisit some of the old functions and make them do some smarter things. We explore a simple variable and an IF/ELSE statement. Then we look at the AJAX-y .load() function, the CSS function, and then finish off by writing out own custom function and going over how that layer of abstraction can help us keep our code clean. Semantics counts in JavaScript too! http://tc.eserver.org/35764.html http://tc.eserver.org/35764.html This video focuses on taking an already existing idea and code and turning it into a jQuery plugin. In this case it helps keep our code as semantic as it can be, and with JavaScript off, degrades nicely. We cover the syntax of creating a plugin, show off the cool chain-ability of jQuery, and show how to make the plugin versatile and expandable. http://tc.eserver.org/35766.html http://tc.eserver.org/35766.html Recently I looked at how Adobe is reworking Flash in preparation for the coming battle with Microsoft over the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space and, with it, the likely future of computer-based design. In this article we finally get to see just what forces Microsoft has assembled – and its three staged launches at the MIX 07 conference in Las Vegas effectively amounted to a declaration of all-out war. http://tc.eserver.org/35768.html http://tc.eserver.org/35768.html Windows Presentation Foundation is a cross-browser cross-platform cross-device implementation of .NET for building and delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. http://tc.eserver.org/35769.html http://tc.eserver.org/35769.html Which pages have the search engines crawled? What kind of pages are they? Has the search engine Indexing indexed all of the crawled pages? How’s the search engine ranking traffic? http://tc.eserver.org/35770.html http://tc.eserver.org/35770.html SharePoint can neither create nor destroy organizational chaos, but does an excellent job of reflecting the level of organizational chaos that existed at the time of deployment. The “SharePoint paradox” and paths to SharePoint wickedness. The power of Issue Mapping and IBIS based collaboration. How to leverage the best of SharePoint and Issue Mapping. http://tc.eserver.org/35772.html http://tc.eserver.org/35772.html Given the pressures on firms to provide increased value at lower costs, it’s imperative that they find ways to reduce the costs of creating and managing documents and increase their value to clients and personnel. Microsoft SharePoint provides a range of features to make your firm’s documents “smarter,” from capturing rich metadata to automating workflows to intelligent search. As applied, these features can transform passive documents into active, reusable resources. In this article I’ll describe some of the ways that SharePoint can reduce the effort to create, manage and retrieve documents and increase their value, as smart documents, to both your firm and its clients. http://tc.eserver.org/35773.html http://tc.eserver.org/35773.html The SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata feature has been my favourite topic since coming back from the SharePoint conference. I get excited about this kind of thing because metadata is a big part of all of the software we build. But some people are probably saying "Why should we get so excited about new metadata features in SharePoint? The new UI and improved capacity are really the neat things about SharePoint 2010." http://tc.eserver.org/35741.html http://tc.eserver.org/35741.html I am working on a number of website projects right now. My mission is to banish ‘lorem ipsum’ by working text into page designs before development starts. I wanted to find a tool that would let me create page mockups quickly and try out different combinations of copy and layout. Eventually, I settled on Balsamiq Mockups, which is an awesome tool. The rest of this article describes the different alternatives I considered and concludes with a detailed review of Balsamiq. http://tc.eserver.org/35742.html http://tc.eserver.org/35742.html The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and open-source tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use. http://tc.eserver.org/35744.html http://tc.eserver.org/35744.html We wanted to provide a comprehensive references of elements that are new or have been redefined in HTML5, so we've created a glossary. The purpose of the glossary is simple: we’re going to give you a breakdown of all the elements within the spec in clear, bite-sized chunks. http://tc.eserver.org/35717.html http://tc.eserver.org/35717.html All the screenshots in your Word document are different sizes. What’s the quickest way to get them all the same size? Is there a shortcut? Yes! http://tc.eserver.org/35728.html http://tc.eserver.org/35728.html Treat others the way you would want to be treated. It seems ridiculous to think that one of the most common rules taught to children somehow hinders effective business communication when these children become adults. But it’s true. To be effective at communicating with customers (for example, internal audiences who buy into ideas or messages, or external audiences who buy products or services), one must turn away from this standard rule and focus instead on treating others the way they want to be treated. http://tc.eserver.org/35696.html http://tc.eserver.org/35696.html Those who think video games are not educational, this post is for you. Not only can video games be an enjoyable experience, they can teach us many things. Websites and video games often use similar concepts about usability in order to achieve an amazing end-product. I’ve come up with 6 essential concepts that video games can teach web designers about usability. http://tc.eserver.org/35702.html http://tc.eserver.org/35702.html Now is an exciting time to be creating CSS layouts. After years of what felt like the same old techniques for the same old browsers, we’re finally seeing browsers implement CSS 3, HTML 5 and other technologies that give us cool new tools and tricks for our designs. But all of this change can be stressful, too. How do you keep up with all of the new techniques and make sure your Web pages look great on the increasing number of browsers and devices out there? In part 1 of this article, you’ll learn the five essential characteristics of successful modern CSS websites. http://tc.eserver.org/35703.html http://tc.eserver.org/35703.html Today we take a look deeper into the hidden art of digital retouching where skies can always be blue and imperfections simply disappear. Whether you like it or hate it, think it’s necessary or not, retouching is here to stay. http://tc.eserver.org/35704.html http://tc.eserver.org/35704.html This article will cover a basic understanding of what the left and right brains are, and each of their traits. We’ll also go into how we, as creative people, can harness this understanding of the left and right brain to be more creative, as well as succeed in other work-related tasks. http://tc.eserver.org/35705.html http://tc.eserver.org/35705.html Be it web-based applications or online services, they are taking the Internet by storm. Many websites introducing these services are created and launched to get users to sign up and use the software (hopefully for a long-term). The question is: How do we get users from the unfamiliar zone into the interested zone and subsequently becoming a first time use? http://tc.eserver.org/35706.html http://tc.eserver.org/35706.html For a database administrator, DBM (database management) tools make tasks related to maintaining relational databases efficient and fast. Prior to the popularity of these tools, most DBA’s had to use the command line to create, edit, and delete databases. In this article, we present to you the top five most popular/most voted for database management tools. http://tc.eserver.org/35713.html http://tc.eserver.org/35713.html I did an experiment on Friday that taught me an important lesson: When it comes to handling XML structures, I know pretty much jack. This may be a fatal admission for a technical communicator, but it’s an honest one. http://tc.eserver.org/35627.html http://tc.eserver.org/35627.html Seth Godin believes that everything reflects what you stand for—right down to your technical documents. Ever looked at Apple’s tech docs? http://tc.eserver.org/35629.html http://tc.eserver.org/35629.html On the web, write in small digestible chucks, which fit into the information hierarchy. To create your hierarchy, outline the website as you would for printed material. Then examine the site’s purpose and outline the main sections (e.g. words people use to navigate) and the links within those heads. Test it before it goes online. http://tc.eserver.org/35631.html http://tc.eserver.org/35631.html Websites are generally designed by dogs. There’s a lot of optimism. The dogs look at the website and think of it as an endless attic. No matter how much stuff you into it, there’s always room for more. The dogs approach each design step with a ‘have gigabytes, must fill’ enthusiasm. And then cats have to manage the website. The dogs let everyone publish and the cats are certainly not going to review all this stuff. The dogs created an architecture where everyone can find everything and now nobody can find anything. The cats shake their heads. http://tc.eserver.org/35638.html http://tc.eserver.org/35638.html Using color and color alone as a visual cue is appealing because it’s usually an aesthetically pleasing and a minimalist design technique. Calls to action and visual cues are critical to interface designers because users, especially on the web, have limited patience and are looking to process information and make decisions quickly. Since the brain recognizes and forms an emotional bond with colors almost immediately, colors are a natural choice for visual cues. Unfortunately, it’s easy to alienate or confuse some of your users when some of those aesthetically pleasing colors look very similar. To point out a few interfaces that use hard to differentiate colors as visual cues, here are a few examples that have given me some trouble. http://tc.eserver.org/35643.html http://tc.eserver.org/35643.html In my column, On Good Behavior, I’ll explore the essentials of good interaction design. This first column provides a brief introduction to interaction design—defining the scope this column will cover—then explores some key design principles. What is interaction design? http://tc.eserver.org/35645.html http://tc.eserver.org/35645.html Many of us are more comfortable communicating in words than in pictures. For example, user assistance writers are by nature and training writers, so they understand words and are adept at using word processing and publishing tools. Writers use lexicentric tools not only for creating and delivering content, but also as cognitive tools—that is, tools that help them think more clearly and efficiently. Thus, a user assistance writer might create a user-task matrix or take advantage of a word processor’s outline view when creating or evaluating a document’s structure. http://tc.eserver.org/35647.html http://tc.eserver.org/35647.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/35648.html http://tc.eserver.org/35648.html In this installment of Search Matters, we’ll continue our discussion of ads in search results. Understand what makes a good ad. Limit cannibalization. Provide ads for internal merchandise instead of third-party advertising. Pay special attention to ads on pages that appear if there are no search results. http://tc.eserver.org/35649.html http://tc.eserver.org/35649.html For the last 6 months, I have been using Microsoft Expression Blend as my primary design tool. Blend, shown in Figure 1, is quickly becoming a powerful product. Its new Sketchflow module had me at hello. http://tc.eserver.org/35655.html http://tc.eserver.org/35655.html The arrow and its brethren are everywhere on our computer screens. For example, a quick examination of the Firefox 3.0 browser, shown in Figure 1 in its standard configuration, yields eight examples of arrows—Forward, Back, and Reload buttons, scroll bar controls, and drop-down menus that reveal search engine, history, and bookmark choices. http://tc.eserver.org/35656.html http://tc.eserver.org/35656.html Not long after I went independent, a friend who works at a well-known global advertising agency asked if I would be interested in helping out on a high-profile Web site redesign project. I was pretty stoked. He suggested I come in to meet his team. After meeting with the lead developer and project manager, I was told they wanted to bring me on. All I had to do was to meet the creative director. “Can I see your portfolio?” I hadn’t brought one. “I can give you the URL,” I said. We weren’t near a computer. His glassy response: “I’m not sure what we have to discuss if I can’t see your work.” http://tc.eserver.org/35657.html http://tc.eserver.org/35657.html Conflicting demands make many UX professionals think of ads as a necessary evil. Customers frequently go out of their way to say they hate ads, while marketers always seem to try their hardest to stuff as many of them as they can on each search results page on your site. This leaves many UX design professionals caught in the middle, trying to balance the ad equation—and frequently failing to fully satisfy either customers or marketers. For this 2-part column, I’ve teamed up with advertisement and eyetracking research guru Frank Guo to present real-world strategies for successfully integrating ads into your search results. The goal is making money without unduly turning off your customers. http://tc.eserver.org/35676.html http://tc.eserver.org/35676.html In order to provide guidance to those involved in the preparation of documents for the Japanese market, a special Japanese layout taskforce has developed the “Requirements for Japanese Text Layout”. Here is an insight into the content. http://tc.eserver.org/35677.html http://tc.eserver.org/35677.html The shift in information development from a narrative to a modular writing style reflects the established shift towards modularization of source code. What can information developers learn from software developers? What are the challenges and benefits of the modular approach? http://tc.eserver.org/35618.html http://tc.eserver.org/35618.html By reading this short tutorial, you'll get acquainted with the DITA 1.1 markup and after that, you'll be able to author your first DITA document right away. This short tutorial will not discuss the DITA ``philosophy'' or the advantages of the DITA vocabulary over other XML vocabularies (e.g. DocBook). http://tc.eserver.org/35598.html http://tc.eserver.org/35598.html I’m part of the AEC User Experience Team at Autodesk. Our goal is to design a great user experience for our customers, but just what does that mean? Our definition of user experience focuses on all the touchpoints that current or new users have with our product. For example, the downloading of software trials is often the beginning of one’s user experience with a product. If you have to fill out forms that ask for too much information, (should “cell phone number” be a required field on a trial download form?) or present you with too many obstacles, the likelihood of a positive user experience will be low. Your interactions with technical support, documentation, the product, and even other products that you use, are all aspects of the user experience. http://tc.eserver.org/35600.html http://tc.eserver.org/35600.html This tutorial is intended for practitioners who have come to interaction design from a research, psychology, information architecture, or other non-design background. It focuses on what happens after the requirements are done and before you build your first prototype. Design fields such as graphic arts, architecture, and industrial design have long-standing practices for innovative design, and these apply well to interaction design. http://tc.eserver.org/35601.html http://tc.eserver.org/35601.html An SME is someone who has been trained and has worked in the area that is being targeted for the new application. At Autodesk, we have found that pairing SMEs with Interaction Designers is the most efficient and successful way of meeting user centered design goals. http://tc.eserver.org/35604.html http://tc.eserver.org/35604.html As interaction designers at Autodesk, we sometimes engage in design and thought investigations that are not directly related to the task at hand. These investigations are ways to frame problems by venturing into related design disciplines. For example, in order to understand what might be an appropriate transition when changing views in a 3d model, we try to understand how a video artist would create a transition between two scenes in a video. To understand how to improve the graphic quality of elements drawn in a building information model, we look at lots of pencil sketches drawn by architects. We think, what would happen if an on-screen element was made from physical material? http://tc.eserver.org/35607.html http://tc.eserver.org/35607.html Give 3 designers 4 weeks to create multiple conceptual designs for 8 features and what do you get? If they are team of innovative designers you might get the designs and a new process. If they are a team of committed designers you might get the designs and an improved collaboration. We were lucky. We got all three. http://tc.eserver.org/35608.html http://tc.eserver.org/35608.html The Process and Power team hadn’t conducted contextual inquires before. Since the group was originally launched as a start-up within a larger organization, the Product Design team often found itself in an ad-hoc rapid process with Software Development (SWD) – working frantically to develop the right amount of specificity to keep the SWD machine cranking and the goal of first release clearly in sights. http://tc.eserver.org/35609.html http://tc.eserver.org/35609.html Our plan was to market Project Dragonfly virally. Going out now meant that we were a little early and many details were still on the to-do list. As a user centered design practitioner working with an Agile Development process, I was comfortable working in an iterative manner to engage users quickly so that we think through details and bring solutions forward. Yet something about this situation seemed different to me. We wanted the world to broadcast about the benefits of Project Dragonfly while our marketing efforts simply facilitated the conversation. http://tc.eserver.org/35557.html http://tc.eserver.org/35557.html Laying out your poster on a grid establishes limitations for your poster. Choosing a font establishes limitations for your poster. Being conservative in your design choices establishes limitations. Working within limits requires discipline. Setting yourself limitations does not necessarily limit creativity; it can do just the opposite. http://tc.eserver.org/35558.html http://tc.eserver.org/35558.html Academics use posters to present research, but their posters are often ugly, with tiny text, confusing layouts, and dubious colour schemes. Better Posters is about making posters informative and beautiful. http://tc.eserver.org/35559.html http://tc.eserver.org/35559.html If you look through a poster session at a scientific conference, I’ll bet over 98% of their titles are centered at the top of their posters. Why? There is no advantage in reading. Most word processors and other publishing programs start with text left aligned by default, which implies that people deliberately center the text all the time. http://tc.eserver.org/35560.html http://tc.eserver.org/35560.html New research shows that highly embellished graphs and charts may actually help people understand data more effectively than traditional graphs. http://tc.eserver.org/35561.html http://tc.eserver.org/35561.html It looks like the opening (quoted above) overreaches what the study actually does. The research only looks at backgrounds, but “chart junk” comes in many other forms: pointless 3-D effects, crazy colour schemes, excessive gridlines, cutesy cartoons, and more. The summary of this research in no way provides a scientific basis to argue, “I like the 3-D effect, and science supports it’s easier to read!” http://tc.eserver.org/35562.html http://tc.eserver.org/35562.html I stumbled upon this poster while reading the blog Anna’s Bones. She described as being finished “just in the nick of time.” A few more hours, and a stronger editorial hand, probably would have been welcomed. http://tc.eserver.org/35563.html http://tc.eserver.org/35563.html A poster can be better than giving a talk. It’s just an illustrated abstract. http://tc.eserver.org/35564.html http://tc.eserver.org/35564.html Because many researchers use PowerPoint for their talks and lectures, they also tend to use it for every graphic problem, including posters. Predictably, the form of the resulting posters often look like nothing more than a series of ugly PowerPoint slides tacked together. A poster is more like a whiteboard than slides. But because many researchers give more presentations than posters, they’re not used to thinking in terms of a big space, viewed all at once, instead of a series of small spaces, viewed one at a time. http://tc.eserver.org/35565.html http://tc.eserver.org/35565.html As discussed recently, many people use PowerPoint to design posters, an act that borders on criminal. PowerPoint was designed for multiple projected images with minimal text, not one large image with complex text and graphics. People use PowerPoint because it’s the only thing remotely resembling a graphics software that people are familiar with. Microsoft Office simply doesn’t have a good, high end graphics component. Publisher comes close. OpenOffice does have a graphics component, simply called Draw. If you are not willing to shell out the big bucks generally required of a professional graphics software package, Draw has several features in its favour. http://tc.eserver.org/35566.html http://tc.eserver.org/35566.html I have used Microsoft Publisher a lot for posters. I’m going to show three easy things that Publisher does well that are useful when making a conference poster. http://tc.eserver.org/35568.html http://tc.eserver.org/35568.html Adobe AIR has grown immensely popular over the past months. With its popularity, many new applications have been released. During this period, the following 10 issues have been the mistakes I have seen most often among developers. Hopefully, this list can help you avoid the same mistakes when building your next AIR application. http://tc.eserver.org/35569.html http://tc.eserver.org/35569.html I get to see and play with a lot of really cool AIR applications (even when they’re still being developed). Every now and then I come across an app that totally ignores any best practices or usability rules. AIR provides developers with a lot of features that could potentially annoy users if not used wisely. I thought it was a good idea to write this article. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use these features, I just want you to think about them before you add them to your application. http://tc.eserver.org/35572.html http://tc.eserver.org/35572.html As part of a project I'm working on, we are going to develop a comic-style collection of user scenarios to help communicate best practices around a security service we are offering. http://tc.eserver.org/35577.html http://tc.eserver.org/35577.html Fortunately, you don't see dialogs in web apps much, but this sort of modal dialog lunacy is, sadly, becoming more popular in today's AJAX-y world of web 2.5. Those who can't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, I guess. http://tc.eserver.org/35578.html http://tc.eserver.org/35578.html This may sound a little harsh, but you'll see, when you do usability tests, that there are quite a few users who simply do not read words that you put on the screen. If you pop up an error box of any sort, they simply will not read it. http://tc.eserver.org/35579.html http://tc.eserver.org/35579.html Quick Tables are a quick and easy way to insert a pre-formatted table. However, the default tables are probably not what you want, so you need to know how to add your own. http://tc.eserver.org/35584.html http://tc.eserver.org/35584.html Websites are social creatures. Or rather, their users are. In turn, the websites you visit are tempered by the users that interact with them. Your experience with a website, say facebook.com, is directly linked to the people with which you interact on that website. But this introduces an interesting challenge for a user experience designer: do you design for the intial experience or the resulting experience? http://tc.eserver.org/35590.html http://tc.eserver.org/35590.html The site focuses on web usability, user research, usability testing, accessibility and standards focused design. http://tc.eserver.org/35593.html http://tc.eserver.org/35593.html How can we designers get valid feedback from more design iterations in less time? One bottleneck in the design flow is finding a steady stream of usability testers. Between the extremes of the perfect (an actual user, on site) and the unacceptable (the developer who's coding the feature), lies the grey zone of user proxies. Can you use internal employees with relevant domain knowledge to usability test your products, and still get valid data? http://tc.eserver.org/35594.html http://tc.eserver.org/35594.html In his book, Sketching User Experience, Bill Buxton advocates for sketching as a technique and process that can put experience front and center in design. I am a big fan of sketching and use the techniques I first learned in architecture school for interaction design. In this post, I’m going to give you a quick peek at the types of sketches I typically create in my design process with the hope that it will inspire you to try sketching for you next project. http://tc.eserver.org/35539.html http://tc.eserver.org/35539.html New FrameMaker documents have default Master Pages. Single-sided documents have one, called "Right," and double-sided documents have two, called "Left" and "Right." We use these pages to place the objects we want to repeat on all the Body Pages, things like our running heads, page numbers and repeating graphics. But what do you do when you need a different look for a Body Page, on a repeating basis? For example, no page number on the opening page of each chapter? You set up a custom master page. Here's how. http://tc.eserver.org/35547.html http://tc.eserver.org/35547.html Weblog collaboratif portant sur les enjeux sociopolitiques, technologiques et stratégiques entourant la normalisation et l'accessibilisation du Web, mais aussi un million d'autres trucs tout aussi futiles qui nous passent par l'esprit... http://tc.eserver.org/35549.html http://tc.eserver.org/35549.html Thanks to the hype generated by Business Week, The New York Times, Fortune, and Newsweek (among others), Web 2.0 has captured the imagination of consumers and businesses alike. But knowing how to leverage Web 2.0 concepts to fuel collaboration and innovation among employees, partners, and customers is another story. http://tc.eserver.org/35550.html http://tc.eserver.org/35550.html Bad buildings and bad web sites share similar architectural roots. First, many architects don’t inhabit the structures they design. They don’t fully understand the needs of their customers, and they’re not around to suffer the long-term consequences of poor decisions. Second, creating structures to stand the test of time is really difficult. http://tc.eserver.org/35551.html http://tc.eserver.org/35551.html Lo sviluppo di un’architettura dell’informazione prevede parecchie sfide, ma una biblioteca è un ambiente relativamente ben definito e sono disponibili molte esperienze e sapere collettivo da cui attingere. I siti web, d’altro canto, presentano un serie di nuove sfide. http://tc.eserver.org/35552.html http://tc.eserver.org/35552.html The article presents a point of view about analyzing and designing the user experience within pervasive networks made of distributed services and applications, where the user is the primary actor who freely and opportunistically connects and activates the system components following an activity-driven process. A digital content case study is used to outline the main characteristics of this scenario and to introduce a tool for user experience modelling and designing. From the application of this model are proposed some considerations about how the design process could change to support this vision. http://tc.eserver.org/35553.html http://tc.eserver.org/35553.html Information architecture (IA) and document architecture (DA) provide two, partly overlapping, perspectives on the creation of document structures. This article suggests how the architecture of a document can be analysed from these two perspectives. Literature on IA and DA has been examined in order to identify central ideas that are of relevance for analysing the architectures of digital documents. The article contains an overview of how IA and DA have been used and defined. The article shows how a model for analysing documents as sociotechnical artefacts can fruitfully draw on parts of the theoretical and practical complexes of IA and DA. The aspects that are identified as particularly important from IA are organisation systems, navigation, and labelling. From DA, logical structures, layout structures, content structures, and file structures are all applicable aspects. It is discussed how these various aspects may be interpreted in order to support an analysis of the organising principles of documents. http://tc.eserver.org/35554.html http://tc.eserver.org/35554.html The Journal of Information Architecture is an international peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Its aim is to facilitate the systematic development of the scientific body of knowledge in the field of information architecture. http://tc.eserver.org/35555.html http://tc.eserver.org/35555.html Uncertainty, in general, is a fundamental aspect of human activity and underlies much of our decision making. The notion of uncertainty in information seeking, in particular, dates back to Shannon and Weaver (1949) and since then has been investigated in many forms. Kulthau's (1993) work on information uncertainty is perhaps the most extensive. Through two specific examples, this article proposes uncertainty as a unifying heuristic in information architecture. Measurements of uncertainty can serve a diagnostic function in both the design and evaluation of information technologies and user interfaces. http://tc.eserver.org/35556.html http://tc.eserver.org/35556.html This essay re-frames Information Architecture as designing context in the digital layer, contending that IA has always been less about organizing information than about designing architecture for a new kind of contextual space. It explores how a global network of user-created hyperlinks has changed how we experience context, and how IA practice emerged to contend with this change. In addition, the essay proposes that IA study and practice develop tools and methods that improve our understanding and methods for solving the increasingly complex design challenges brought about by this new contextual reality. http://tc.eserver.org/35514.html http://tc.eserver.org/35514.html Over the past year we have worked with a number of organizations that have chosen to relocate their sites from an existing domain to a new domain. One of the questions that always comes up early in the process is “how much traffic are we going to lose?” It is an excellent question and not an easy one to answer, but in today’s column I am going to explore that exact question. http://tc.eserver.org/35515.html http://tc.eserver.org/35515.html Google has a bidding methodology called Budget Optimizer that attempts to maximize the traffic you receive for the keywords in a campaign. This is useful for early buying cycle keywords. However, every keyword should be reaching some goal regardless of where it falls into the buying cycle. It was difficult to track the effectiveness of these campaigns until recently when Google made some changes to Google Analytics. Now you can more effectively bid on early buying cycle keywords, or keywords that you want exposure for, but do not have direct returns by combining the new Google Analytics goals with a budget optimizer campaign. http://tc.eserver.org/35519.html http://tc.eserver.org/35519.html Demonstrates how collaboration between all involved in a project can improve the final product, improve the bottom line, and improve your own knowledge base. By understanding the point of view of your collaborators, you can present information better and be sure they understand your point of view better as well. http://tc.eserver.org/35527.html http://tc.eserver.org/35527.html In our design review sessions, a couple of members from our eight-person team share what they’re working on and ask questions about challenges they’re facing. We provide feedback and critique their project. If you’ve ever participated in a creative writing group, the design review works similarly. Team members use common sense and experience to guide their questions and reviews. Somewhat in contrast to a creative writing group, though, you don’t have to bring a finished piece to share. http://tc.eserver.org/35505.html http://tc.eserver.org/35505.html Personas are a powerful tool for helping you to better understand the needs of your users. In this comic, drawn exclusively for Think Vitamin, you’ll learn more about Personas and how they’ll revolutionize the way you design and build web sites. http://tc.eserver.org/35506.html http://tc.eserver.org/35506.html The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, published in 1998, introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool. Based on the single-chapter discussion in that book, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry due to their unusual power and effectiveness. Had personas been developed in the laboratory, the full story of how they came to be would have been published long ago, but since their use developed over many years in both my practice as a software inventor and architectural consultant and the consulting work of Cooper designers, that is not the case. Since Inmates was published, many people have asked for the history of Cooper personas, and here it is. http://tc.eserver.org/35507.html http://tc.eserver.org/35507.html The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but a lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona. Although space does not permit a full treatment of persona creation in this article, I hope to highlight a few essential points. http://tc.eserver.org/35508.html http://tc.eserver.org/35508.html We use personas because they are powerful design, measurement, and communication tools. We use them in design to help us avoid the elastic user problem--where "the user" is a total novice one minute and a technophile the next--as well as self-referential design, because designers are seldom representative of a product's target audience. Personas also help cut through assumptions that certain tasks are necessary; if a task doesn't directly help accomplish a goal, we can try to eliminate it. http://tc.eserver.org/35509.html http://tc.eserver.org/35509.html Using "personas" forces us to think carefully about who our customer is for each product — what they need and want and how they'll use it. We've come up with a few personas, and each one has a name and personality. Even for a book on business planning, for instance, "Sally Startup" has different needs than does "Vic Venture." http://tc.eserver.org/35487.html http://tc.eserver.org/35487.html It's not uncommon to hear people complaining about the poor user experience of some B2B and enterprise applications. Read through these top tips to help you design enterprise applications that offer a better user experience and increase productivity. http://tc.eserver.org/35488.html http://tc.eserver.org/35488.html "Content-rich" is not enough. Most websites are not learner-friendly. As an industry, we haven’t done our best to make our content-rich websites suitable for learning and exploration. Learners require more from us than keywords and killer headlines. They need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable. Amber Simmons tells how to begin creating rich content sites that invite and repay exploration and discovery. http://tc.eserver.org/35493.html http://tc.eserver.org/35493.html When writing software, *please* don't give error messages that are only meaningful to developers of the software. Microsoft used to be awful for this: "System fault at DEAD:BEEF, please contact your system administrator". Which would've been cool, except that I *was* the system administrator. http://tc.eserver.org/35499.html http://tc.eserver.org/35499.html Development of HTML 5, the highly touted upgrade to the language of the Web, is progressing but still faces obstacles, including lack of a standard video codec, said an official of the World Wide Web Consortium at a gathering on Tuesday. http://tc.eserver.org/35500.html http://tc.eserver.org/35500.html HTML 5, a groundbreaking upgrade to the prominent Web presentation specification, could become a game-changer in Web application development, one that might even make obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX. http://tc.eserver.org/35476.html http://tc.eserver.org/35476.html In addition to font stacks, why not replace the heading text with an image, embedded font, or bit of Flash? The methods described below are easier than they sound. And the end result is that the vast majority of users will see the beautiful typography you want them to see. A word of warning, though: don’t use dynamic text replacement for all of the text on your page. All that would do is slow it down and frustrate your visitors. Instead, save it for headings, menu items, pull quotes and other small bits of text. http://tc.eserver.org/35478.html http://tc.eserver.org/35478.html Looks at 50 most useful typographic tools, techniques and resources for creating effective and expressive designs. We will also look at some hands-on typography tools that help designers and developers learn how to style their Web content, test it interactively and see the changes instantly. These tools are great for experimenting with different font types for your website. http://tc.eserver.org/35479.html http://tc.eserver.org/35479.html PHP is one of the most widely used open-source server-side scripting languages that exist today. With over 20 million indexed domains using PHP, including major websites like Facebook, Digg and WordPress, there are good reasons why many Web developers prefer it to other server-side scripting languages, such as Python and Ruby. This post presents 50 useful PHP tools that can significantly improve your programming workflow. Among other things, you’ll find a plethora of libraries and classes that aid in debugging, testing, profiling and code-authoring in PHP. http://tc.eserver.org/35480.html http://tc.eserver.org/35480.html Below, we present 50 extremely useful CSS tools, generators, templates and resources. We did not include “traditional” CSS tools, such as Firebug or the Web Developer extension, but tried to focus on rather unknown tools that are definitely worth a look. Some tools are new and some are old, but hopefully everybody will find a couple of new useful or at least inspiring tools. http://tc.eserver.org/35481.html http://tc.eserver.org/35481.html Sometimes being a web-developer is just damn hard. Particularly coding is often responsible for slowing down our workflow, reducing the quality of our work and sleepless nights with pizza and coffee laying around the laptop. Reason: with a number of incompatibility issues and quite creative rendering engines it sometimes takes too much time to find a workaround for some problem without addressing browsers with quirky hacks. And that’s where ready-to-use solutions developed by other designers come in handy. In this post we present 50 new CSS-techniques, ideas and ready-to-use solutions for effective coding. http://tc.eserver.org/35482.html http://tc.eserver.org/35482.html Since web-development is a quite dynamic field nowadays, new techniques are being developed and updated all the time. A primary example are CSS-related techniques, which emerge almost every day and offer more possibilities for fellows web-developers. We keep an eye on the recent developments and collect new ideas and methods for our readers. A “fresh” round-up of the “fresh” CSS techniques, tutorials and layouts. http://tc.eserver.org/35483.html http://tc.eserver.org/35483.html Ampersands have long been the character in a typeface with which typographers can indulge themselves. Sweeping curves, flirtatious finishes and bold statements – these are the things that make ampersands an exciting character to use and, better still, to design. There are, however, two problems. http://tc.eserver.org/35484.html http://tc.eserver.org/35484.html While many designers have been quick to embrace web standards, it’s surprising how often the basic standards of typography are neglected. Here are ten deadly sins to avoid in your web typography. http://tc.eserver.org/35473.html http://tc.eserver.org/35473.html Here is a collection of some testing tools that we have compiled to aid your testing handily grouped into categories. Look out for our reviews of some of these tools coming soon. http://tc.eserver.org/35474.html http://tc.eserver.org/35474.html Generates screenshots of how websites appear at 800x600 and 1024x768 resolution in six commonly used web browsers. http://tc.eserver.org/35450.html http://tc.eserver.org/35450.html How can user-centered design principles be applied to technical communication? http://tc.eserver.org/35451.html http://tc.eserver.org/35451.html Every other team meeting, three team members get 30 minutes each to talk about projects they are working on, and they get to demonstrate some of the cool things they are integrating into the project. As a team, we look at the project and both learn from what they’ve done, and make suggestions on how they might improve the project. http://tc.eserver.org/35454.html http://tc.eserver.org/35454.html When designing an online store, you have to consider many different types of customers: repeat customers, first-timers, people in a rush, etc. One thing that would help all of them is optimum usability. You can achieve this in a variety of ways, starting with eliminating the most common usability problems from your website. Fixing any one of the following eight common usability problems will get you started on the path to usability and user-experience heaven and, ultimately, more sales. http://tc.eserver.org/35455.html http://tc.eserver.org/35455.html A lot of designers think CMYK is the way to go when designing for print. We will, of course, always use CMYK-based ink, but this does not mean you have to work with CMYK files. You can work with RGB images to perfectly optimize your print colors. http://tc.eserver.org/35457.html http://tc.eserver.org/35457.html Most people who have designed websites or apps in Photoshop will, at one point or another, have had issues trying to match colors in images to colors generated by HTML, CSS or code. This article aims to solve those problems once and for all. http://tc.eserver.org/35459.html http://tc.eserver.org/35459.html Clean. Easy to use. User-friendly. Intuitive. This mantra is proclaimed by many but often gets lost in translation. The culprit: complexity. How one deals with complexity can make or break an application. A complex interface can disorient the user in a mild case and completely alienate them in an extreme case. But if you take measures first to reduce actual complexity and then to minimize perceived complexity, the user will be rewarded with a gratifying experience. http://tc.eserver.org/35460.html http://tc.eserver.org/35460.html Unfortunately, not many people enjoy criticism. In fact, many have developed a thick skin and take pride in their ability to brush it off and move on. However, despite its negative connotation, criticism often presents an excellent opportunity to grow as a designer. Before you can respond effectively, you need to understand what those opportunities are. http://tc.eserver.org/35461.html http://tc.eserver.org/35461.html While art and design schools do an impressive job of teaching the importance of form, function, and how to use flashy Photoshop techniques, it's rare that designers have been taught the skills necessary to pass off their projects to printers so that they may not only successfully, but smoothly, produce a designed work. In this article, I'll discuss the basics when it comes to translating your brilliant ideas (and surely hours of your precious time and energy) into successfully printed projects with a printer, making it easier to keep your deadlines and maintain a blissfully happy and healthy relationship with your vendor. http://tc.eserver.org/35462.html http://tc.eserver.org/35462.html It may sound like a simple thing, but you better believe that a lot of thought goes into the design of a magazine cover. Covers compete for attention next to dozens of other magazines on the rack. In this tutorial, we’ll not only take you through the process of creating a cover, but also reveal techniques that designers use to make their covers stand out. http://tc.eserver.org/35463.html http://tc.eserver.org/35463.html The most frequently asked questions I get from people who are new to InDesign revolves around Text Wrap; however, there are also questions about text formatting that don’t get asked. But I know they exist because when I’m presenting in front of an audience and I start formatting text, I can see the look of amazement on some folks’ faces as if they’re thinking, “Hey, I didn’t know you could do that!” http://tc.eserver.org/35464.html http://tc.eserver.org/35464.html InDesign has always supported the use of layers, but layers don’t always cut it when working with text. You can put a text frame on a layer and turn that layer on and off as needed, but it’s an all or nothing approach. What if you want to show and hide individual words or paragraphs and have the text automatically rewrap when you show or hide those words? With conditional text, it’s a breeze. http://tc.eserver.org/35465.html http://tc.eserver.org/35465.html Every now and then an app gets an update that really impacts your daily routine, and I’m happy to say that InDesign CS4 has some new-and-improved features that will do just that. InDesign is a page layout app, so anything that helps that process is a welcome addition, so let’s take a look at how CS4 will speed up your day-to-day work. http://tc.eserver.org/35466.html http://tc.eserver.org/35466.html We’re all used to working with style sheets (or least we should be). With each new version of InDesign, there seems to be a new way to style your content. We started with paragraph and character styles, then we got nested styles, followed by object styles, and finally table styles in InDesign CS3. As you can see, nested styles is not really new but it’s something that you should be taking advantage of, so let’s get to it. http://tc.eserver.org/35469.html http://tc.eserver.org/35469.html One appealing aspect of blogs over print media is the ability to comment and respond to comments. It’s the appeal of a conversation instead a lecture. http://tc.eserver.org/35440.html http://tc.eserver.org/35440.html Community is discussions, people, passion, alignment, emergent, support, connections, and relationships. http://tc.eserver.org/35442.html http://tc.eserver.org/35442.html Who owns user-generated content (UGC) posted to social media sites? This is but one of the many vexing issues presented by the emerging law of social media, albeit one of great interest to users, corporate subscribers and social networking providers alike. After all, if possession is 9/10 of the law, then the natural, lay reaction to the question of who owns social media UGC is “the Web site, of course.” That’s not exactly correct, however. http://tc.eserver.org/35443.html http://tc.eserver.org/35443.html Who owns user generated content (UGC) posted to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter,MySpace and the like? How has or will the law evolve to deal with the different, and sometimes unique, modes of personal interaction (with others and with information) made possible by social networking technologies? These are just a few of the legal issues presented by the emergence of social media, one of the fastest growing — and most addictive — forms of Internet-based communication in the relatively brief history of the medium. http://tc.eserver.org/35444.html http://tc.eserver.org/35444.html This chapter will take an HTML page that has absolutely nothing wrong with it, and improve it. Parts of it will become shorter. Parts will become longer. All of it will become more semantic. It’ll be awesome. http://tc.eserver.org/35448.html http://tc.eserver.org/35448.html With the advent of digital cameras, photographs are now stored on fixed and removable digital storage media (possibly kept in shoe boxes again!). But again, the solutions we see coming from the industry today mostly emphasize photo capture and storage, but offer little in terms of building photo libraries. Today’s digital cameras will record the time, date and exposure data; they might even permit a short audio comment to be recorded. However there is little if any software that will adequately utilize this data to catalog and search for images. http://tc.eserver.org/35439.html http://tc.eserver.org/35439.html A weblog/podcast by an Information Architect living and working in Ottawa, Ontario. http://tc.eserver.org/35426.html http://tc.eserver.org/35426.html Google is no longer the only hub for content discovery. The statusphere is introducing new channels that now serve as our attention dashboards and it's the collection of streams of consciousness from those we choose to follow. Collecta, Twitter Search, Facebook News Feeds, FriendFeed, etc., serve as the gateways to insight and enlightenment. http://tc.eserver.org/35428.html http://tc.eserver.org/35428.html Some folks may find it impressive that you know the ins and out of UNIX and how your last open source coding project attracted media attention, but the majority do not. Especially when acronyms start spewing forth with articulated speed. Keep in mind that executives are employed to keep you employed and need to understand your ideas to communicate them to stakeholders and customers. One way to minimize 'tech' talk is to include the following words into each technical statement: We are using [technology/programming language] to enhance [a specific part] of our business. http://tc.eserver.org/35430.html http://tc.eserver.org/35430.html This study describes what SDI Global Solutions did to help a small software company (hereafter referred to as SSC) to provide them with a basic infrastructure to support their information needs. We have broken up this study into sections titled, Company Description, Business Requirement, Starting State, Project Scope, Implementation, and Ending State. The purpose of the study is to provide guidance for similar projects to ensure the same or greater success. http://tc.eserver.org/35431.html http://tc.eserver.org/35431.html This presentation is for beginning to intermediate users of DITA. It's based on my experience with projects on which I'm project manager, information architect, and writer. http://tc.eserver.org/35433.html http://tc.eserver.org/35433.html DITA is useful for helping writers create small units of organized information that can be used in multiple contexts. Of course, the reader's problem then becomes locating the information they want in a quick, reasonable timeframe. Although DITA provides enough metadata to simplify searching, or even to present information the reader needs based on a profile, there are some media that cannot make use of those facilities. To bridge that gap, you can use the tried and true index. http://tc.eserver.org/35435.html http://tc.eserver.org/35435.html What does structured authoring mean to you? Structured authoring is a publishing workflow that lets you define and enforce consistent organization of information in documents, whether printed or online. What it means to me: defining a goal and assembling architected topics to help the reader achieve that goal. http://tc.eserver.org/35410.html http://tc.eserver.org/35410.html Below are twenty do's and don'ts of effective web design. Study, read, (re)read and print this page. It will help either make or break your website. And don't hesitate to let us know of anything we might have left out, in the comments below. We love getting your opinions on things and discussing the articles with you -- after all, you're quite possibly the coolest people in the world. http://tc.eserver.org/35411.html http://tc.eserver.org/35411.html At the recent workshop co-organized by W3C and XBRL International on improving access to financial data on the web, a few key issues related to the semantic web took center stage. The goal of the workshop was to identify opportunities and challenges for interactive access to financial data expressed in XBRL and related languages, and the broader opportunities for semantic technologies. http://tc.eserver.org/35413.html http://tc.eserver.org/35413.html Our best CSS gallery is a showcase of well designed websites by the best web designers and web developers around the world, css gallery help you to get inspirations for the web site projects as well as to learn and see what can be achieved through pure css layouts and web standard.