Participatory design is an approach to design that attempts to actively involve end users in the design process to help ensure that the product designed meets their needs and is usable. This approach is focused on process and is not a design style. For some, this approach has a political dimension of user empowerment and democratisation. For others, it is seen as a way of abrogating design responsibility and innovation by designers.
#26561
Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville
Can we reasonably judge authority? How can we make good decisions in the information age? How do we know enough to ask the right questions? Peter Morville takes a moment to talk with us about these and other potential answers, his most recent book, the death of data, and our fascination with the future.
Danzico, Liz. Boxes and Arrows (2005). Articles>Interviews>Information Design
#11814
American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA)
The purpose of AIGA is to further excellence in communication design as a broadly defined discipline, strategic tool for business and cultural force. AIGA is the place design professionals turn to first to exchange ideas and information, participate in critical analysis and research and advance education and ethical practice.
AIGA (2001). Organizations>Graphic Design
#10199
The American Society for Information Science and Technology
ASIST provides the people, programs and publications that keep your career moving forward. Whether you need to improve your productivity through better information retrieval, satisfy the information needs of your clients and constiuents, or need to understand or affect information policies, ASIST can help you address all of these diverse needs.
#31624
Amex Woes Highlight Common PDF Accessibility Problem
American Express has come under criticism, and potential legal action, for the lack of accessibility of its credit card website. A blind customer of American Express credit cards found that Amex's change in the presentation of its online credit card statements from HTML to PDF format effectively prevented him from accessing his financial information online.
Rourke, Chris. User Vision (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Adobe Acrobat
#25942
An Agreement With a Web Designer: What Should it Look Like?
Whether you're spending a few hundred dollars, or thousands of dollars, on your website, you should have a written agreement with your web designer. Here's what to include.
Bennaco (2004). Articles>Web Design>Contracts
#29358
Analysing Everyday Interaction
Inspired by Don Norman's classic book, 'The Design of Everyday Things', I started to collect my own examples of bad designs to analyse according to interaction design principles. Here are just a few.
Poole, Alex. Alex Poole (2004). Articles>Usability>Interaction Design>User Experience
#14276
Analyzing an Organizational Web Site 
The Web is still so new that there is very little consensus about what an organizational Web page should be and what purpose(s) it should serve. You will start this exercise by examining some organizational Web sites (preferably organizations in your field). You will develop criteria by which to judge organizational sites, and then use those criteria to evaluate a single Web site, with the site’s creator as your audience. Your criteria will doubtless include elements like the elegance of the design and should certainly include the navigational system and other Web page practicalities. They should also include the fundamentals that are important in all technical documents: suitability to purpose(s) and audience(s), content, organization, and tone.
Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Web Design>Assessment
#20113
Analyzing Documents to Understand Tags
SGML is a language for describing the structure of a document. The language involves using a system of tags for elements of a document. Document analysis is the process of discovering the elements of a document and understanding how the parts work together to form the document.
Coggin, William O. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Information Design>SGML
#14995
This paper discusses the use of automated data collection to learn from hundreds of beta-test users of a web-based industrial product database how successfully the product met their needs. The collected data consisted of web server log data, opinion data from online questionnaires and follow-up interviews, and user profile data from telerecruiting and online registration was also collected. In the Proceedings of the 1998 Usability Professionals' Association Conference.
Kantner, Laurie and Larry Rusinsky. Tec-Ed, Inc. (1998). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#31893
Analyzing Your Users and Needs Before Creating the Help Deliverables; Interview with Nicky Bleiel
In this podcast, Nicky Bleiel says we should talk to as many users as we can — conducting on-site visits, sending surveys, gathering information from Marketing, Support, and other departments — so we can have a better understanding of our users’ needs and the formats and mediums that will work best for them. After completing this audience and needs analysis, we can then go out and create the deliverables that will best serve our users.
Bleiel, Nicky and Tom H. Johnson. Tech Writer Voices (2008). Articles>Interviews>Documentation>User Centered Design
#20430
How do you tell one typeface from another? If you’re trying to distinguish Helvetica from Times Roman, the difference is obvious. In other cases, however–especially between text designs having similar characteristics–the differences can be subtle and difficult for the less–experienced eye to see. One important step in training your eye to notice the details that set one design apart from another is to examine the anatomy of the characters that make up our alphabet.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2001). Design>Typography
#20274
Anatomy of a Corporate Intranet Project
Today more and more companies use intranets to communicate with employees and to help them perform their jobs. An intranet is an internal network that operates like the Internet.
Rhines, Becky. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Web Design>Intranets
#25430
In some sense, weblogs sum up what's so great about the Internet. Like fanzine editors before them, weblog editors embrace a topic or theme and run with it. Weblogs are a great indicator of what's happening on the Internet and within the web community.
Barrett, Cameron. Camworld (2005). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging
#28446
This tutorial describes some of the main attributes that HTML tags can feature.
Hunt, Ben. Web Design From Scratch (2006). Design>Web Design>HTML
#27326
And Then There Were Adwords... An Introduction
If you have been looking into Internet marketing, you have probably seen Adwords mentioned now and again. Why don’t we cover the basics of the program. Adwords is the name of the pay-per-click system offered by Google on its search engine.
Pires, Halstatt. Ezine Articles (2006). Articles>Web Design>E Commerce>Search
#30049
Animated Character Likeability Revisited: The Case of Interactive TV 
Animated characters have been a popular research theme, but the respective desktop applications have not been well-received by end-users. The objective of this study was to evaluate the use of an animated character for presenting information and navigating music videos within an interactive television (ITV) application. Information was displayed over music video clips with two alternative user interfaces: 1) semi-transparent information overlays, 2) an animated character. For this purpose, the differences between ITV and desktop computing motivated the adaptation of the traditional usability evaluation techniques. The evaluation revealed that users reported higher affective quality with the animated character user interface. Although the success of animated characters in desktop productivity applications has been limited, there is growing evidence that animated characters might be viable in a domestic environment for leisure activities, such as interactive TV.
Chorianopoulos, Konstantinos. Journal of Usability Studies (2006). Design>Multimedia>Interactive>Video
#14628
Animation: Technical Documents on the Move
Coleman presents a four-step process to develop an animation project while insuring consistency and quality.
Coleman, Mary Ellen. Intercom (2000). Design>Multimedia>Interactive
#23929
Un internaute fait très vite la différence entre un site qui vit et un autre qui croupit! Un site qui donne l'impression d'être abandonné, ou d'avoir été conçu de manière trop statique, a peu de chances de générer de nombreuses visites ! Pour inciter les gens à venir prendre régulièrement le pouls de votre site, pour qu'il aient confiance dans la fraîcheur de l'information, pour qu'ils se sentent accueillis, il faut que votre site respire!
Redaction (2004). (French) Design>Web Design
#31888
You've seen reader comments on weblogs and other Web 2.0 sites, but the Atom protocol makes it possible to create and manage such comments in a very flexible way. Flexible Web annotations is an idea that will open up an entirely new class of Web applications with very little actual new invention. Learn how to create a system to manage annotations for anything on the Web, from nearly anywhere.
Ogbuji, Uche and Eric Larson. IBM (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>RSS
#31012
Annual Report Graphic Use: A Review of the Literature 
Corporate annual reports typically include a narrative section and a financial section. The narrative section is not scrutinized by auditors as the financial section is, yet many readers rely heavily on its graphs to estimate the firm's financial situation. However, the graphs often misrepresent the financial data. To better understand annual report graphs' important role, this article examines more than 25 years of literature related to these four areas: (a) the ways financial graphs are prepared, used, and misinterpreted; (b) differences by country; (c) regulatory influences for accountants; and (d) the parts formatting and media selection decisions play in communication interpretation and persuasion. Across the literature, the author notes consensus that annual report graphs are widely used in many countries and that there is rampant disregard for the guidelines for their accurate, non-misleading presentation. The article concludes with seven proposed directions for future research.
Penrose, John M. JBC (2008). Design>Document Design>Business Communication>Visual Rhetoric
#28353
Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters
While anonymity may allow people to feel more free and disinhibited to discuss otherwise embarrassing or stigmatizing topics, it can also be a community's biggest enemy.
Grohol, John M. List Apart, A (2006). Articles>Web Design>Community Building
#20986
Anonymous Personalization: Part I
Personalization versus privacy. It's not a question of which will ultimately prevail. But rather, how can we have both?
Allen, Cliff. Allen.com (2003). Design>Web Design>Personalization>Privacy
#20987
Anonymous Personalization: Part II
Personalization doesn't always require that you obtain personally identifiable information about a visitor -- many times you can personalize your Web content by only knowing their interests and preferences.
Allen, Cliff. Allen.com (2003). Design>Web Design>Personalization
#22933
Another Way of Looking at Accessibility
Lorraine Ireland writes about her experiences of learning about web accessibility, having been in the business of selling adaptive technology for a number of years.
Ireland, Lorraine. Accessify (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility
#21912
A variety of technologies are evolving to help make type readable on the computer screen. Here's a report on anti-aliasing.
Tinkel, Kathleen. Adobe Magazine (1997). Design>Typography>Online
