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.
#21296
Brand should be a component of every decision a company makes, from its customer service to its logistics to its letterhead to its interactive properties. Tips and advice for the IA needing to support the brand experience within a quality user experience.
Saffer, Dan. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Graphic Design>Marketing
#19706
Technical communication courses and training programs often benefit from peer review or group critique. To encourage learning, these activities require a constructive climate: Students must listen to one another, be receptive to feedback, and refrain from reproaches, interpretations, and judgments. Such a positive group spirit is not a given, especially if the school or corporate environment encourages competition more than collaboration. Teachers must foster an appropriate environment if they want their collaborative learning activities to be successful.
Doumont, Jean-luc. Intercom (2003). Articles>Education>Instructional Design>Collaboration
#22858
Building Hypermedia Information Systems That Work 
The trend to online delivery of information means new challenges for developers. New skills must be learned. Developing a hypermedia information delivery system. Five steps are critical to the conversion process: (I) Determine spectjic system requirements. (2) Create a pzoject team with clearly assigned roles. (3) Develop an implementation plan. (4) Implement the Plan. (5) Update and maintain the system.
Williams, Travis W. and Stacey D. Hatley. STC Proceedings (1997). Design>Web Design>Hypertext
#21645
Building New Documents with XSLT
This chapter will take you a few steps further by showing you how to add text and markup to your result tree with XSLT templates. First, you'll addliteral text to your output. Then you'll work with literal result elements, that is, elements that are represented literally in templates. You'll also learn how to add content with the text, element, attribute, attribute-set, comment, and processing-instruction elements. In addition, you'll get your first encounter with attribute value templates, which provide a way to define templates inside attribute values.
Fitzgerald, Michael. O'Reilly and Associates (2003). Design>Information Design>XML>XSL
#25201
Building Preloaders and Progress Bars in Macromedia Flash
One of the unique features of web content built with Macromedia Flash is the ability to control when and how the content loads. When loading a heavy HTML page, the user is usually stuck looking at a blank window until the content starts appearing. Flash allows for the creation of animated preloaders, which give the user precise information about the progress of the loading process. A simple rectangular progress bar or percentage indicator will do the job, but why stop there? A preloader should be given just as much love and consideration as the rest of the site content, especially on a site that is trying to evoke a mood, or create an immersive experience. If a preloader is engaging enough, the user won't mind waiting for content, and the time it takes to load will seem shorter. The preloader is the first element someone will see when visiting your site. You can make a good first impression by welcoming your visitors with a snappy preloader.
Hirsch, Joshua. Adobe (2005). Design>Web Design>Interactive>Flash
#15095
Identifies the characteristics of poorly constructed Web sites.
Smart, Karl L. Intercom (2001). Design>Web Design
#20992
Building Relationships With Personalization
Understanding what personalization is all about regarding potential customers. Variables that can affect how fast a relationship can be developed.
Allen, Cliff. Allen.com (2003). Design>Web Design>Personalization>CRM
#21359
Building the Beast: Talking with Peter Morville
Polar Bear book co-author Peter Morville shares the inside stories about the making of the new edition--from its original scribblings on an airsick bag to the ideas that didn’t make it in--and his thoughts about how the field has changed since their book was first published.
Olsen, George. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Information Design
#30665
Building the Front End: Craft Intelligent and Intuitive Front Ends for Ajax Applications
With Ajax still one of the industry's hottest buzzwords, more and more applications are being built with Ajax technologies. However, it's not always easy to build a good application. This article focuses on how to build intuitive, easy-to-use Ajax-driven applications.
McLaughlin, Brett D. IBM (2007). Articles>Web Design>User Interface>Ajax
#14913
In the information age it is widely understood that there is now too much information. Some of this newly created information will most certainly be valuable, but despite marked improvement in search tools, finding the valuable information is a slow panhandle. Perhaps in light of this situation, the W3C under the direction of Berners-Lee has begun to build the foundation for the next phase of the web. This phase, called the Semantic Web, will make information stored with this technology much more processible by machines.
Emonds-Banfield, Peter. Orange Journal, The (2002). Articles>Web Design>XML>Metadata
#26226
Building the Treasure House: Creating Knowledge Bases for the World Wide Web
What is a knowledge base? What are the components necessary to build one?
Massa, Jack A. STC Orange County (1998). Presentations>Documentation>Information Design>Databases
#20287
Building the Treasure House: Creating Knowledge Bases on the World-Wide Web
Web knowledge bases offer an excellent platform for delivering technical documentation and customer support information. They also represent an area of great opportunity for technical communicators to expand their skills, satisfy their customers, and create value for their employers or clients. This session explores the components of a web knowledge base and the tasks involved in planning and building one.
Massa, Jack A. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Documentation>Online>Web Design
#30633
Finding the right person to complement your User Experience team is part art and part luck. Though good interviewing can limit the risk of a bad hire, you need to carefully analyze your current organizational context, before you can know what you need. Herein lies the art. Since you can't truly know a candidate from an interview, you gamble that their personality and skills are what they seem. Aimed at managers and those involved in the hiring decision process, this article looks at the facets of UX staff and offers ways to identify the skills and influence that will tune your team to deliver winning results.
Colfelt, Anthony. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Design>User Experience
#11907
Is the Web really the ultimate customer-empowering environment? The Web as a whole is empowering, because users have the option to click over to the competition at the slightest whim. So why do sites so often leave users feeling powerless? The Web increases accessibility and defies geographical barriers. But e-commerce sites often decrease accessibility and erect more barriers than you'd walk past in a store.
Nielsen, Jakob and Marie Tahir. WebTechniques (2001). Design>Web Design>Usability
#22815
Building a blog is cool, but building a blog with Flash, MySQL, and PHP is so much cooler. Scott guides you through two days of coding and querying.
Gilbertson, Scott. Webmonkey (2003). Design>Web Design>Server Side Includes>Flash
#13657
We can compare web design and development to the process of building a house or a structure. The development of every web site has a process that these craftsmen must follow in order to achieve the finished structure. These phases are generalized and somewhat vague at times, while some may even be grouped or varied in name, but they are all essential steps in each web construction.
Finck, Nick and Peter Fielding. Digital Web Magazine (2001). Design>Web Design>Workflow
#19787
Building Your Home on the World Wide Web: Researching, Designing and Maintaining a Web Page
Good web design follows many of the same tenants true of good design in any media: a concern for contrast, harmony, unity, and tone. But home page design also provides ways of presenting a corporate image and sense of place in unique ways through imagery, color, textured backgrounds, links, and unusual layout features. Technical concerns unique to Web page design includes the need to minimize download time through reduction in the size, complexity, and color depth of images and icons, and repetition of icons, backgrounds, and tables. All sites should have an introductory overview, a heuristic navigation system, links to local and distant sites, a response method, the date the site was last updated, and a copyright notice.
#28093
The Bull's-Eye: A Framework for Web Application User Interface Design Guidelines
A multi-leveled framework for user interface design guidelines of Web applications is presented. User interface design guidelines tend to provide information that is either too general, so that it is difficult to apply to a specific case, or too specific, so that a wide range of products is not supported. The framework presented is unique in that it provides a bridge between the two extremes. It has been dubbed the "Bull's-Eye' due to its five layers, represented as concentric circles. The center of the Bull's-Eye is the Component layer, followed by Page Templates, Page Flows, Interface Models and Patterns, and Overarching Features and Principles. To support this approach,requirements were gathered from user interface designers,product managers, UI developers, and product developers. Also, usability testing of the guidelines occurred on several levels, from broad guideline tests to more specific product tests. The guidelines and lessons learned are intended to serve as examples for others seeking to design families of Web applications or Web sites.
Beier, Betsy and Misha W. Vaughan. uiGarden (2006). Articles>Web Design>User Interface
#25258
Bulleted Lists: Multi-Layered Fudge
A passion for web standards can become a broken heart when effects that are easy to achieve with table layouts seem to defy the earnest CSS- and markup-conscious designer. Fortunately, new ALA author Nandini Doreswamy loves a challenge. Here she shows how to create two columns of bulleted lists in the flow of text.
Doreswamy, Nandini. List Apart, A (2005). Design>Web Design>CSS
#25933
Brochures are good for some things but not others. The key to not wasting your money is to understand what brochures do well, and what they don't do well.
Bennaco (2005). Articles>Document Design>Marketing
#20413
What kind of a bullet doesn’t travel at high speeds and is completely non-violent? A typographer’s bullet, of course! This very useful typographic element can add emphasis, clarity and visual interest to all kinds of copy. Simply put, a bullet is a large dot used to draw attention to each item in a list or series. The items can be single words, phrases, sentences or paragraphs. Even if you use the bullet that is part of your font, don’t automatically assume it’s the right size: it might need to be altered in scale or position to make it look balanced next to the text.
Strizver, Ilene. Upper and lowercase Magazine (2003). Design>Typography
#21530
The Business Case for Web Accessibility
Makes the business case for catering to the widest audience possible. Identifies groups of people who have problems accessing the web, and explains how building web sites they are able to use can positively impact your bottom line.
Budd, Andy. Blogography (2004). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Business Case
#20220
You've mastered Photoshop, Flash, PHP, CSS, XHTML and JavaScript; studied usability, accessibility, and information architecture; and can fake your way through XML. But there’s more to running a web business than that.
Kramer, Scott. List Apart, A (2002). Careers>Management>Web Design
#31016
Survey of business information services in corporate information services, based on in-depth interviews with leading business information managers. Key findings are: Business information budgets have been stable, with at least inflationary increases built in; Business conditions have been turbulent of late but this has had no real impact on the services to date; With more information rolled out to the clients' desktops, the services are all working to add value through a variety of approaches, including training, evaluation and analysis, business and client development, and generally undertaking more complex work; Some pressure on the staffing headcount in the services during the year; Recruiting suitable information professionals is a difficult process; Offshoring information and research work has not expanded significantly but more companies are considering this option; 'Techno-centric' knowledge management remains important in some companies, particularly law firms, but is fading as a practice in others; There is great interest and envisaged potential in social technology and Web 2.0 tools and techniques -- but not much serious deployment yet; Even in mature corporate information environments, marketing business information services is still seen as crucial by 90 per cent of respondents; Fifty-five percent of the services provide some kind of competitor information function, albeit not at a high level; A significant majority (75 per cent) of services support compliance functions such as 'Know your client' and anti-money laundering checks; Existing copyright provisions are seen as a barrier to effective information dissemination within companies by 80 per cent of respondents; LexisNexis takes over at the top of the expenditure league; The demand for information on Asian business markets is growing; Almost all services are committed to training users in the discovery and use of digital business information sources; The organization, management, and sometimes realignment of services is the highest strategic priority.
Foster, Allan. Business Information Review (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Information Design
#28389
There's a lot more to being a successful web designer than designing good web sites. Your job is actually to satisfy your client. This section provides guidelines from our experience of running web agencies, which we hope will help you be more successful and more fulfilled.
Hunt, Ben. Web Design From Scratch (2006). Careers>Web Design
