Modeling Information for Three-Dimensional Space: Lessons Learned from Museum Exhibit Design    

Perhaps these concerns sound familiar: visitors complain that they cannot find information of interest. One observes, 'I know there's information about that type of robotics here, but darned if I can find it;' visitors enter the site but don't stay particularly long. Some might even express an interest in the subject; let's say it's modern art. But they leave almost as quickly as they enter without paying much attention to the artwork that the designers painstakingly displayed; other visitors spend hours at the site but never seem to notice particular sections. For example, a visitor might be thoroughly familiar with the content on radios but oblivious to the section on industrial hardware. These observations could describe visitors to Web sites. Actually, these observations describe museum visitors. The connections between the two are discussed in this article.

Carliner, Saul. Technical Communication Online (2001). Design>Information Design>Usability

Navigating Isn't Fun

The artless Websites created during the Web's infancy were of necessity built only with simple HTML tags, and were forced to divide up their functionality and content into a maze (a web?) of separate pages. This made a navigation scheme an unavoidable component of any Website design, and of course, a clear, visually arresting navigation scheme was better than an obscure or hidden one. But many Web designers have incorrectly deduced from this that users want navigation schemes. Actually, they'd be happy if there were no navigation at all.

Cooper, Alan. Cooper Interaction Design (2001). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Usability

Navigation: An Often Neglected Component of Web Authorship

Web authors should follow web design conventions that account for the variety of ways users will try to navigate through their pages. While usability testing is the best way to ensure your site is really operating as you intend it to, this page offers a basic overview of basic navigation principles that most visitors will expect on most pages that they visit.

Jerz, Dennis G. Seton Hill University (2000). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Usability

On Beyond Help: Meeting User Needs for Useful Online Information    

It is well accepted that understanding the users and a thorough analysis of their goals and tasks is a prerequisite for usability. To produce a document, online information, or knowledge base that is truly usable, the designer and writer must also consider different user approaches to the information to create it in a form that meets those needs. The underlying technology must also be considered, as it affects the presentation of the information as well as the functionality available to users. To meet user needs for useful online information, all these elements must be factored into the design—and technical communicators must master the skills necessary to make the right choices.

Quesenbery, Whitney. Technical Communication Online (2001). Articles>Usability>Information Design

Papers and Presentations from STC India Learning Sessions

View and download papers presented at STC India's learning sessions.

STC India. Presentations>Information Design>Communication>Usability

PDF Link Usability

Das kennt man: ein ahnungsloser Klick und plötzlich öffnet sich eine mega-lange PDF-Datei. Seitengestalter sind deshalb angehalten Links auf PDF-Dateien zu kennzeichnen. Selbstverständlich macht das inzwischen auch (fast) jeder.

Lennartz, Sven. Dr. Web (2007). (German) Articles>Usability>Information Design>Adobe Acrobat

PDF Usability: Debate and Reality

This article examines the claims of those PDF critics and argues that usability complaints about PDF documents are misdirected, and further, highlights some of the key reasons why PDF is the preferred electronic document format.

Johnson, Duff. Adobe (2006). Articles>Usability>Information Design>Adobe Acrobat

Personas: Matching a Design to the Users' Goals

We hear all the time from designers that they're faced with the huge challenge of designing products and web sites for a large number of different users. Many designers tackle this problem by making the functionality of the web site or product as extensive as possible. To do this, they outline all of the goals of each user, identify any commonalities between these goals, and add all of the functionality needed to satisfy these common goals.

Perfetti, Christine. User Interface Engineering (2001). Articles>Information Design>Usability

Prioritize: Good Content Bubbles to the Top

If everything is equally prominent, then nothing is prominent. It is the job of the designer to advise the user and guide them to the most important or most promising choices (while ensuring their freedom to go anywhere they please). On today's Web, the most common mistake is to make everything too prominent: over-use of colors, animation, blinking, and graphics. Every element of the page screams 'look at me' (while all the other design elements scream 'no, look at me'). When everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1999). Articles>Usability>Information Design

The Psychology of Menu Selection: Designing Cognitive Control at the Human/Computer Interface

Menu selection is emerging as an important mode of human/computer interaction. This book, the first entirely devoted to this important form of human/computer interaction, provides detailed theoretical and empirical information of interest to software designers and human/computer interaction specialists and researchers. A new theoretical approach to menu selection is taken by developing a psychological theory of cognitive control by the user. A comprehensive review of empirical research on menu selection is presented in an organized fashion to aid in the design and evaluation of systems. Finally, information is given on how to protype and evaluate menu selection systems using both performance data and user ratings.

Norman, Kent L. University of Maryland (1991). Books>Information Design>Usability>Cognitive Psychology

A Study of the Effectiveness of Information Design Principles Applied to Clinical Research Questionnaires    

This study investigates the effectiveness of information design principles and feedback-based usability testing in the development of clinical questionnaires, with the goal of increasing the amount of data collected in the Breast Cancer Lymphatic Mapping Database at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute. It finds that although both the Control and Study forms were generated using the same form design software, the Study form developed using information design principles collected significantly more data than the Control form developed by a systems analyst. The article observes that information designers face conflicts between the needs of users, general information design guidelines, constraints of the software, and misunderstandings by medical researchers and health professionals over the role of information designers.

Zimmerman, Beverly B. and Jessica R. Schultz. Technical Communication Online (2000). Articles>Information Design>Usability

Web Navigation: Resolving Conflicts between the Desktop and the Web

This paper summarizes a workshop at CHI98 that focused on navigational problems caused by differences in navigational models between the desktop and the Web. The goal of this workshop was to identify usability problems encountered when users move from the 'traditional' desktop to the Web and to identify ways to minimize transfer-learning problems between the two platforms.Workshop papers will soon be available online.

Fellenz, Carola, Jarmo Parkkinen and Hal Shubin. ACM SIGCHI (1998). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Usability

Website Navigation is Useful

Although users tend to navigate websites by search mechanisms or by links embedded in actual content, website navigation serves useful purposes.

Baker, Adam. Merges.net (2001). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Usability

What an Information Architect Should Know About Prototypes for User Testing

There are several important factors to consider when you are planning to do prototyping for user testing. You will want to make careful choices about fidelity, level of interactivity and the medium of your prototype. Chris Farnum offers descriptions and best use scenarios to help you make the best prototype decision for your tests.

Farnum, Chris. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Information Design>Usability

What's In A Name?

In defining a field, each person seems to look at the world and place themselves in the center of the circle, giving their specialty top billing as the summation of all the others. What exactly is gained by this political one-upmanship? In the face of this inflation, I find myself pulling back to the simplest craft title I can find. Or avoiding titles altogether.

Quesenbery, Whitney. WQusability (2001). Articles>Information Design>Professionalism>Usability

Readability, Browsability, Searchability Plus Assistance

Readability, browsability, and searchability do not have to be equally represented in every information system. As your collection of information increases, different aspects of these qualities take on greater significance. Thus, the amount of readability, browsability, and searchability your information system exhibits depends on the type and quality of your collected data, as well as the information needs of your clientele.

Morgan, Eric Lease. Infomotions (2004). Articles>Information Design>Usability>Search

'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

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

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

Information Architecture is Not Usability

The distinction between information architecture and usability may seem like semantics, but there are significant differences between the two disciplines. Though they are often discussed interchangeably, and practitioners are often well-versed in both, information architecture and usability differ in their scope and areas of focus.

Lash, Jeff. Digital Web Magazine (2002). Articles>Information Design>Usability>Semantic

Making the Right Constraints for Usable and Accessible User Interfaces

This paper focuses on managing constraints in a way that enables developers to create an accessible and usable user interface (UI). The constraining processes presented in this paper comprise of a language to describe a logical web page in an application, a basic bottom-up repository management system and the processing required for compiling pages.

Cornelius, Gary and John J. Chelsom. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>User Interface>Usability

User Experience Designer or ...? What You Call Yourself Matters

Using a self-designation with a certain amount of specificity sacrifices practicality to accuracy. Individuals who have been hired as a single-function specialist may have the luxury of presenting as a “usability engineer” or “information architect”. For the independent consultant, this strategy can have definite negative consequences.

Bailie, Rahel Anne. Intentional Design Inc. (2009). Careers>Usability>User Experience>Information Design

Information Architecture Task Failures Remain Costly

Task success is up substantially compared with usability statistics from 2004. Bad information architecture causes most of the remaining user failures.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Information Design>Usability>Assessment