Storyboarding Rich Internet Applications with Visio

The recent rise in more powerful technologies that provide richer user experiences online has presented us with a challenge. As designers, we are moving from from designing for "PIAs" to designing for "RIAs." Does our documentation style change with the technology? Will our standard ways do the job?

Scott, Bill. Boxes and Arrows (2005). Design>Web Design>Information Design

Strategies for Categorizing Categories

How does a site containing thousands of pages of content get users to the content they seek quickly?  There are many different strategies for organizing content on sites and we recently took a hard look at five of them. We've been examining several e-commerce sites to see how they handled the problem of categorizing large numbers of products. We were interested in seeing if the different designers came up with different methods and which methods were most effective.

User Interface Engineering (2002). Design>Information Design>Web Design

Strategies for Improving Enterprise Search

Acquiring and installing a search engine is just the beginning of creating an effective enterprise search system. John Ferrara walks us through strategies for addressing critical aspects of the user experience often overlooked or ignored.

Ferrara, John. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Structure Paves the Way Online

What I've called structure in this series actually has various other names, the most familiar of which are probably 'hierarchy' or 'information architecture.' Whichever word you use, structure encapsulates the relationships between the components of a site that visitors will use to navigate to the information they seek. Structure is simple enough to define, but can be devilishly tricky to create. A successful site structure must create what psychologists refer to as a schema: A mental model that visitors can use to understand where you've hidden the content.

Hart, Geoffrey J.S. TECHWR-L (2001). Design>Web Design>Information Design

Studies in Hypertext: the Conversion of Traditional Texts into Web Sites  

The production of a web page has become a common assignment in a number of university classrooms, but there has yet to be established a pedagogy for the generation of large group-generated web sites that replicate the methods found in industry. In Studies in Hypertext, a course offered to technical communication students at the University of Central Florida, such a pedagogy is being shaped. In this course, students with little or no experience in web site generation work their way through a series of written and small web site construction tasks to eventually produce one complex and competently-integrated web site.

Applen, J.D. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Hypertext

Tackling Maintenance Projects

A typical maintenance project goes something like this: someone has a new piece of functionality or content they want to put up on the website. The IA’s job: find the best place for it.

Saffer, Dan. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design

Taking A Content Inventory

Provides a methodology for auditing web site content to produce an inventory -- a tabular document that may be used in information re-architecture projects.

Fraser, Janice. New Architect (2001). Design>Web Design>Information Design

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

Any time you've got a big pile of stuff that you want to put out into the world — a list of your company's products, a document archive for your intranet, or almost any set of content that goes into or comes out of a CMS — a sensible taxonomy will be crucial to your success, assuming you define success as 'when people can actually find what they're looking for.' A good taxonomy is a win for both a company and its customers. It’s easy to see why taxonomy development is good for your users: The whole reason for creating a taxonomy for your site is to make information retrieval quick and easy by putting the information into a sensible structure that’s consistently applied. Well-designed taxonomies map out the base structure for your content, providing a navigation scheme that makes sense to your users.

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

A Taxonomy Primer

An introductory article discussing when and how to use controlled vocabularies in the development of information architectures.

Warner, Amy J. Lexonomy. Design>Web Design>Information Design

Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution

Better prioritization, fewer interruptions, and concentrated information that's easy to find and manage helps people become more productive and stop wasting their colleagues' time.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Design>Information Design>Web Design

Those Pesky Index Pages

Every directory on the site must have an index page. The index.htm or index.html page is a standard requirement for every directory on every site.

McAlpine, Rachel. Quality Web Content (2004). Design>Web Design>Information Design

Three Lessons From Tufte: Special Deliverable #6

Held up as a trio of 'must have' books for the Information Architect, Tufte’'s books are the quintessential resource for information design. But many IAs may wonder how Tufte'’s principles can be applied to their daily work. Dan Brown offers three lessons from Tufte.

Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Information Design>Web Design

Toward the Optimal Link Structure of the Cyber Shopping Mall  

This study aims at identifying the optimal link structure, which is an essential requirement for convenient and pleasant cyber-shopping. To achieve the goal, this paper presents a research framework in which different types of links are hypothesized to cause different patterns of customer navigation, which in turn is expected to influence cognitive convenience and emotional pleasure of cyber shopping. Based on two dimensions of links, link direction and link target, various links are classified into five types; NBR(Neighborhood), PAR(Parent), TOP, NEP(Nephew), and IND (Index). Two consecutive experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the cognitive and emotional usability of various combinations of the five link types. Experimental results clearly indicated that different combinations of link types influenced customers’ navigation patterns, which in turn effected the convenience and pleasure of shopping. It was found that the combination of NBR, TOP and IND generated the optimal link structure, whereas PAR and NEP rather decreased the degree of shopping pleasure and convenience. This paper concludes with its limitations and implications on the construction of effective cyber shopping malls.

Kim, Jinwoo and Byunggon Yoo. Yonsei University (2000). Design>Information Design>Web Design>E Commerce

Toward Usable Browse Hierarchies for the Web  

The goal of the following study was to determine the potential usefulness of tracking traversal patterns through a browse hierarchy as a way to monitor confusion and determine its source. The major conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that this method is a useful and insightful way to monitor user experience.

Risden, Kirsten. Microsoft (1999). Articles>Information Design>Web Design

Towards a Core Ontology for Information Integration  

In this paper, we argue that a core ontology is one of the key building blocks necessary to enable the scalable assimilation of information from diverse sources. A complete and extensible ontology that expresses the basic concepts that are common across a variety of domains and can provide the basis for specialization into domain-specific concepts and vocabularies, is essential for well-defined mappings between domain-specific knowledge representations (i.e. metadata vocabularies) and the subsequent building of a variety of services such as cross-domain searching, browsing, data mining and knowledge extraction. This paper describes the results of a series of three workshops held in 2001 and 2002 which brought together representatives from the cultural heritage and digital library communities with the goal of harmonizing their knowledge perspectives and producing a core ontology. The knowledge perspectives of these two communities were represented by the CIDOC/CRM, an ontology for information exchange in the cultural heritage and museum community, and the ABC ontology, a model for the exchange and integration of digital library information. This paper describes the mediation process between these two different knowledge biases and the results of this mediation - the harmonization of the ABC and CIDOC/CRM ontologies, which we believe may provide a useful basis for information integration in the wider scope of the involved communities.

Doerr, Martin, Jane Hunter and Carl Lagoze. Journal of Digital information (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

TreeDec: an Annotation Tool to Support Website Navigation  

Websites are often organized into logical hierarchies, or tree structures, in order to help users navigate. Ideally, users could view the entire tree, or jump to nearby pages. TreeDec (= Tree Decorator) is a system to support website authors and maintainers by providing automatic annotation of webpages under the control of a central file that represents the tree structure.

Cugini, John. NIST (2000). Design>User Interface>Information Design>Web Design

Two Kinds of Keywords

I have long wondered why government web sites all over the world tend to use metadata of several different types jumbled together and overlapping. For example, pages with two description metatags or two or three title tags are common. I suspect that most of the replication and confusion has developed for historical reasons.

McAlpine, Rachel. Quality Web Content (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Understanding DOM

Even before there was XML, there was the Document Object Model, or DOM. It allows a developer to refer to, retrieve, and change items within an XML structure, and is essential to working with XML. In this tutorial, you will learn about the structure of a DOM document. You will also learn how to use Java technology to create a Document from an XML file, make changes to it, and retrieve the output.

Chase, Nicholas. IBM (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design>XML

Unraveling the Mysteries of Metadata and Taxonomies

Recently Boxes and Arrows caught up with Samantha Bailey, formerly at Argus and current lead IA for Wachovia Corporation's Wachovia.com website. She talks about the transition from being a consultant to an 'innie' IA, unravels the mysteries of metadata and taxonomies and shares her vision of the future of IA.

Wodtke, Christina. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

The Untimely Death of Yahoo, or, How the Double-Whammy of Web Architecture and Information Retrieval Will Do Yahoo In

Yahoo is truly one of the Best of the Net, as it has filled an enormous void in the areas of browsing and searching Internet-based information. So I hope you'll believe that I am truly sad as I predict the death of Yahoo. It seems inevitable, as Yahoo's organization, its information architecture, will collapse under the weight of the high volume of entries. And, unfortunately, searching won't solve the problem of volume.

Rosenfeld, Louis. CMC Magazine (1995). Articles>Information Design>Web Design

Using Categories to Improve Search

The authors explore ways in which categories can be leveraged to improve search. An interface named SWISH is presented, in which search results are automatically categorized, and pages in the same category are grouped together.

Cutrell, Edward and Susan Dumais. Earthlink (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Search

Using XML

XML is not just a pretty face, living in isolation from the rest of the computing world. XML is more than a rulebook for generating custom markup languages. It is part of a family of technologies, which, working together, make your XML-based documents very useful indeed.

Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Information Design>Web Design>XML

Visio - The Interaction Designer's Nail Gun

The reason why Visio is the favourite prototyping tool of many interaction designers is because of its ready-made interface objects, you can drag-and-drop onto pages and its ability to link pages together and export them as web pages. But what distinguishes Visio from other prototyping tools is its use of layered backgrounds.

Olsen, Henrik. GUUUI (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Interaction Design

Visual Vocabulary Three Years Later: An Interview with Jesse James Garrett

This interview focuses on Jesse James Garret's Visual Vocabulary, a site architecture documentation standard.

Brown, Dan. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Design>Documentation>Information Design>Web Design

Weaving an Untangled Web: Proper Planning of Your Web Site Will Pay Off

Many people rush eagerly to start playing with the World Wide Web as if it were a new toy. But, unlike a shiny new bicycle, the Web does not come with easy-to-follow assembly instructions: you can easily end up riding backwards down an extremely busy road. To make effective use of a Web site, you need to create your own assembly instructions—a well thought-out plan that positions your Web site as simply another tool in your overall communications or marketing strategy.

Collins, John. Writer's Block (1996). Design>Web Design>Information Design