Automating Diagrams with Visio

By doing the demanding intellectual work first and then forcing the tools to succumb to need to produce seemingly speedy deliverables, you can get around the difficulty of choosing between 'Good, Fast and Cheap.' Here's one approach using Excel and Visio.

Angeles, Michael. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Project Management>Information Design>Microsoft Excel

The Basics of Navigation

You can have all kinds of great attractions on your site, but if your visitors don't know how to get to them, they'll just collect dust on the server. Worse yet, if visitors find your site's navigation confusing or convoluted, they'll simply give up and head off to explore the rest of the Web, never to return. So, good navigation design is an essential ingredient for any successful Web site.

Timberlake, Sean. EFuse (2000). Design>Web Design>Information Design

Being Shallow

Information Architects are often put on the defensive by spears flung by brethren in related disciplines. In taking the accusations seriously and accepting truths within them, Grant Campbell reveals greatest strengths in shallowness, insularity, and being 'relegated' to history.

Campbell, Grant. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Information Design>Professionalism

Better Content Management through Information Architecture

Content Management Systems promise so much: content is easier to publish, easier to update, and easier to find and use. Lots of promises, but do CMSs really deliver? Masood Nasser examines why Content Management Systems often fail and shows how Information Architecture can come to the rescue.

Nasser, Masood. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Content Strategy

Better Structuring and Designing  

There is something to be learnt from the way a good architect works: before beginning with the planning, he takes a look at the site and the future inhabitants of the building, and asks them for their requirements and desires. He takes the general conditions imposed by building regulations and the budget into consideration, and designs the construction in such a way that the inhabitants can use it optimally. And this is exactly how we as information architects should also go about our business.

Oehmig, Peter. tekom (2006). Articles>Information Design

Beyond Bookmarks: Schemes for Organizing the Web

A clearinghouse of web sites that have applied or adopted standard classification schemes or controlled vocabularies to organize or provide enhanced access to Internet resources.

McKiernan, Gerry. Iowa State University (2003). Resources>Directories>Information Design>Controlled Vocabulary

Bibliographie Informationsdesign

Zur Entwicklung seiner Anliegen nimmt IIID weltweit Kontakte mit Informations-Designern, Beratungsorganisationen und Forschungsinstituten, Universitäten, kommerziellen Unternehmen und design-fördernden Institutionen auf. Organisation des jährlich stattfindenden Symposiums 'Vision Plus' und Veröffentlichung der dort gehaltenen Präsentationen.

Freenet.de. (German) Resources>Bibliographies>Information Design

The Big Cocktail: Cognitive and Humanistic Traits of an Information Designer  

This paper describes how our experience in striving to hire Information Designers led us to identify the very basic cognitive and humanistic traits that make up a successful technical communicator. It also shows how, once identified, such traits can be used to unveil hidden potentialities which can help turn a non expert candidate into a successful and gratified Information Designer and communicator. This paper focuses mainly on psychological traits, not on technical skills, that have been extensively discussed in a series of other papers.

Zace, Sokol. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>Information Design>User Experience>Cognitive Psychology

The Big O: IA Lessons from Orienteering

Several orienteering strategies - including map simplification and contact, navigating by checkpoints, rough and precise map reading, and using attack points to find the goal - have useful IA parallels. Gene Smith explores how IAs can learn from these parallel techniques and create digital spaces that are easier to navigate.

Smith, Gene. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

There is an astonishing amount of disbelief that the users of web pages have learned to scroll and that they do so regularly. Holding on to this disbelief--this myth that users won't scroll to see anything below the fold--is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users.

Tarquini, Milissa. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Design>Web Design>Information Design>User Centered Design

Blog 101: An Overview of Weblog Technologies  

A weblog or 'blog' is a Web site with content consisting of a series of discrete postings added sequentially and presented in reverse chronological order. Historically used for personal Web sites, blogs in fact represent a form of lightweight content management that can be adapted to virtually any topic, including technical communication. The recent explosion of blogs is in part a result of the availability of publishing tools that simplify their creation. These tools vary significantly in capability, setup, and ease of use, and each offers advantages and disadvantages.

Berry, Robert R. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Blogging

A Body of Criticism  

The nature of hypertext challenges many underlying assumptions for traditional literary critics. Literary critics frequently like to think that they have objectively looked at the lexias of the work, thoughtfully considered them, and constructed a solid interpretation or analysis of the work based on those lexia. Hypertext, however, presents the possibility that two critics who are reading the same work may have differing sets of lexia from which to work. Thus, even if critics objectively consider the lexia before them, they cannot free themselves from the subjectivity of the reading performance that made those lexia (and not others) appear. This raises the concern that, if hypertext critics can only present subjective views of the text, there may be little or no benefit to reading or writing those critiques.

Higgason, Richard E. Journal of Digital Information (2003). Articles>Information Design>Hypertext>Theory

Review: Bosworth's Web of Data

In a Thursday morning keynote at the MySQL Users Conference 2005, Google's Adam Bosworth advocated an open model for data. Although he was not referring to open source, he expanded upon the example by explaining that customers like open source software because of the transparency.

Steinberg, Daniel H. O'Reilly and Associates (2005). Articles>Reviews>Information Design>SQL

Bottoms Up: Designing Complex, Adaptive Systems

Web design is under attack. Our enemy is a dangerous meme known as reductionism. This devious adversary is spreading the notion that we can fully understand Web sites as a combination of simpler components, and that we can break the process of design into lots of quick steps and clearly defined deliverables.

Morville, Peter. New Architect (2002). Articles>Information Design>Web Design

Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful

Breadcrumbs use a single line of text to show a page's location in the site hierarchy. While secondary, this navigation technique is increasingly beneficial to users.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Design>Web Design>Information Design

Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage

There has been speculation that a breadcrumb trail also aids the user's 'mental model' of the site's layout to reduce disorientation within the site (Bernard, 2003); however, we have not found research to validate this assumption. It would seem logical, however, that a constant visualization of the path to the user's current location would increase their awareness and knowledge of the site structure.

Rogers, Bonnie Lida and Barbara Chaparro. Usability News (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design

Bridging the Gap: From Raw Usability Testing Data to Design Implementation  

Learn practical ways to influence members of your company’s product engineering group with usability testing data. Putting the authors’ tips into practice will help you improve the design of your company’s products.

Leritz-Higgins, Sarah E. and Catherine J. Yaspo. Intercom (2006). Articles>Usability>Information Design

Bring the lnternet into Your Documents on Budget and on Time  

Technical communicators can mine the Internet for fresh approaches and information to prepare documents with efficiency and minimal expense.

Murphy, Avon J. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Information Design>Research

Building a Bridge: DITA, DocBook, and ODF

Some folks here are taking a very strong look at DITA. I'm certainly one of them. But we also have a huge legacy of documents in Solbook format (Sun's subset of DocBook). There are tools for editing such documents, and tools for processing them. and there are many people who are comfortable with those tools. So DITA isn't going to replace the world, just yet. But DITA makes extensive reuse possible. It's a format with a serious future, because "reuse" is a very big deal. It lets you single-source your information content so have one place to make an edit. That sort of thing becomes important when you have multiple revisions of a product, and/or multiple variations. It becomes important when different tools and different products use the same information in different ways. It can drastically improve quality, ensure uniformity of presentation. Finally, structured formats like DITA and DocBook create the kind of consistently-tagged information that allows for useful automation.

Armstrong, Eric. Sun Microsystems (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

Building a Database of Graphic Files Using Microsoft Access  

Many technical communicators manage large collections of graphic files and must keep track of which graphics are used in which deliverables. An effective tool for managing a collection of graphic files is a relational database management system (RDMS) such as Microsoft Access. Before the database can be built in Access, it is necessary to 1) create detailed functional requirements and 2) build a high-level conceptual model from which the database relations (tables) can be derived. A spreadsheet program can be used to build the conceptual model and generate the relations. Normalization checks should be performed on the relations before the database is implemented in Access.

Lowe, Richard B. STC Proceedings (2005). Articles>Information Design>Databases>Microsoft Access

Building a Home-Grown Knowledge Base: Don't Wait for the Resources—Build a Prototype

In this presentation, we will discuss why and how we came to build a knowledge base for the Computing Help Desk at MIT. We discuss MIT’s re-engineering effort and its impact on the various Help Desk groups who were brought together as a single team; how this centralizing of Help Desk services created a new requirement of getting useful, just-in-time knowledge to student consultants, and professional staff; and how that requirement helped us approach another goal of our re-engineered processes-helping our customers to help themselves. We then describe the tool we created and how we are using it.

Jones, Susan B. and Carol Wood. ACM SIGDOC (1998). Design>Information Design>Web Design

Building a Metadata-Based Website

The online world has been flooded in recent years with talk of metadata, structured authoring, and cascading style sheets. The idea of a semantic web is gaining momentum. At the confluence of these two broad categories of activity, new models of websites are emerging.

Lider, Brett and Anca Mosoiu. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Building a PDF Book  

Wilson describes a process for PDF versions of papers manuals by converting Microsoft Word files with Adobe Acrobat.

Wilson, Dennis E. Intercom (2002). Design>Information Design>eBooks>Adobe Acrobat