Applying Turing's Ideas to Search

Users hold search to a human standard of understanding that computers cannot as yet achieve. This is more than just a curiosity: The Turing test has something to tell us about how we can better design our website search interfaces today.

Ferrara, John. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search

What Is A Controlled Vocabulary?

A controlled vocabulary is a way to insert an interpretive layer of semantics between the term entered by the user and the underlying database to better represent the original intention of the terms of the user.

Leise, Fred, Karl Fast and Mike Steckel. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Controlled Vocabulary

Information Architecture for Audio: Doing It Right

Audio content is becoming increasingly prevalent. But do you know how to design it effectively? Jens Jacobsen combines information architecture, journalism, usability engineering and interface design to resolve some of the issues that arise from introducing audio.

Jacobsen, Jens. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Web Design>Audio>Podcasting

IDEA 2008: An Interview with Elliott Malkin

Where the seams of information and public space overlap and intersect, Elliott Malkin creates projects that span genres from religion to natural science. In a preview of his upcoming IDEA conference talk, Malkin talks about home-movies, butterflies, and designing for unofficial signs in public space.

Danzico, Liz. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Interviews>Information Design>Scientific Communication

Quick Turnaround Usability Testing

Completing usability testing quickly is a challenge anywhere but especially in consultancies, which have to overcome additional challenges, such as learning a new application. To assure success on these projects, I’ve developed a quick turnaround usability testing methodology (QTUT) that minimizes the time needed to complete testing.

Nuschke, Paul. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Usability>Testing

Getting a Form's Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Email Applications

There are a million websites out there. There are a million email service providers out there. How do you ensure that you gain the right audience to join your service? What are those factors that will help users move ahead and become your loyal customer? Part of the answer has to do with the first step: Registration!

Kirmani, Afshan. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Web Design>Forms>Usability

Making Knowledge Management Work on your Intranet

In the information economy, the longevity of an organisation is based as much on the sophistication of its knowledge management practices as it is on traditional differentiators such as the strength of its products, the talent of its employees, and its marketplace reputation and partner relationships. Simply speaking, as actionable and insightful information becomes the currency of an organisation, there are few other ways to tap into any latent potential lost in the office corridors.

Singh, Shiv. Boxes and Arrows (2004). Articles>Knowledge Management>Intranets>Usability

Web Traffic Analytics and User Experience

As a specialist in the user, you gain knowledge through observation and direct questioning of individual users. Now, you can add to that insights gained from data pulled during their actions on the site. By looking at this information, you will get a fuller picture of user behavior, not in a lab, but in the true user environment.

Diamond, Fran. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Log Analysis

Bringing Your Personas to Life in Real Life

The way you communicate personas and present your deliverables is key to ensuring consistency of vision. Without that consistency, you’ll spend far too much time arguing with your colleagues about who your users are rather than how to meet their needs. Let’s start with a review of what we know about personas, and why they are useful.

Freydenson, Elan. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>User Centered Design>Personas

Developing and Creatively Leveraging Hierarchical Metadata and Taxonomy

In content metadata and hierarchies, you will often find a goldmine of implicit and explicit data that you can leverage to creatively contextualise content. After a brief introduction on taxonomy and metadata, this article focuses on finding and utilising such relationships in hierarchies.

Ricci, Christian. Boxes and Arrows (2004). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

Practical Strategies for Creating a Successful Intranet

Designing, developing, and deploying an intranet can be expensive, time-consuming and organizationally tricky. Complicating factors include: supervising the budget; prioritizing features; addressing user requests; collaborating with other departments to produce and deploy content; and leading interdisciplinary teams of site administrators, information architects, content writers, visual designers, technical architects, and developers. Nevertheless, certain strategies, when carefully executed, can simplify designing and managing your intranet.

Singh, Shiv. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Printing the Web

For some websites the user experience already extends onto paper, like it or not. Ignoring this may result in lower overall user satisfaction. Consider the following factors when designing web pages that will be printed.

Kalbach, James. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Web Design>CSS>Printing

Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization

Visual communication can be thought of as two intertwined parts: personality, or look and feel, and visual organization. The personality of a presentation is what provides the emotional impact —your instinctual response to what you see. Creating an appropriate personality requires the use of colors, type treatments, images, shapes, patterns, and more, to “say” the right thing to your audience. This article, however, focuses on the other side of the visual communication coin: visual organization.

Wroblewski, Luke. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Web Design>Document Design>Visual Rhetoric

Managing the Complexity of Content Management

Content management systems suck. Or so you would think from the strife heard from analysts and practitioners alike. And yet, many websites regularly publish vast amounts of information with superior control and ease compared to manually editing pages. So where’s the disconnect between what’s possible and the too-often failure of CMS?

Lombardi, Victor. Boxes and Arrows (2004). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Content Strategy

Why We Call Them Participants

Sometimes we need to take a step back to ensure that our motivations are in the right place. It can be easy to forget that, when people participate in our studies, they are our partners. Dana Chisnell has taken the time to examine these attitudes and help us understand how to avoid falling into such traps.

Chisnell, Dana E. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Usability>Testing

Prototyping with XHTML

Looking for another way of realizing your design deliverables? XHTML are easy to code, can double as specifications, and create constraints that increase design effectiveness.

Ramsay, Anders and Leah Buley. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Web Design>Planning>XHTML

Design Behind the Design

I would like to encourage the community to talk about the need for professional networks within the information architecture field, especially as it relates to creating successful software and information systems. And, I would like to compare our needs in the field of IA with the systems that have been used in other areas to determine if we can develop an appropriate support system in moving towards specialization in our profession.

Evans, Clifton. Boxes and Arrows (2005). Articles>Information Design>Design>Collaboration

Designing for Limited Resources

Even in an ideal world, designs must optimise both the user experience and the business return. When resources are limited, the design must be optimised to make the best use of all resources as well. To account for this complexity, it is important to have a clear understanding of both sides of the design equation--what you have to work with and what you are trying to build.

Quinn, Laura S. Boxes and Arrows (2004). Articles>User Experience>Design

Examining the Role of De Facto Standards on the Web

Just what are the design practices on the web that have the highest frequency? And are there design practices that all (or nearly all) sites employ?

Adkisson, Heidi P. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Quick Turnaround Usability Testing, Part II

The beauty of the whiteboard method is that your report becomes simply a summary of what you have already written on the whiteboard, including completion metrics, findings, and recommendations that have been vetted by key stakeholders.

Nuschke, Paul. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods

Wanted/Needed: UX Design for Collaboration 2.0

There is plenty of hype about “Collaboration 2.0” at the moment, but the bugle is being blown too loudly, too soon. Take, for instance, the Enterprise Collaboration Panel at last year’s Office 2.0 Conference. Most of the discussion was really about communication rather than collaboration, with only a hint that beyond forming a social network (“putting the water cooler inside the computer”) there was still a lack of software that actually helped groups of people get the work done. What’s missing from the discussion is any formulation of what the process of collaboration entails; there’s no model from which collaborative applications could arise. If we can figure out a model then we in the UX community should be able to make a significant contribution to it.

Clarke, Matthew C. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>Web Design>Collaboration>Social Networking

Designing the Democratic

The role of the information architect (IA), interaction designer, or user experience (UX) designer is to help create architecture and interactions which will impact the user in constructive, meaningful ways. Sometimes the design choices are strategic and affect a broad interaction environment; other times they may be tactical and detailed, affecting few. But sometimes the design choices we make are not good enough for the users we’re trying to reach. Often a sense of democratic responsibility is missing in the artifacts and experiences which result from our designs and decisions.

Owen, Jamie. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>Information Design>User Experience>Participatory Design

Photos for Interaction

Software companies and other parties involved begin to use the power of a distinct visual design to express both their brand identity and custom interactive design solutions to the users. While this implies a new freedom for designers working in the field of interactive software products, it strengthens the importance of visual design for the design of user interfaces. Designers working on concrete graphic solutions for a specific interface are breaking away from established standards defined by a software vendor. It is now the responsibility of those user interface designers to choose graphical elements wisely to make a product’s interaction principles visible and usable.

Guenther, Milan. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Design>Graphic Design>Photography>Interaction Design

Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design

All of the members of the best teams could tell us, with relative ease, the top five business goals of their application, the top five user types the application was to serve, and the top five platform capabilities and limitations they had to work within. And, when questioned more deeply, each team member revealed an appreciation and understanding of the challenges and goals of their teammates almost as well as their own.

Selbie, Joseph. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Design>User Experience>Usability>User Centered Design

Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage

There are a wide variety of uses for Wikis and a level of interest in using them that’s matched by an extensive range of Wiki software. Wikis introduce to the Internet a collaborative model that not only allows, but explicitly encourages, broad and open participation. The idea that anyone can contribute reflects an assumption that both content quantity and quality will arise out of the ‘wisdom of the crowd.’

Clarke, Matthew C. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Wikis