Knowledge Navigator

Thanks to a post by Alex Wright's blog, I ran across a copy of Apple's legendary Knowledge Navigator presentation (QuickTime), which was produced by Clement Mok.

Considering how old this movie is, the Knowledge Navigator really showed how a connected UI could play a central role in the user experience. They did a lot of really good work at Apple back then with their ATG.

Role of Information Architecture in Success Metrics

"Information Architecture can be applied to resolve breakdowns in site design and navigation structure. The role of good Information Architecture is to make the Website work not in the technical sense, but from a functional, organized, conceptual perspective. "

From Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales

Building Usable Information Sites with Personas

"Personas are power tools that give a much-needed focus to interface design projects. "

From Information Today

We Are All Connected: The Path from Architecture to Information Architecture

Boxes and Arrows recently featured an article illustrating the connective tissue between Information architecture and tradional building architecture disciplines. They did a really interesting approach in showing how the process that tradiional architects approach visual design is similar to that of IA.

I am not going to start the argument that the two are one in the same... I have too many friends that are real architects, but the article is worth the read for those of us that are UXP and IA types.

Understanding Mental Maps

People coming to your website bring all their previous experiences with other web sites with them. This knowledge is what is commonly referred to as a mental map, where a user has some very well placed and preconceived notions of where to find things they are looking for on a page.

In most cases this mental map is what is their expectation of where to find things on any site. Examples of items that make up a mental map are where to find things like home, or using terms such as "Search," "Sign-In" in navigation instead of some funky term like Projects. The success and failure of a site can rest on how a user's mental map synchs to how you designed your site.

Gerry's latest article dives deeper into this notion of Mental Mapping and how it can imact a site's success.

Looking for a User Experience Job?

Looks like there is a new specialized firm focusing on placing experienced User Experience professionals. That is something that is sorely needed. Although a lot of us get into gigs through personal networks and professional associations, there are always folks that know more people.

ExperiencePeople was founded by a Challis Hodge and comes with some pretty glowing endorsements from Peter.

Anyone looking for a new UXP gig?

Pitfalls of Internationalizing Websites

I recently went through the process of moving a site from a static and U.S. centric audience to a global user experience, which required designing navigation systems and translating content for multiple languages.

The effort was a first for the company and myself. The project really awakened my understanding of the complexities involved in sucessessfully managing the internationalization of content and creation of a multdimensional IA.

We broke up our approach into several phases, with the bulk of the strategy and global stakeholder alignment done up front as we defined the user experience. As we started development, we started to comprehend how the effort of gathering assets (content, localized, graphics, and identification of local content) was multiplied with local versions in at least 2 languages per country.

This process also provided a rude awakening to the need to have content authors that can not only write in the local language for any given country on a global website, but can write well. Moreover, a having a distributed publishing model in place via a content management system would have also made things easier.

A recent article by Gerry McGovern (pop-up) really brought my experience home in his discussion about some of the big pitfalls (pop-up) with developing content on a global and localized bases for any website. His main argument is that a truly international site, whether a corporate/investor focused site or a ecommerce site, relies on well written content by folks that understand how to write content for the web. The complexities of being successful is only magnified by the number of languages a site is translated into. So, if you can't do local content at all, Gerry argues, you shouldn't do it at all.

The article is well worth the read. (pop-up)

10 Most Violated Home Page Guidelines

Although I have sort of a love hate relationship with Jakob Nielsen (some of his views on graphics on sites and navigation are just a little too extreme), he does have some very valid points when it comes to general page layout and home page design.

The man I love to hate (pop-up) recently published his top 10 list of most violated home page design standards. Jakob found the that many of the items listed had a very low percentage of being used on the web.

Here are some key examples:

• Emphasize what your site offers that's of value to users and how your services differ from those of key competitors . Compliance Rate: 27%
• Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size. Compliance Rate: 28%
• Don't include an active link to the homepage on the homepage. Compliance Rate: 41%
• Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does. Compliance Rate: 36%

Some of these things are just plain obvious. For example, you would want to explain what your site is all about and the value to the user. However, what I find in my many design and content sessions is that despite the desire explain the value of the site to your users, the message gets muddled in marketing speak that means nothing to the extenal audience.

Another compliance item that drives me crazy is the embedding of a link to the home page while you are on the home page. We have examples of this phenomena on some of the sites we have online where I work. A lot of those are just legacy items or cases where the it was too much effort to conditionally write the link depending where the user was in the site.

If you are on the home page, whether the Global Home or a localized country home, you should not be able to revisit the page you are already on by clicking home. You are already home.

So, having a home link on the home page confuses users. Hell, it can confuse me at times and I design navigation systems for a living.

Read the full article >> (pop-up)

Friday in the City

We spent Friday night in the City, which was a big deal since we moved. It seems that we are either faced with a decision of leaving SF early or staying in a hotel. This is a far cry from the days when we lived only 30 minutes away from downtown San Francisco.

We went into town to see Guster in concert @ the Warfield. These guys came to prominence a few years ago and we happened to catch them as an opening act for the Barenaked Ladies. After that we were hooked.

The show at the Warfield was great. I am still amazed at the drummer. This guy plays the drums with his bare hands. How he manages to play for 3 hours straight is beyond me. There were many memorable moments, but the best part of the show was the closing song. Guster played totally unplugged...all acoustic. That is something that I have never seen done in a large concert setting.

Blog Corruption

Well, I did it. i managed to get Dan (pop-up) set up on my server with MovableType. Yet another convert from Blogger (pop-up).

It's funny how you forget how to do certain things after not doing them for a long time. It took 2 hours to do what I have done in the past in 15 minutes. Man, I am getting old and forgetful.

Good Design Comes from Bad Design

I was talking about this the other day in a design meeting with some key stakeholders and for the life of me couldn't remember the URL article that explained the theory. This is it, an article that was published on UIWEB. Well worth the read.

Usefull List Serve Summary

As a subsriber to CHI-WEB, I am more than often overwhelmed by the amount of information and the lack of filtering available on what should be a very invaluable list.

Thanks to UIWEB, there is now a filtered summary and best of CHI-WEB and SIGGIA-L.

It is well worth the visit and has actually replaced my daily reading of CHI-WEB.

IA Elevator Pitches

The IAFIA has some really good elevator pitches (pop-up) that can be used to explain and sell the value of IA in 2 sentences or less.

Improvements to Panther

Well, I ran (not walked) to the nearest Apple store when Panther was released a week ago, but have been so busy that have not installed it yet. Now I have time to see what kind of kitten this OS update is. Sunday is Panther day. I will either be cheering or cursing depending upon what issues I run into. Mac OS Updates never seem to go all the smoothly since OS X was introduced.

On a related note, Jason Kottke, has an interesting suggestion for improving Expose, which is rumored to be based upon the research that Apple did on piles back in '92 (PDF) and Microsoft subsequently put into Longhorn --cough, vaporware.

Web Design Practices

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on De Facto Web Standards, I ran across Web Design Practices (pop-up), a well-presented survey of the interface design practices of 79 prominent E-commerce sites. The site is run by Heidi Atkinson, the author of the study and article republished on Boxes and Arrows.

The site really brings the common standards and usage information to the surface. This is helpful in those discussions about what is really a "web standard" and refocus discussions on user needs.

IA Jargon Watch

Friday is typically List Serve catch up day. A day when I go through all the UXP list serves and sites I subscribe to and read up on the happenings in the user experience world. While going through the news, I ran accross a good IA jargon list from Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path that I found entertaining.

My personal favorites:

SUAC v. Acronym for "Shut Up and Color". How Marketing and Engineering departments often think (or wish) design should be done.

Boil the Ocean v. Try to solve too many problems with an overambitious project, typically resulting in a complete failure. Many Content Management projects end up this way when attempting to port an entire organization's content, process, and workflow into one new, massive tool. "Look, just help the HR teams get their forms online. We don't need to boil the ocean with this."

Deep Diving v. Giving users the ability to bookmark a page deep within the site. "We've enabled deep diving in the employee directory by changing the URL structure."

"Boil the Ocean" tends to really ring true in my experience. We go through far too many of those type of projects only to narrow scope well after it is obvious we Boiled the Ocean dry.

Read the full list >> (pop-up)

House Update

Well, we have been on the go for the last 8 weeks...all house, all the time, day and night. We have gotten all the drapes up in the house with the exception of the second guest room and the ceiling fans (thanks to Brian and Lanette). The only thing is the ceiling fan in the family room died on us, so we are off to Home depot to exchange it.

I've been making a lot of late evening runs to Home Depot. I picked up pathway lights and flagstone for some pathways I plan on putting in on the side and backyard. The big debate is now centered on the backyard...hire a contractor or do it ourselves. A lot of this issue revolves around the budget and the impending winter season. I really don't want to slog through a mud pit back there.

New pictures will be posted soon.

Home Page Optimzation for New Users

Nick Usborne recently published a great article on addressing the needs of new users on a home page. At the heart of his discussion, Nick argues that most sites focus on addressing the needs of returning users and give short shrift to addressing the needs of new users. This lack of focus on new users needs often fails to give this critical audience directed instructions on what do do (e.g, how to register, use the site) and information about what the site does. Nick offers a series of techniques and examples that point to how to cater to new user needs.

Read the article >> (pop-up)

De Facto Web Standards

Anyone that uses the web on a semi-regular basis will begin to notice things that seem to be "standards" online. Things like orientation of navigation (left vs. top), location of search or log in, the use of the site logo for the home buttom are some examples of such de facto standards.

The problem with user experience especially when working with clients or peers is that everyone has a perception of what is a standard. Without any imperical data folks will argue until they are blue in the face that it is a de facto standard for main navigation to be rendered in graphics or that log in should not be located on the far left. A recent article by Heidi Adkinsson with Blink Interactive Architects on Boxes and Arrows sheds some light on the subject.

In Heidi's article we get a glimpse of some initial data on what is a standard on the web and to what degree that a perceived defacto standard is real. In the study conducted at the University of Washington items ranging from the use of the logo as a home button, top or horizontal navigation, and (my personal favorite) text vs. graphics for main navigation links were examined.

Some of the results were quite telling...

Characteristic & Frequency (of sites)

Logo (upper left corner) linking back to the home page 100%

Horizontal placement of top level category links 87%

Text for top navigation rendered as graphic 76%

Breadcrumb navigation used on site 45%

Despite the numberts presented, Heidi also noted that 70% of the ecommerce sites surveyed did not use many of the design principles that were examined (excerpt above). This leads to the question of where should we derived web standards from. In many cases UXP folks, including myself, look to Human Interface Guidelines from Apple and Microsoft. The theory behind this is that people take their apriore knowledge from applications and operating systems and apply them to web. While this can be helpful, the web also has subtle differences that do not easily lend itself to the use of UI theories from a dektop interface metaphor.

Read the full article >> (pop-up)

Movable type is fixed

What a very weird week. For the last 5 days I have been trying to figure out why movable type, which is used to publish to this site, has been hosed. After some fiddling and permissions modifications I got it back online. The thing that perplexes me is this: I have not touched the install on this app for well over a year. It was installed and was extremely stable. Weird.