User journeys are a method for conceptualising and structuring a website’s content and functionality. These journeys allow us to shift away from thinking about structure in terms of hierarchies or a technical build; instead you create a narrative around your user’s needs.
Big Ideas
Perhaps it’s happened to you too. If you’ve clicked on an interesting image or piece of content only to find that you clicked through an online advertisement, you may be missing the lines between content and advertising. Their dichotomy is not new: television networks have been thinking about the distinction for over 60 years. Can their models reveal anything about the future direction of online advertising?
What I Learned From Television
Goodbye 2004, hello ’05. At the end of 2004, we look back at the year and take stock of where things are, how the year has passed and are thankful for Boxes and Arrows’ readers and community of authors and volunteers.
Goodbye 2004, Hello to Another Good Year
Notes from the Editors and Publisher
Assume that you are in charge of a development project and you have about $10,000 to spend on usability. What is the best way to use the money? What is the right thing to do for the organization? What will be best for customers?
Investing in Usability: Testing versus Training
Extreme Makeover is an unlikely place to look for useful insights into corporate innovation. Even the fat, awkward, and, let’s face it, hideous bubble-era companies were not going to improve their questionable bottom lines with a nose job, liposuction, and tummy-tuck. In spite of that, the show can offer some useful lessons when trying to understand the dynamics of innovation.
Innovation Extreme Makeover
I recently started a new job. The group I manage is new and all the people on my team have recently been transferred into this group. Additionally, each person has spent a lot of time in the recent past working on individual, solitary projects, and has not regularly been part of a collaborative team.
Mission Statements: Why You Might Want One
The efforts to define our field and our role are understandable by-products of our economic times and of forces in our contexts of practice. What are the pressures behind this quest for definition? What are the options (and potential advantages) of refusing to pigeonhole ourselves?
Information Architecture: A Rose by Any Other Name…
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.
Managing the Complexity of Content Management
When resources are limited, the design must be optimized to make the best use of all resources. 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.
Designing for Limited Resources
How often do we want to simply make our point, instead of bringing our opinions together to reach consensus? Look at all the PowerPoint presentations and slick brochures: we want to tell our view, instead of listening to others. We want our opinion to be heard.