Tom Wailes’ interviews Dan Brown about how pushing the envelope in small ways can be the best path to innovation in many corporate and public sector projects. (Part 4 in a series)
Deliverables and Documentation
Many Web professionals consider content inventories critical parts of most projects. Are there certain specific things to look for during a content inventory? Fred Leise definitely thinks so. He proposes a set of content analysis heuristics and discusses how to utilize each one.
Content Analysis Heuristics
Information architects, afraid to step on designers’ toes, may actually render wireframes unusable. Stephen Turbek talks about Verizon, the similarities between wireframes and iPods, and how to get real.
Real Wireframes Get Real Results
Wireframes. We’ve all done them. We’ve all had to make sure our clients look at placement, labels, flow, and real estate distribution–but ignore color and design at all costs because, after all, they are wireframes.
AJAX, Laszlo, Flex, and other technologies and techniques that enhance usability challenge the way we think as architects but, more importantly, they also put a larger demand on our deliverables.
The Guided Wireframe Narrative for Rich Internet Applications
Case Study: Prototyping Complex Interactions
Popular wireframing tools allow for reuse of repeated elements: change a centralized module once and have it update across all your screens. Nathan Curtis offers practical tips for increasing wireframing efficiency in this story.
Know Your Place
Your Designs are Modular, but are your Artifacts?
Interaction modeling makes design decisions explicit. In principle it’s simple: record what users “should” do, what they actually do, and then explain the differences between the two. Of course there’s more to it than that, and Matt Queen gives us all the details in this story.
Interaction Modeling
User State-Trace Analysis
The more automated our lives become, the less time we seem to have. And as an information architect, a lot of time is spent making sitemaps … by hand. How valuable are sitemaps to a project team and to clients? Would your time be better spent doing other tasks than hand building sitemaps? What if we told you, “now you can.” Find out how.
The Lazy IA’s Guide to Making Sitemaps
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?
Storyboarding Rich Internet Applications with Visio
Spend any time with Visio and you’ll find yourself wondering how glue works. In the real world, it’s pretty straightforward: put glue between two things and they’ll stick. Although glue is used for sticking shapes together in Visio, the metaphor ends there.
Visio Glue: Not For Sniffing – Special Deliverable #13
The Yahoo! platform design team shares their process for defining and designing a pattern and standards library, the process for defining the requirements of the repository and the process for defining the lifecycle of a pattern.