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.
Methods
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
Not every upgrade comes with a big budget, so you have to work with what you’ve got. Here are a couple of ways you can work with an existing UI to give it a new look and a new function.
Change It Up!
Adapting an Existing UI for a New Purpose
Personas and scenarios tell honest stories that are sculpted from diverse and comprehensive sets of data. Parrish Hanna and his Experience Planners demonstrate how to keep it honest throughout the organization.
Customer Storytelling at the Heart of Business Success
The emergence of a handful of popular mobile data services has changed the way we interact with our phones. Now, several technologies on the immediate horizon are about to change the way we (and our phones) interact with the world. Imagine…
Location and Presence in Mobile Data Services
I’ve heard of a fantastic land far, far away where magical people called “project managers” collect something called “requirements.” These requirements so clearly, concisely, and completely describe work to be done that all the villagers involved share a common understanding of a project’s goals.
Are Useful Requirements Just A Fairy Tale? (and why an IA should care)
Enterprise software usability is difficult to evaluate because the standard product shipped on a CD is almost always customized when it is implemented. How then can we learn about the design issues that actual users encounter with customized software?
Remote Contextual Inquiry: A Technique to Improve Enterprise Software
Card sorting is a simple user-centered technique for obtaining insight into the structure of a site. But is it really so simple? This definitive guide to card sorting includes detailed instructions on how to execute and analyze a sort, plus helpful hints to improve your sorts. It is the first in a series of articles about card sorting.
Card sorting: a definitive guide
Personalization, properly implemented, brings focus to your message and delivers an experience that is visitor-oriented, quick to inform, and relevant. Personalization, poorly implemented, complicates the user experience and orphans content. This article describes what separates the freshness from the noise.