Methods
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The Lazy IA's Guide to Making Sitemaps
by Stephen Turbek | [64 comments]
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. more...
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The Age of Findability
by Peter Morville | [62 comments]
It doesn’t replace information architecture. And it’s really not a school or brand of information architecture. Findability is about recognizing that we live in a multi-dimensional world, and deciding to explore new facets that cut across traditional boundaries. more...
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Card sorting: a definitive guide
by Donna Maurer and Todd Warfel | [38 comments]
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. more...
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Building the UX Dreamteam
by Anthony Colfelt | [36 comments]
Every time you hire someone for your UX team, you make a gut call that their personality and skills are what they seem. Anthony Colfelt looks to arm you with ways to make the hiring decisions that fit the best people into the reality of your business context. more...
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Real Wireframes Get Real Results
by Stephen Turbek | [35 comments]
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. more...
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Extreme User Research
by Daniel Lafreniere | [34 comments]
Clients don’t know a thing about their users, and designers think that if they like it, everyone will. Sound familiar? Daniel Lafreniere's 30-minute "extreme user research" plan comes to the rescue for those of us facing this exact situation. With this practical method, you can generate loads of useful data that will have a real impact on design, thus making the website more effective and profitable. more...
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Icon Analysis
by Matt Queen | [34 comments]
Icons that are difficult to tell apart can lead to disastrous consequences. Queen shows us how studying the way the human visual system encodes information can lead to more effective icon design. more...
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PDF Prototypes: Mistakenly Disregarded and Underutilized
by Kyle Soucy | [33 comments]
Creating clickable PDF prototypes for new designs is a valuable tool that is often overlooked and underutilized. Kyle Pero Soucy demonstrates how we can replicate most interactive design elements without investing a lot of time and effort. more...
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Recording Screen Activity During Usability Testing
by Karl Fast | [28 comments]
Recording what users do is a crucial aspect of usability testing. Fortunately, recording screen activity doesn’t necessarily cost much. Three Windows-based software programs range between $30 and $150 and offer excellent performance. more...
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Personas and the Role of Design Documentation
by Andrew Hinton | [25 comments]
Andrew Hinton digs into the origins of the persona and reflects on how business uses (or misuses) design documentation. more...
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A Map-Based Approach to a Content Inventory
by Patrick C. Walsh | [24 comments]
A map-based approach to building a content inventory allows it to be a tool from the concept stages and throughout the life of the website. Patrick Walsh tells us why to use them, shows us how to create the maps, and how to leverage them over the long haul. more...
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Programming for Information Architects
by Andrew Otwell | [24 comments]
Both programming and IA are oriented towards abstraction. They both want to find patterns and rules that describe and predict. They both are concerned with handling structured content and metadata. But more often than not, IAs don’t know what’s going on with code. In this article, Andrew Otwell introduces IAs to the basic building blocks of programming. more...
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Pioneering a User Experience (UX) Process
by B&A Staff and Amy Hillman | [23 comments]
Though a possibly rewarding journey, starting a UX process can be a nightmare if approached from the wrong angle. Initiating a culture-shift, overhauling existing processes, evangelizing, strategizing, and educating is an enormous undertaking. Amy Hillman offers her perspective on how to build a UX process, from the ground up. more...
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Faceted Feature Analysis
by Adam Polansky | [22 comments]
Adam Polansky tells us about how “Faceted Feature Analysis” takes the subjective needs of stakeholders and blends them with objective constraints in a way that ensures all points of view are fairly considered. more...
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Comics: Not just for laughs!
by Rebekah Sedaca | [22 comments]
Using comics is a novel means of communicating complex design concepts. There is has been a lot of talk about it recently, but it this medium only reserved for artists? Rebekah Sedaca decided to give it a try. It worked and she's outlined her process and tools that you may be able to use. more...
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Practical Applications: Visio or HTML for Wireframes
by Jeff Gothelf | [21 comments]
Design organizations inevitably run across the debate of Visio versus HTML wireframes. The decision for one over the other is never a clear-cut one since, as with all things IA-related, it depends. This article seeks to sort out the issues by describing the pros and cons of each and identifying situations where one may be more effective than the other. more...
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Interactive Prototypes with PowerPoint
by Maureen Kelly | [20 comments]
Many designers use MS PowerPoint to conceptualize wireframes and get buy-in on project direction. Maureen Kelly shows us how to bring those same artifacts to life as an interactive prototype that allows you to validate the design at many levels. more...
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The Challenge of Dashboards and Portals
by Joe Lamantia | [20 comments]
Can components come to the rescue for executive dashboards? Much like IKEA uses interchangeable islands, counters, and cupboards to create a custom kitchen, by Joe Lamantia shows how it's possible to use a modular approach for executive dashboards. more...
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Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design
by Luke Wroblewski | [20 comments]
The web is awash with sterile design solutions. IBM, Dell, Microsoft, and countless others are virtually indistinguishable from each other. Though one might say this makes browsing easier by virtue of a standardized interface, in reality such sites create mundane experiences for their users and fail to make a positive connection with their audience. more...
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Analyzing Card Sort Results with a Spreadsheet Template
by Joe Lamantia and Joe Lamantia | [20 comments]
This article explains how to quickly derive easily-read, quantitative results from a card-sort activity by entering data into a spreadsheet template that is adaptable to any set of cards and categories. more...