Category: Foundational Thinking

Boxes and Arrows has been serving the user experience and information architecture community since 2001. Along the way, some pretty big ideas have been developed here by people who are now leaders in the industry. We hope you’ll find inspiration in these posts.

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Foundational Thinking / Social UX / UX Design

Designing Respectful Tech: What is your relationship with technology?

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You’ve been there before. You thought you could trust someone with a secret. You thought it would be safe, but found out later that they blabbed to everyone. Or, maybe they didn’t share it, but the way they used it felt manipulative. You gave more than you got and it didn’t feel fair. But now that it’s out there, do you even have control anymore? Ok. Now imagine that person was your supermarket.  Or your doctor.  Or your boss.

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Content Strategy / Foundational Thinking / Information Architecture

Introduction to Ontology Concepts and Modeling

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What is ontology? An ontology is a formal system for modeling concepts and their relationships. Unlike relational database systems, which are essentially interconnected tables, ontologies put a premium on the relationships between concepts by storing the information in a graph database, or triplestore. (The following examples use data derived from PLOS, which makes all of its Open Access data and content available.) Relational databases are good at representing tabular data for one-to-one relationships: However, real-life data is seldom this tidy;

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Discovery, Research, and Testing / Foundational Thinking / User Centered

Focus on Usage Maturity: Part III

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Using a Usage Maturity Matrix to Make Design and Strategy Decisions Early Foundations You may recall from earlier installments in this series, that usage maturity is a measure of users’ comfort and familiarity with, and degree of use of, a product, process or place.   During our master’s capstone research at Kent State, my project partner and I explored the varied levels of usage maturity of participants using Apple’s voice assistant Siri and found usage maturity did not coincide with participants’

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Case Studies / Discovery, Research, and Testing / Foundational Thinking / Mobile UX

A Digital Response to the Pandemic

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In March 2020, the pandemic stretched across Europe to the UK and Ireland. As the governments of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic began reporting cases of a deadly new coronavirus strain, both health services began to organize expert teams to take on what would be the biggest threat to public health in generations. At Big Motive, we have enjoyed the privilege of working with the health service as part of an integrated and multi-disciplined stakeholder team, charged with combatting

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Deliverables / Findability / Foundational Thinking / Process and Methods / Prototyping

Stop Counting Clicks

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Every user interaction is a decision. Every decision can lead to an exit. So the more options we offer, the more exit opportunities we create, which will reduce the probability of conversion. Right? Well… In fact, the number of interactions a user makes is in no way directly related to conversion rates. It might be a surprise, but there is no statistical evidence to prove that this widely held belief is true. When establishing the amount of clicks that are

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