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.

Conferences and Events / Deliverables / Foundational Thinking / Process and Methods / Professionalism

Information Architecture’s Teenage Dilemma

Posted by

Imagine if you will information architecture as a pimply-faced, malcontent teenager.  IA is eager to express and redefine itself. It wants to be an individual yet accepted by its peers. It is simultaneously aggravated and apathetic about its parents, mentors, and role-models. It is a bit of a mess, but a wonderful, beautiful mess with endless opportunity and potential. The IA Summit (and information architecture) enters adolescence The first IA Summit was held April 8-9, 2000, in Boston, MA, and

Continue reading
Content Strategy / Foundational Thinking / Interfaces

Is the iPad mobile?

Posted by

My Android phone died on the train when I was several stops away from my destination. I should have remembered where I was supposed to get off, but, like everyone else, I rely on technology to offload cognitive processes when I should be using my brain. Wait, I thought, I have both my iPad and my laptop in my backpack. I felt ridiculously conspicuous pulling out either just to check Google Maps. Between the two, I chose the iPad. It’s

Continue reading
Design Principles / Foundational Thinking

A Truly Ambitious Product Idea: Making Stuff for People

Posted by

When I was eleven, my parents bought a Mac Plus. It had a tiny monochrome screen, a floppy drive, and 1MB of memory. And it came with something called HyperCard. HyperCard let you make stuff. It had documents called stacks, each a series of cards – similar to PowerPoint today. In addition to graphics and text, you could create buttons and tell them what to do – flip to another card, show or hide an object, and so forth. Down at

Continue reading
Foundational Thinking

Five Big UX Topics in 2012

Posted by

For years, UX professionals have vigorously lobbied for a “seat at the table” when it comes to formative decisions about products and product development. Looking back at 2012, trends indicate that this wish is becoming reality. Many leading UX consultants reported that their clients are more open to research and design methods with a UX focus than they have been in the past. This elevated focus on UX ideas and concepts will require informed engagement with several high-level topics that

Continue reading
Foundational Thinking / Professionalism / Workplace and Career

A Perfection of Means and a Confusion of Aims

Posted by

“A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem” – Albert Einstein My work involves helping people to understand how to best plan circumstances in which users are engaged and satisfied with their experience. Yet, I do not call myself a user experience designer. I am an information architect. I work on clarifying information and the structure it should take to best enable understanding. I create maps, controlled vocabularies, diagrams, flows, hierarchies, and statements of

Continue reading