Simplify your work and your life by learning the tools and techniques that authors have used to conquered gnarly problem spaces. From avoiding burnout to doing scrappy research on a shoestring budget, you’ll benefit from their experience, avoid making the mistakes they made, and go on to make all new mistakes of your own. (Then contribute your learnings back to us!)
Part 2: The intense focus on the user experience differentiates websites from printed products—and information architects from print designers and writers—more than anything else. Information architects must think like print designers and writers—and they must do what print designers and writers do—on a much bigger scale, in “N dimensions.”
Continue reading“Experience design” doesn’t just apply to online design. Paco Underhill’s “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping” explores customer experience and consumer behavior as they affect retail and offline environments and in turn provides dozens of lessons for those in web development.
Continue readingIt 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.
Continue readingSeveral orienteering strategies – including map simplification and contact, navigating by checkpoints, rough and precise map reading, and using attack points to find the goal – have useful IA parallels. Gene Smith explores how IAs can learn from these parallel techniques and create digital spaces that are easier to navigate.
Continue readingRecently Boxes and Arrows caught up with Samantha Bailey, formerly at Argus and current lead IA for Wachovia Corporation’s Wachovia.com website. She talks about the transition from being a consultant to an “innie” IA, unravels the mysteries of metadata and taxonomies and shares her vision of the future of IA.
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