User-centered design professionals pay special emphasis to one type of stakeholder—the users of the system—arguing that user experience needs to be carefully crafted to satisfy user needs. While understanding user needs and goals is certainly necessary, it is often not sufficient for producing a successful design.
Continue readingHAPPY BIRTHDAY BOXES AND ARROWS! On this, Boxes and Arrows’ one year anniversary, Christina Wodtke muses about our original goals, some of our accomplishments, and even shares a few tidbits from behind the scenes at B&A.
Continue reading“Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications” is a well-written, meaty book on the entire process of designing interactive websites from a user interface perspective. Those new to the field of user-centered design will find it most useful; intermediate or advanced practitioners looking for in-depth information specific to web applications may want to look elsewhere.
Continue readingDesigning, developing, and deploying an intranet can be expensive, time-consuming and organizationally tricky. But certain strategies, when carefully executed, can simplify designing and managing your intranet.
Continue readingPowerPoint: the software we love to hate. Has there been any other software since the dawn of the personal computer that has earned so much criticism? The question at hand is not, “Does PowerPoint suck?” The answer to that, as we all know, is yes. The question is, in fact, “For information architects, does PowerPoint suck?” Or, more to the point, “Even though PowerPoint sucks, should I use it for my deliverables?”
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