Clik here to view.
Pythagorus’ golden section
Why do we tend to use 8.5‑inch by 11-inch paper? How did a dollar bill come to exist in its present size? What determined the choice of musical notes that created a chord? Why are the logarithms in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Information architecture moving forward
Louis Rosenfeld is one of the better thinkers currently involved in information architecture. Frustrated with the baby steps — self-definition and self-justification — required to formulate a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Defining information architecture components
Louis Rosenfeld has followed up his excellent article on selecting architectural components with what amounts to an excerpt from his Information Architecture for the World Wide Web book on defining...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Megnut on usurping the design process
O’Reilly has published a very good essay by Meg Hourihan on the problem of clients usurping the design process in the building of websites. Too often, stakeholders on the client side of a web...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Carleton University interviews Donald Norman
Carleton University’s Human Oriented Technology Lab has published an interview with usability/human factors expert Donald Norman. Focusing on mental models in design, the interview is well worth a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Paul Otlet: Information architecture forefather
Even before Vannevar Bush began specification work on his memex, Paul Otlet was developing the first mechanical database: A rotating, wheel-shaped desk through which users could browse and annotate...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rosenfeld information architecture seminar
I’m headed out to Portland next week for Louis Rosenfeld’s enterprise information architecture seminar. I’m looking forward to learning a few more tricks of my trade and Rosenfeld is one of the best in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Usability refresher
We’ve just implemented a new information architecture on the College of Design website at the University of Minnesota. It’s been a long, excruciating process and now comes the fun part — usability...
View ArticleClik here to view.
User experience tips from a software engineer
According to the blurb for Michael Lopp’s talk at SXSW, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts, great design always meets with great resistance. Lopp is a senior engineering manager at Apple and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nielsen on writing styles
The web is not television, we’ve been told over and over. Television, Jakob Nielsen reminds us, is a passive medium. The web, on the other hand, is an active medium. Different mediums require different...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Usability problems with the Airbus A320
The ditch of US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River exposed several serious usability/human factors problems with the Airbus A320 aircraft. According to Michael Wilson and Russ Buettner’s account...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Yikes: Mega drop-down navigation actually works pretty well
Here’s the shocker for the week. Usability and human factors expert Jakob Nielsen has found that mega drop-down navigation panels actually work for dense or complicated subnavigation structures. This...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Typekit: Typography for the web… finally… really?
Real typography on the web has been as elusive as a shadow at night. One of the brightest web designers, Jeff Veen and his cohorts at Small Batch, aim to change all that with Typekit. Veen thinks...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Content templates or page tables: Whatever you call them, use them
Erin Kissane has written a stellar second article, “Content templates to the rescue,” for A List Apart in what hopefully is a continuing series. Her first article in the series, “Writing content that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Toward a user experience strategy
ARTS & FARCES has specialized in user experience for many years, but I’ve been reluctant to write much about the topic. For a variety of reasons, that’s changing now and I’m adding a new “User...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Nielsen on usability progress
Usability improved by about six percent each year over the past decade according to Jakob Nielsen’s research. That works out to a seemingly-astounding 77 percent. That sounds like incredibly good news...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Eye-tracking shows real-time search results ignored
A recent eye-tracking usability study indicates that users ignore real-time results in searches. How users use search is, well, weird science. We’ve known for some time, for example, that a typical...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What the youngs don’t grok
The Information Architecture Summit 2010 took place this week in Phoenix. I rarely, if ever, attend big honking conferences like these any more because they’re too expensive, dialysis on the road is a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The dark side of working in user experience
Lou Rosenfeld absolutely nails the dark side of working in user experience, especially the information architecture piece of it, in his “Banned terms for information architects.” Rosenfeld spotlights a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
400 milliseconds. Really?
When I first started working on the web, I had a Sun workstation connected to the internet’s backbone through MRNet. Everyone thought I had blazing internet connectivity, but that wasn’t the case. In...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Apple’s user interfaces have always been skeuomorphic
There’s much hand-wringing happening currently on the intertubes about Apple’s skeuomorphic (attempts to replicate physical world objects’ ornamental design cues in a virtual form; in user interface...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Apple’s human factors problems
When Tim Cook canned Scott Forstall and announced that Jonathan Ive would “provide leadership and direction for Human Interface (HI) across the company in addition to his longtime role as the leader of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why iTunes 11 sucks
Dave Winer nails it (yet again) with “iTunes is an outliner.” He also provides an excellent analysis of how iTunes got to be so bad. I’m absolutely dumbfounded with all of the tech press fawning over...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Responsive or not?
I’ve been working in my spare time over the past year or so to migrate major parts of this website from ExpressionEngine to a combination of WordPress and Apple’s OS X Server Wiki module. In the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
John Maeda on the uselessness of the skeuomorphism argument
It’s unfortunate that outside of the design community, the thing for which John Maeda is most widely known is the controversy surrounding his presidency of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). His...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Resisting web redesigns
The very best user experience information is coming from practitioners — rather than the usual suspect pundits — these days. As an example, consider Linda Holmes’s “Why I Resist Web Redesigns (And...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On organizational style guides
Style guides are difficult to create — especially for organizations with which a freelancer has only a glancing relationship. MailChimp’s Kate Kiefer Lee recently published an article on style guides...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Type Connection offers matching typefaces for non-designers
If, like me, you love typography but aren’t a graphic designer, you spend a lot of time trying to match an appropriate companion to a specific typeface. Truth be told, we selected Sumner Stone’s family...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ratios, not grids, for responsive web structure
Ratios have historically been used by architects, artists, and designers to scale and distinguish their compositions. Nathan Ford writing for A List Apart, suggests that web designers, developers, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jeffrey Zeldman documentary
I owe a great debt to a dozen or so people who helped establish the various disciplines that make up the practice of user experience design. High on that list is Jeffrey Zeldman who was there from...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tufte CSS
Edward Tufte is one of my heroes in so many ways; everything from graphic design to publishing. His approach is that of simplicity and clarity at the macro level. At the micro level, that translates to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Donald Norman says Apple has forgotten usability
Don Norman is no slouch when it comes to design, usability/human factors, and cognitive science. He was an Apple vice president in the 1990s focusing on it, co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group to...
View Article
