ReachCustomersOnline.com

“To date, the most common approach to propagating a single user experience standard is the development of UI guidelines and principles documentation within an organization. Development teams — usually incorporating a user experience specialist — then reference this documentation during implementation and upgrade processes. However, as the numbers of systems grow within an organization, so... 
Read the full story

“Information architecture is an often misunderstood job title. Are they Designers? Developers? Managers? All of the above? In this article we’ll discuss what information architecture is, why it’s related to usability, and what are the common tools/programs used in information architecture. Along the way we’ll share some of the tweeters, books, and resources we found useful for budding information... 
Read the full story

” Possibly the biggest mistake in any development project is failure to plan. Recently, the owner of a prospective start-up told me that planning was unnecessary and a good developer could just start coding. This, I promise you, will end in tears. Wireframing is one of the first steps in your planning process and arguably it’s one of the most important ones. This is when the idea starts to... 
Read the full story

“In the broadest sense, all kinds of design artifacts are prototypes. Pencil sketches, blocks of wood, storyboards, wireframes, foam-core models, pixel-perfect state renderings, clickable demos, and functioning production code are all strategies for representing a thing being designed. However, in the world of interaction design, we usually reserve the term for ways... 
Read the full story

” Unfortunately, we’ve found that many teams don’t know how to iterate effectively. Good iteration is a deliberate activity, with four important stages: planning, implementing, measuring, and learning. The best teams focus on each stage appropriately, making sure they get the most out of it. While iterations can be very short, (we’ve seen teams that can iterate a dozen times... 
Read the full story

“Since Apple opened up the iPhone and iPod Touch operating system to outside developers and gave them a place to sell their wares – the AppStore - a new breed of mind mapping tools has quickly emerged that enable you to capture your ideas any time, anywhere. These programs vary widely in their capabilities, but all offer some intriguing capabilities that promise a bright future for visual diagramming... 
Read the full story

“Whereas a design pattern is a common solution to a specific, recurring problem (such as pagination interfaces), an interaction design framework is a set of design patterns and other elements used together to guide the design of a complete system or site context.” From UIE. This is a good overview of how you can take interactions within a software application, and across software... 
Read the full story

“The barrier between web pages and desktop software is beginning to disappear, and modern rich client user interface technologies such as Silverlight/WPF, Air, or Java FX enables designers to take the control over the whole user experience of a software product. Style guides for operating systems like MacOS or Windows become less important because software products are available on multiple platforms,... 
Read the full story

“Here is another very good Polypage HTML wireframe submitted by Joey Marchy from nGen Works. Two interesting uses of Polypage make themselves visible in this sample. First, on the upper left hand side, all of the various user types have been defined. Toggling them gives a good sense of what all of the various wireframes will look like for that particular user. Secondly, Polypage has also been... 
Read the full story

“One of the biggest problems with wireframes is the lack of a standardized notation. In other words, my wireframes certainly don’t look anything like your wireframes. This means that visual designers and developers who use wireframes are continually relearning how to interpret our work, leading to noise between author and reader. To compensate for the lack of a standard, we have to create highly... 
Read the full story

“An interaction design pattern is not a step-by-step recipe or a specification. It’s a set of things we’ve learned that tend to work in clearly defined situations as well as some known issues that need to be balanced or sorted out or otherwise addressed. A pattern is closer to a checklist than to a mock or a wireframe.” From Boxes and Arrows. This is a moderately technical discussion... 
Read the full story

“I often tell clients that IA [information architecture] establishes the baseline, or foundation, for a solid site structure. It helps create the traffic patterns and navigational routes that get the customer from A to B in language that is helpful and easy to understand. In fact, IA is the first step in meeting customer goals and can therefore increase brand awareness and product or service... 
Read the full story

“People constantly ask me what the best prototyping or mockup tool is.  My standard answer is “whichever tool you are most comfortable/experienced with.”  But just to cover all the bases and make sure that I’m not missing out on the “silver bullet”, I decided to do a review of all the tools that I’m aware of.  You could (and probably should) distinguish between pure mockup tools... 
Read the full story

“So my choice of using FW for prototyping is most definitely not a statement about it being a great prototyping tool overall, just that it works great for me personally because I can go all the way from wireframes to final design within the same app. That’s going to be one of the main things I was going to demo - recycling art assets from the wireframes to the final visual mockups.” From... 
Read the full story

“The user experience team members learned to speak the same language by collectively discussing our ways of working and our deliverables. This process started with the kick-off workshop, continued during the review process of the diagram and deliverables descriptions and continues to this day when we discuss how to combine smaller ... 
Read the full story

“I think it is quite common for UX folks to view design as problem solving. For me, designing through the use of wireframes is a search in a problem space of alternatives; it’s a process of problem setting as much as it is a process of problem solving, which means that I always start with the context. To simplify, I pick my primary audience and the one activity which allows them to solve one... 
Read the full story

“Lists are a beautiful way to display content and information in a very easy to scan, easy to read method. Lists are found on most blogs to list posts, comments, tags, or links. In this post we will be exploring the modern practices of lists as an element of web design and I will be showing you how to design better lists to add to the overall design of your site.” From WebDesignTuts. The... 
Read the full story

“Ben pointed me to an interesting set of HTML wireframes which use Polypage. Polypage expands HTML wireframes or mock-ups and allows for the creation of page states. Furthermore, the various states are independent of each other and can be toggled on a small top menu to affect the page view. Say for example you want to show your wireframes to your client in the “logged out” and “first time... 
Read the full story

Scrnshots.com is an online community where designers can share interesting and beautiful designs. What a great idea. Search by date, tags, domains, and users. This is a great resource for designers in search of visual stimulation and/or ideas. You also could get lost for hours.  Read More →

“It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem. The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The... 
Read the full story