Information architecture (IA) focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling content in an effective and sustainable way. The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks. The Information Architecture Institute defines information architecture simply: “Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable.” The purpose of your … Read more
In Agile, user story maps are a holistic view of your product backlog. A product backlog is a repository of requirements for the releases of the product. The user story map is focused on the user experience target outcomes and identifying the best way to ‘slice’ your product releases by minimal viable product (MVP). A … Read more
I started developing website in the 1990’s – HTML 1, before CSS, basic JavaScript and the beginning of the dot com boom. Now there is HTML 5, CSS 3 and all sorts of libraries and frameworks to create sophisticated websites. One thing hasn’t change about websites – they still need to be easy to use. … Read more
Every day, we fill out forms. At the office to get our work done and at home to take care of our domestic needs. Forms are the lifeblood of digital information sharing. A couple of excellent guidelines on forms: Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design Best Practices shares guidelines on input fields, input labels, validation, feedback, … Read more
I find myself going back to Fabien Girardin’s excellent article, Experience Design in the Machine Learning Era, and mining it for more gold. Fabien shares: “Nowadays, the design of many digital services does not only rely on data manipulation and information design but also on systems that learn from their users. If you would open the … Read more
While visually appealing (harmonious) color palettes are easy to come by these days, finding the right color palette for data visualizations is challenging. Things are made more difficult, as we need to convey information across thousands of unique data sets in many different types of visualization layouts. And then there are issues like accessibility, enough … Read more
Ever visit a website or store or see a sign in a public space that you had no idea what the icon meant? There are a lot of reasons for that. One, of course is the ethnocentric aspect – we know what we know based on our prior experiences. So, if the image of the … Read more
Where customer journey maps define your customers – prospects through advocates – touch points with your brand, products and services; service blueprints define the the behind-the-scenes people, processes and technology that supports that journey. Where creating a customer journey maps requires you to “walk in the shoes” of your customer and see your organization through … Read more
So how do you make the complex simple? How do you accommodate a person’s first-time experience from their familiar routine from their advance experts needs? With progressive disclosure. Progressive disclosure is an interaction design technique to help maintain the focus of a person’s attention by reducing clutter, confusion, and cognitive load by presenting only the … Read more
Psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman define “the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has” in the Hick–Hyman Law.That is, increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically. This means that people subdivide their total collection of choices into categories, eliminating … Read more
In 1954, Paul Fitts developed a model of human movement, Fitts’s law, based on rapid, aimed movement. Fitts’s model predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. This law is used to model the act of … Read more
We are seeing the blooming of the Experience Economy in the Information Age. There is so much information we have create Big Data. The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data. Data sets grow in size in part because they … Read more