“If [Information Architecture] is the spatial side of information, I see content strategy as the temporal side of the same coin.”

Customer journey mapping could hold the key to analysing and improving the customer experience. Only recently a report from the Cabinet Office recommended CJM for authorities to provide a more efficient and cost-effective service. Arne van Oosterom outlines how it can help organisations - and lists the 10 key ingredents to a customer journey map.

Nielsen is confusing device context with user intent. All that we can really know about mobile users is that they're on a small screen, and we can't divine user intent from that. Just because I'm on a small screen doesn't mean I'm interested in less content or want to do less

Join @selmaz's Mar 22 webinar: Understanding & exploring context of use for mobile intranets #intranet #mobile #ux

RT @berkun: If you're interested in #design, and live in the real world, check out my new group blog: http://t.co/bwrX5uN0 #ux #ui

Effective cross-channel experiences demand strategic leadership and multidisciplinary cooperation.

organizational change is where it's at.

Personas strengthen the focus on the end user, their tasks, goals and motivation. Personas make the needs of the end-user more explicit and thereby can direct decision-making within design teams more towards those needs.

RT @selmaz: Leaving the rain behind! @openroadies #UX team heading to sunny Cali for usability testing fun http://t.co/dKfUTRyA

Are you collecting gestures, postures, and tap errors in your mobile usability testing? http://t.co/yGt4Mmk #ux #mobile #usability @selmaz

RT @bryantrobertson Visualizing requirements vs. scope with our 'football diagram' #strategy #ux by @openroadies

Here is a series of diagrams I’ve re-created from Jesse James Garrett’s talk at UX09, which present an evolution on his original conception of what user experience design is all about.

I view social interaction design as a field that seeks user-centric descriptions of experiences and behaviors on social media, with an eye on emergent social practices. I see user interactions as occurring between users, mediated by social tools — not as interactions with the tools only. Social practices, in the view of social theory, involve users who know what they’re doing, what’s going on, and how to participate. Not on the basis of what’s on the screen, at the level of the interface and its design, but in terms of the social activity in which they are involved.

Russel Davies being clever

RT @kegill Slides and notes from @OpenGovWest website usability panel with @gordonr @zelbinian : #UX #OGW11 #gov20

A post for theory heads! Theoretical underpinnings of social interaction design #sxd #ux #ixd

Whether it’s a Fortune 500 Company, a knitting circle, or a terrorist cell, anytime a group interacts, a complex and constantly shifting set of social relationships and behavioral patterns emerge. Some of these interconnections may be apparent, but others are not. Who are the experts, connectors, influencers, proliferators, obstructionists, implementers, and other types of members in the group? Tracking the shifting tides of influence carried in the ebbs and flows of communication is like monitoring the ocean currents—often hard to see, but powerful in their effects.

government customer journey mapping

There are three kinds of relationship ties:

* Strong ties: People we care deeply about.
* Weak ties: People we are loosely connected to, like friends of friends.
* Temporary ties: People we don’t know, and interact with temporarily.

Upcoming Webinar: Overcoming E2.0 Adoption Hurdles with Social Interaction Design http://bit.ly/TFsxd #e2.0 #SxD

Information Architecture is a discipline and a set of methods that aim to identify and organize information in a purposeful and service-oriented way. It is also a term used to describe the resulting document or documents that define the facets of a given information domain. The goal of Information Architecture is to improve information access, relevancy, and usefulness to a given audience, as well as improve the publishing entity's ability to maintain and develop the information over time. It is primarily associated with website design and it is directly related to the following professional disciplines: User interface design, content development, content management, usability engineering, interaction design, and user experience design. It is also indirectly related to database design, document design, and knowledge management.

We wanted to further explore the issue of balancing aesthetic and functionality, so we met with a few experts who work with companies and designers to incorporate the user experience in the design and development of today’s technology products. We spoke with Gordon Ross, Vice President and Selma Zafar, Senior User Experience Designer, of Open Road Communications (www.openroad.ca), a Vancouver-based professional services firm specializing in the design, development and measurement of websites, intranets, and custom software following a user centered design approach and Melanie Walls, a user experience consultant, with extensive experience in enhancing the usability of business and safety critical systems, where high performance is essential.

This is all good, but polyhierarchy can easily become a crutch.

His most notable contributions to the field were his five laws of library science and the development of the first major analytico-synthetic classification system, the colon classification. He is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental thinking in the field.

Faceted search, or guided navigation, has become the de facto standard for e-commerce and product-related websites,

In case you missed it... @selmaz's 2009 interaction design year in review blog post

Now you can perform various Return on Investment (ROI) calculations for improved usability of your Web site or application.

Let’s face it: brighter and more sensitive people than us have been thinking about issues like public versus private realms, or which elements of a system are hard to reconfigure and which more open to user specification, for many hundreds of years

This is the website for the Field Research and Interaction Design, a Master course at the Geneva University of Art and Design, in the Media Design program taught by Nicolas Nova in 2009-2010

A good site structure makes users happy. They can easily find, understand and use the information on your site. For the business, this makes all the difference. In this article I’ll go through principles behind good site structures and describe a methodology for creating site structures.

This list describes twenty user experience deliverables with links to relevant resources and examples

As important as the user experience of enterprise software is to a business’s success, why isn’t its assessment usually a factor in technology selection?

While doing research for a recent workshop, I came across a useful list of seven social software elements. These seven building blocks--identity, presence, relationships, conversations, groups, reputation and sharing--provide a good functional definition for social software.

Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone Coming Soon! from O'Reilly Media and Yahoo! Press

Everyone designs. The teacher arranging desks for a discussion. The entrepreneur planning a business. The team building a rocket.

brandon's talk at CanUX

Jerome's lecture from CanUX on 5 sketches, or else!

We're excited to report that Yvonne's submission, the Swimlane Diagram, won the popular vote. Here's an example of a Swimlane Diagram (here's a picture of one from Flickr):

we could use something like this in vancouver

the usability.gov book

Content strategy may not be fully defined or widely understood, but that shouldn’t stop you from doing it. Make time in your projects to deeply consider the content requirements, and the content philosophers in your ranks will rise to the occasion.

Louis Rosenfeld thinks "the redesign" must die.

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

Yesterday at the Information Architecture Summit in Miami, I delivered a presentation called “The Information Architect and the Fighter Pilot“. As part of this presentation, I looked at how the theories of John Boyd, a brilliant military strategist, c

Here’s the presentation that I’m giving at the IA Summit in Miami on consumer behavior and Web 2.0. It’s called Do Real People Really Use Tag Clouds?: Research To Help Separate Web 2.0’s Hits From Hype and is an evolution of the consumer behavior

A sandbox for collecting search examples, patterns, and anti-patterns.

One of the most popular questions we hear from web designers and usability professionals is: "How many users is enough when conducting usability tests?"

The biggest insight I get from this story? Personas are not documents, and they are not the result of a step-by-step method that automagically pops out convenient facsimiles of your users. Personas are actually the designer’s focused act of empathetic i

the assumption with semantic domains is that there is something common to people's understanding of that domain. Free-listing is a good way to explore that common understanding

So it’s gutting that his last book, Emotional Design, and his new effort, The Design of Future Things, feel weak, unconvincing and without rigour.

The author concluded about “the burgeoning interest in a reflective approach to HCI” that would be concerned by the “critical dimensions of design”. He basically describes technologies such as computers as “an effective site” at which to engag

Join several hundred Interaction Designers from around the world as we address the design of interactive systems of all types: applications (web and desktop), mobile, consumer electronics, digitally enhanced environments, and more.

Web-based applications present usability challenges we don’t often see in other types of designs. These challenges need to be top-of-mind as the design team creates, updates, and maintains the application.

Sketching User Experiences is Bill Buxton's new book arguing that the process of sketching is distinct from prototyping, and an integral part of design.

web apps and cycling. my two favourite things

upcoming conference in Vancouver. Good CMS and UX focus.

Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.

To summarize, knowledge in the world systems are obvious but slow and knowledge in the head systems require learning but can be fast. In augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), knowledge in the world systems are those that cannot be used without

In an earlier posting titled Goal Based Information Retrieval, I reviewed four modes of information retrieval that my team identified as addressing user goals in a broader and more effective fashion than the simple query and response searching common toda

Nifty wireframe template tools

modal design debate

good blurb on models of UI design, including "modal/non-modal" stuff

As mentioned earlier in the usability panel, Peter Morville's infamous UX honeycomb from 2004: #OGW11 #web