Information Architecture, Internet Strategy, User Experience Design, Visual Design

BBC Discusses Changes to Its New Look July 19th, 2010

The BBC’s news Web site got a new look this month. They started discussing the changes at the beginning of July before they started rolling them out. They continued in mid-July when the changes went live. And since then, they have blogged about the feedback and the questions they’ve been receiving about the new design here and here.

User Experience Design, Visual Design

Kayak Travel Planning June 16th, 2010

Kayak is a newcomer to the travel industry, but they have created such an engaging experience that it’ll be tough to ignore them the next time I start thinking about a vacation.

The Kayak Explore feature is something that I have not seen before – presented visually.

Insight Article, User Experience Design, Visual Design

1 Web site + 1 Email = 1 User Experience. June 8th, 2010

Like most digital marketing consultants, I’m concerned with improving the online user experience for users of my clients’ Web sites – arguably the quickest way to provide a positive return on any Web marketing investment.  With few exceptions, upgrading the online experience to meet a marketing objective involves making enhancements to the email marketing program in parallel.  What I’ve noticed, lamentably, is the number of often systemic hurdles that prevent marketers from treating Web sites and emails as one user experience.

Emails, particularly opt-in consumer marketing HTML format emails, basically look and feel like a web page, and invite interaction exactly the way a browser-based Web page would.  And they should – since the goal of non-transactional emails is to “get the click” and deliver a visit to the emailer’s Web site.   So why on earth would marketers allocate budget separately, deploy creative and technical resources inconsistently, and otherwise architect these systems in silos, and thus permit discordant and inferior user experiences to occur?

Technology, Usability, User Experience Design, User Research, Visual Design

Integrated Solutions: Part 2 – Why User Experience Design is Important May 25th, 2010

User Experience Design (UXD) considers interaction flows, user research, usability, efficiency, visual design, navigation and technology.  It incorporates aspects of human performance factors and usability and focuses on the interaction between people and computer systems and the design that makes this interaction effective, optimal and valuable.

At NavigationArts,

UXD = IA + Visual Design + Technology

Information Architecture, Interaction Design, User Experience Design, Visual Design

Translation on the Web: Commonplace, Participatory, and Expected? May 14th, 2010

Above : “A Sampling of Chinglish” courtesy of The New York Times

On The Media is a favorite radio program of mine. Its hosts frequently present interesting takes on “new media” and recently, they had a fascinating segment on translation issues on the Internet. With only 27% of Internet users using English, it’s becoming unreasonable to expect English to be the default Internet language. To avoid the siloing that could occur along linguistic lines, innovative Web sites with an international or multilingual audience are experimenting with machine and human translation. (The importance of getting translation right should not be underestimated, as the images in a recent New York Times slideshow demonstrate.) Ethan Zuckerman, cofounder of the multilingual blog network, Global Voices, tells On The Media, “Translation is going to go from esoteric, rare, and expensive to becoming fairly commonplace, participatory, and expected.”

Information Architecture, Interaction Design, User Experience Design, Visual Design

Drawing is Not Just for Designers April 16th, 2010

Dan Roam gave the opening keynote at the IA Summit 2010 in Phoenix.  His premise was this:  “Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it.”  In other words:  Whoever draws the best picture gets the funding.

That may sound disheartening, but he’s not talking about works of art here.  Dan believes that basic shapes and stick figures can illustrate what the problem is and what the solution can be.  He showed a series of examples where powerful ideas were drawn out in simple shapes on the back of napkins – like the sketch that started Southwest Airlines or a graph that ended up being the idea behind Reaganomics.

Dan summarized the ways in which our brains process visual information and then outlined the types of sketches that can be used to answer relevant questions as we try to solve a problem. Here’s how he broke it down:

Interaction Design, Technology, Visual Design, Web Development, Flash, Full-screen mode

Flash Full-Screen Mode April 7th, 2010

The release of Flash Player 9 has given Flash Developers the ability to view the Flash in full-screen mode, whether it be a movie or the Flash Animation itself. Here are two great examples of Web sites utilizing the full-screen mode to display something other than a movie: Nicola Walbeck and Waterlife. On a large monitor, the experience of a full-screen mode is something very engaging and eye-catching, at a quick glance, people can easily mistake it as a screen saver.
There are pros and cons when considering full-screen mode:

Usability, User Research, Visual Design

YouTube’s User Experience Updates March 31st, 2010

Not that YouTube’s user experience interest is a new phenomena, but it looks like they are about to implement the changes that were introduced earlier this year.  As they are already seeing impressive results, improving usage by 6% in the small set already being tested, this looks like its a great success story for the proper use of improving the usability of a Web site.

Hat tip Gizmodo.

Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Technology, User Experience Design, Visual Design, Web Development, Microsoft, SharePoint2010, Silverlight

Microsoft MIX10: Day One March 17th, 2010

There’s a lot going on at MIX10, here are my thoughts on day one:

Keynote introduced the design and development community to the new Windows phone. The interface is interesting. As with most new concepts, there are some good things and some bad. Also introduced the Pivot Control for Silverlight 4, which uses content type attributes and values to help winnow down a large set of similar content types down to a narrow set.

Video, Visual Design

My Stop-Motion Experience March 8th, 2010

It’s been almost three months since we completed our stop-motion holiday card, and I’m just now coming around to M&M’s again. It’s amazing to think that for just 50 seconds of video, we had to manipulate thousands of those little chocolate-coated candies and take over 700 photos, and since this was the first time any of us had ever made a stop-motion video, we had to hit the ground running and learn as we went. So here’s what I learned:

1. Stop-motion video take a lot of planning
2. Stop-motion video take a lot of planning and patience
3. M&M’s don’t melt in your hand (but it’s best not to leave your lighting source on for too long because it will melt them)

Insight Article, Interaction Design, Technology, User Experience Design, Visual Design

The Web Typographers Essential Toolkit – 22 Tutorials, Tools, and Resources February 12th, 2010

This collection is for those of you who have already gulped down the typesetters Kool-Aid. You know who you are; the crowd who grimaces at badly kerned movie credits, who get misty-eyed about old motel signs, and who think comic-sans was created by fascists hell-bent on making your Chinese food menu look festive. It goes without saying, in any discipline you have to know the rules before you can break them, yet among young designers there is a perpetual debate revolving around the use of grids and scales. The bottom line is if you’re serious about your craft, these are fundamental tools. As a designer they are as crucial as internalizing the gestalt principles of perception or the basic tenants of color psychology.

Internet Strategy, User Experience Design, Video, Visual Design, Web Development

Learn More About the NavigationArts’ Team January 19th, 2010

Leo Mullen:

“Our strategy practices is designed to help our customers look around the corner a little bit and understand what’s coming and help them to prepare for that.”

Application Development, Information Architecture, Internet Strategy, Social Networking, Visual Design, Web Content Management, Web Development, Video

Professional Video Services for Businesses November 11th, 2009

An unlikely source for cutting edge technology news of course, but USA Today has an interesting article discussing the future of online video for businesses. They point out that video has a huge and critical future for most everyone doing business online these days, and there’s several major players coming in that exceed the offerings by such commonly known entities from YouTube and Vimeo.

Specifically, pay services targeted for businesses include:

Visual Design, Web Development

@font-face and OTF, EOT, and SVG Fonts November 4th, 2009

Jonathan Snook has written up a guide on how to implement custom fonts with more browsers than we have gotten accustomed to talking about in the past six months. Since the release of Firefox 3.5 and Opera 10 everyone has been excited about using @font-face even if the target would be the latest versions of most browsers.

Application Development, Visual Design, Web Content Management, Web Development, performance

Web Site Performance Software October 6th, 2009

At NavigationArts, the client-side development team focuses heavily on optimizing the performance of Web pages and how fast they load. Some of the leading research in the area is from the likes of Yahoo! and their front-end engineering team.

Information Architecture, Insight Article, User Experience Design, Visual Design, Grids

Creative Standardization in Web Site Design September 1st, 2009

Beautiful Solutions

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

Buckminster Fuller, architect, designer, and inventor:

Recently, Jeff Applegate, an Art Director in our office gave a presentation explaining the origins and advantages of using grids in Web site designs. He explained that grids are used to create visually harmonious design layouts and that principles of good design are rooted in the Golden Mean, a mathematical proportion that—when followed—produces designs that are aesthetically pleasing to most people.

Information Architecture, Insight Article, Internet Strategy, Usability, User Experience Design, User Research, Visual Design, Web Content Management, Healthcare

7 Principles for Designing a Successful Hospital Web Site August 1st, 2009

With health information Web sites like WebMD setting the standard, hospital Web sites must at a minimum meet basic user expectations. Your hospital Web site is a direct extension of your brand and a poorly designed or outdated Web site will translate in the public’s perception to a poorly run hospital with outdated services.

What are the keys to developing a successful hospital Web site? All of the principles outlined below are rooted in the practice of user-centered design.

User Experience Design, Visual Design, Webcast

How to Evaluate a Web Design August 1st, 2009

If you missed the live session of “How to Evaluate a Web Design,” you’ll find the presentation and a recording below.

To learn more about the user experience design process, and how to evaluate a Web design, check out my presentation.

During the session you’ll learn:

Interaction Design, Social Networking, Usability, User Experience Design, Visual Design, Web Development

Audio and Video Standards in HTML5 July 1st, 2009

Ian Hickson on the HTML5 spec and why it will not contain language around what codec browsers should support for the <audio> and <video> tags (emphasis mine):

I have therefore removed the two subsections in the HTML5 spec in which codecs would have been required, and have instead left the matter undefined, as has in the past been done with other features like <img> and image formats, <embed> and plugin APIs, or Web fonts and font formats.

Interaction Design, User Experience Design, Visual Design, Flash

Best Flash Site Ever? July 15th, 2008

Have you seen this site? It’s a listing of what Netmag believes are the 20 best Flash sites ever. Number one was Vodafone’s Future Site. For a site that was launched back in 2003 (5 years ago is an eternity in the Web world), it’s quite impressive even by today’s standards. What do you think are some of the best Flash sites around today? What would you say is your all time best Flash site ever?