User Experience & Design
4 Dec 2010
A few months ago, my colleague Brian provided an introduction to Card Sorting. Card Sorting is an Information Architect’s tool used to help organize a site based on how real world users think about organizing information. If you’re unfamiliar with the specifics of card sorting, I...
16 Sep 2010
Colleen Gray contributed to this post.
Illustration of Whitney's storytelling session at the UPA by Amanda Jahn
As we discussed in our last post on this topic, storytelling techniques offer utility across the whole user experience and design process. From discovery, to visual design, to...
30 Apr 2010
Nicely-cropped images help any web site look more credible and finished. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to fancy, schmancy photo-editing software like Adobe Photoshop. But don't despair. Beautifully-cropped photos can be yours with a few simple steps.
Software
I recommend using Picnik.com...
4 Feb 2010
In a session entitled "Tabula Rasa - Methods for jumping into UI Design" at the recently held User Experience Camp in Washington (#uxcampdc), Brian Talbot lead us in a discussion on starting with a blank slate. A number of great ideas came out of that discussion. Since I really enjoy...
11 Dec 2008
I was at a conferences yesterday and the speaker demonstrated several tools that you may find useful for selecting color schemes
Color Scheme Generator 2 This tool is developed by a company named Wellstyled and allows you to select colors from the color-wheel and it recommends several colors to...
8 Dec 2008
What's your blog type?
Typealyzer analyzes your blog and, in a matter of seconds, produces your blog-type (a la Myers Briggs). Some editing is still needed (typos galore!), but overall it's a fun site. The question is, "Does your blog type match your personality type?" The Forum One...
3 Dec 2008
Earlier this year, the University of Baltimore (UB) conducted usability testing on Drupal's admin interface with web developers already familiar with other CMS in the same space, but with no prior Drupal experience.
Users mostly struggled with nomenclature, key functionality burried within...
9 Oct 2008
Product Planner is a slick and simple web application that allows a user to "discover, create, and share user flows."
Creating a user flow in Product Planner provides you with the ability upload images - screenshots from web sites or wireframes, for example. You can easily add steps to...
13 Apr 2007
Scrapblog is what Apple would have done in 6 months with iLife's iWeb. It brings together photos from Flickr, movies from YouTube into a web-based photoediting interface, where you can create a scrapbook of photos, movies, on nice preset layouts and backgrounds. You can then post it like a blog...
28 Mar 2007
Wireframes have been an indispensable tool for information architects to present and communicate the web page layouts and content placement to clients and developers. In revisiting our wireframes templates, I wanted to tackle a couple of issues that have been brought up across the years since I...
