Content Strategy

There wasn't even room on the floor during Margot Bloomstein's content strategy panel during the first day of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. I managed to squeeze into a space upfront along the wall, pulled up some carpet, and took furious notes.

Google's team explains the new browser, Chrome, via comic book. What fun!

For years, businesses have been using a number of techniques in their stores and online to influence their customers and encourage them to respond to their products and services. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the grocery store example. The bread, milk, and eggs are in the back of the store to force the customer to walk past the Little Debbie cakes on their way to pick up the necessities. That's persuasive design or marketing.

How can you be upset with an error page that contains a ASCII art dog?!

Joined an interesting discussion today about writing for the web, most of which applies to information architecture.

I love the latest UPS ads. They are simple and very effectively show what UPS does (and can do for you), which I am sure must be a highly complex operation behind the scenes for UPS.

"The best designed products won't even need manuals." Don Norman In 2001 Steven Heller interviewed usability expert Don Norman for Print Magazine.

I'm always looking for new graphics to use for the bullets in a list. Usability-wise, it just makes lists easier to read, but also adds additional polish to a web design.

300 image from 1800 sites is a great resource I always find myself returning to.

Here's another I just discovered: Fonthead Design ClickBits

We've all seen it. It's the jolting error page you get when the page you requested from a server does not exist. We regularly advise clients that 404 Not Found pages should be helpful and designed. Users may come across them if they have a typo in the URL, follow a link from an email that sometimes breaks URLs or if a search engine is pointing to a page that has been moved or deleted. Some best practices around creating a more user-friendly 404 Not Found page would be:

Here's the case study behind Amnesty International's redesigned site launched in September 2004. The site was designed by Happy Cog Studios, webshop of CSS/Web Standards guru Jeff Zeldman.

Here are the headings from the study: