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.

On November 5, a group of web executives around the DC area joined us to hear 4 speakers share their stories and strategies to get return visitors. And boy did we learn a lot! 
 

Keith LaFerriere published an interesting article today on A List Apart about communicating the value of Information Architecture (IA) to clients, and outlining deliverables by phases.

Keith does a thorough job of outlining the various deliverables that are produced in sequence, and incorporates a brief description of each one. This is a particularly useful overview of artifacts for someone who is unfamiliar with what an information architect produces.

A co-worker recently attended a conference and noted that several speakers talked about the importance of sitemaps to SEO. He also said that a few of these speakers also recommended "fat footers" that contain a partial site map at the bottom of each page.

I just received this same advice from Whitney Hess via Twitter who was relaying advice from Smart Experience's Web Navigation Design presented by James Kalbach:

Recently, a client came to us and asked us to design a multilingual gateway to several language specific sub-domains. We immediately thought of several solutions to this problem that included:

Product Planner is a slick and simple web application that allows a user to "discover, create, and share user flows."

Hierarchy. Strong, consistent visual hierarchy is key to a quality design.

Q : What is visual hierarchy?
A : Important elements have the most emphasis. Least important elements have the least emphasis. So, a user's eye should move around the page from your most important content to your least important content.

First impressions are paramount. Especially in the web world. Let's see how this site strikes me - the new user.