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:

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.

The Culprit Fly-out menu: a navigational solution. When a user puts their mouse over a navigation item, a menu automatically appears or "flies out". Items in that menu are clickable. Often used with intentions of de-cluttering the space and enhancing the user experience. Examples: Iowa Dept of Elder Affairs - Do they really expect the elderly to use this site?

Ajax is showing up more and more online. Not that it's a new solution - it's been around for years - but has become increasingly popular in online applications and websites.

What is AJAX? It stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XHR (XMLHttpRequest). Translation? It updates web content in the page without a full page refresh. This is done by retrieving data from the server and displaying data only in a portion of the page instead of refreshing the entire page.

My last two posts have centered around prototyping methods. Since I talked a bit about techniques, I thought it would be helpful to show an example in practice that we have used for a project I'm currently working on.

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 last wrote anything on the matter:

A reader of my last post, Prototyping for the Masses, brought to my attention an online tool used to create simulations of web applications called Simunication. I thought it would be good to add these kinds of tools to my list of prototyping resources.

Usability is primarily aimed at making things easier for the end-user. This isn't always the case, however. There are tasks, events or functions that you may actually wish to make more cumbersome or difficult.