A common mistake when creating personas is equating one persona with one style of online behavior. Although this simplifies the creation and presentation of personas, it is not an accurate reflection of actual site visitors, their motivations, and their behaviors. Do you have the same goals and behave the same way all the time? People…
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“That which we will call a…” Hey, just what are we going to call it? Nomenclature, terminology, labels. What we call things and the names we use are very important, and deciding upon the “perfect label” can often be more difficult than we anticipate. As information designers and architects we are tasked with not only…
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As information architects and information designers we spend a good deal of our time studying the organization of information. We dissect it, study it, and analyze it to discover the underlying structure. We create taxonomies, classifications, and categorizations to map out the relationships. We look for connections among disparate pieces and distinctions between similar pieces….
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A recent blog post on MSDN discussing the usability process behind the new Microsoft Office 12 “ribbon” used to present function icons in the interface described how they learned from observation that users could scan the icons more quickly when the icons are not all the same size. But not everyone thinks (based on their…
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