Interface and Navigation Design - Articles Archive
from October 2, 2004 to June 11, 2004

When you are working as part of a team on a research project, there are plenty of online collaboration tools you can use to share your discoveries in real-time with your colleagues. Screensharing technology allows you to take others on a tour of webpages as you ... read more

News By Name is a free, non commercial news site with "up to the minute news headlines collected from multiple news channels. Incoming news is automatically scanned for 'names' allowing for charting, archiving and email alerts by name, showing you who's hot and who's last weeks ... read more

Web site designers build components of a whole. This is really the essence of this valuable article by Jakob Nielsen preaching the relevance of more standardization in the design of Web sites, to facilitate the user in finding the information being seeked while not having to ... read more

"...the designer's job is to provide the features users need in a transparent interface that gets out of the way and lets users focus on the task at hand. Sacred words! "Leading e-commerce sites typically understand this; they sell more when users focus on products rather than ... read more

While RSS continues to escalate in popularity as a viable distribution medium for content, issues about how to make newsfeeds more accessible and easy to use are just now emerging. It must be said, that being the application of RSS feeds highly varied and differentiated among ... read more

If you don't know about the Navigation Stress Test, it is time you consider it for serious adoption within your Web testing toolset. The Navigation Stress Test allows to evaluate the accessibility, usability and navigation framework effectiveness of any Web site. Though the author himself declares ... read more

Balancing visual and structural complexity in interaction design. "Usability is based on principles such as "Less is more" and "Keep it simple, stupid". But there is more to simplicity than meets the eye. By reducing visual complexity at the cost of structural simplicity, you will give ... read more

News Maps is a new visual mapping facility bringing together the most popular/recent news in pre-selected topic areas together with an effective set of customization controls to personalize your news panorama. Along the effective lines of earlier newsmaps (Stamen and Newsmap) Newsisfree News Maps offer ... read more

Technorati has just launched a brand new look online. It finally sports the lines and profiles of a serious, online professional service and gets finally rid of the several links to sections forever under construction and to those others not always clear Technorati trend-spotting sections. Now ... read more

Frequently people ask me why is it so important to use "standard", validated HTML code, even when they correctly see the page in their preferred browser. "All browsers know how to deal with correct HTML. However, if it is incorrect, the browser has to repair the document, ... read more

Why are companies reluctant to redesign their websites? Here is an interesting interview covering the of why companies and organizations have so much trouble when deciding to improve the look and accessibility fo their Web sites. The article highlights the importance of getting everyone on the ... read more

"The best way to improve the effectiveness of your company's web site is to let your site's users lend you a hand (quite literally) through the process of paper prototyping. Paper prototyping is a fast, low-cost method of testing web site designs. It involves creating rough ... read more

AAALogo is a software tool to create logotypes in a simple and effective way. AAALogo has a very simple and highly interactive Flash-based interface which integrates immediate access to over 2000 basic symbols and graphics shapes. The end user can easily drag, resize, color and move ... read more

Thanks to a news post inside the Lockergnome Web Developers weekly email-based news-dispatch I noticed a short news item referring to the death of the web-safe color palette. As the news item failed to report that the source of that story was a four-years old article ... read more

Newsletters are still one of the main distribution and loyalty-building channels for much of the content published on the Internet. Their value for keeping an open channel with your readers and their potential for expanding your loyalt reader base is unabated. Though I personally estimate the ... read more

Steve Outing writes: "Perhaps the most common justification for forced user-registration is that it allows managers to monetize (to use the hackneyed phrase from the dot-com boom days) visitors by better targeting advertisements -- Web and e-mail -- based on users' submitted personal data. The rationale ... read more

"Ergonomics is sometimes described as "fitting the system to the human," meaning that through informed decisions; equipment, tools, environments and tasks can be selected and designed to fit unique human abilities and limitations. Typical examples in the "physical ergonomics" arena include designing a lifting job to ... read more

Yesterday I took a group of five among industry experts, news reporters, and technology bloggers to a private demo of a new breakthrough conferencing and collaboration technology called SmartMeeting. This new, immersive 3D collaboration environment is truly a generation ahead of any other conferencing system available ... read more

Two very good examples of effective information design applied to newsmaking, are the recipients of last year Best Of New Media Design Competition organized by the Society for News Design (http://snd.org/). One is El Calamar Gigante, produced by Elmundo with information from the Smithsonian Institute and ... read more

A "pattern language" is made of reusable components that resemble visual languages, in that they cover the entire vocabulary of elements used in a design. Patterns can be a description of best practices within a given design domain. They capture common solutions to design tensions (usually ... read more