6 items tagged “ia”
2012
What are some good ways to insult an Information Architect?
Ask them if they’ve started calling themselves a UX designer yet, or if they’ve jumped straight to Service Design :)
[... 36 words]What are good ways to design a web application? Do you, for example, begin with a wire-frame of the front-end and work your way back to the database schema? The reverse? Figure out both ends and work towards the center?
I start with a working prototype, which I find I can often knock together in a couple of hours using Django. Having a functional (albeit buggy, ugly and insecure) prototype makes it much easier for me to start to reason about the larger application. There’s not much point in coming up with a comprehensive architecture plan only to find out you’re building the wrong thing!
[... 111 words]2011
What is the “best” programming language to learn if you want to mockup your own ideas but don’t have a technical background?
I knew a very talented UX designer at Yahoo! who did all of his interactive mockups in PowerPoint—including widgets that you click to transition to another “page” in the interface. I’ve heard of people doing the same thing in Keynote, and OmniGraffle Pro also has tools for creating interactive mockups.
[... 111 words]2009
If you are demanding registration before checkout, you need to cease this practice immediately. It is costing you a fortune.
2007
XFML (via) Throwing the new home for the XFML specification some Google juice; the domain name got nabbed by a squatter.
Long pages work. And thanks to Pay Per Click advertising, splitting an article over multiple pages to get more ad impressions doesn’t make sense any more.