As I was leading my course in responsive web design between 2011 and 2012, I kept stumbling over the process of wireframing. My students tended to focus on the wireframe as being the end game in the planning process. They didn’t understand that responsive design focuses on how users will access the content.
You can only imagine my relief when I happened to come across a video by Stephen... Read More
Publishing content to the web is expensive. I know what you're thinking: no, it's not; it costs nothing, especially when compared to print. And you would be right, from a certain point of view. The problem is that publishing is cheap. This seduces you, encouraging you to put more and more content online.
In fact, the cost is so cheap that many organizations let almost any employee put... Read More
You’ve put a lot of thought, time and effort into creating great content, and you want users to have a great experience with your content. While you might have created the best content in the world, you don’t get to choose how users access it. That’s why it’s important to make sure your content works beautifully on every platform and device, desktop, mobile or something else entirely.
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A common mistake with localized websites is considering the translated content to be just another version of the pages in the original language. Translation isn’t everything. Of course, for the user it’s all about the content: Is the content relevant and understandable and in line with the user’s cultural context?
From a commercial point of view, when you decide to create and maintain a... Read More
What you say in a user experience matters. How you say it matters equally. The way you frame communication, or how you say something, could be extremely effective at persuading people to start using your product (or to use it more).
So, how do you frame messages effectively? This article explains how design teams can do so in a way that resonates with their users. Read More
Content is hard. It takes a lot of planning, collaboration and governance to produce high-quality content that meets business needs, speaks in an authentic way and targets an audience effectively.
Whether you’re an agency working with clients, or an in-house team working with others around your organization, getting people onboard with producing content is challenging. Thankfully it isn’t... Read More
Information architecture (IA) is one of those buzzwords you’ve probably heard before. It refers to the organization of the information on your website and how it all fits together. When planning your IA, involve users of your website in the process as soon as you can.
In this article, we’ll discuss card sorting, a tried and true technique for doing just that. We’ll go through some... Read More
High school. I won’t lie: I did not have the highest grades in my graduating class. Some classes and lessons were so poorly designed and delivered that I would frequently become frustrated and fatigued and would ultimately shut down. The contents of the lessons would just wash over me. The experience wasn’t pleasant, and the results were obvious from my transcripts.
But I did well in a... Read More
The BBC’s Programmes website is huge, and is intended to be a rolling archive of everything that the BBC broadcasts on television and radio. Originally released in 2007, it now has pages for over 1.6 million episodes, but that’s barely half of the story. Surrounding those episodes is a wealth of content, including clips, galleries, episode guides, character profiles and much more, plus... Read More
