We’ve received some interesting comments about last week’s article on site maps as design cop-outs. Christian & Michael both asked: Why is it a cop-out to provide a site map anyway? Christian explained that they are easy to create and maintain, so what’s the big deal?
It’s a good question. While creating a site map is [...]

We’ve got a unique and exciting UIE Virtual Seminar coming up in September:
Testing Your Critiquing Skills: Site Navigation
Date: Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Time: 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT
When looking over someone else’s design, how do you ensure you’re delivering valuable insights that bring new perspectives to the table?
The best critique [...]

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. Last week, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar: The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content. During the seminar, we received far more questions than time would allow answering. As is tradition, we put together this follow-up podcast to answer even more of your excellent questions.

 

 SpoolCast: The Scent of Information Virtual Seminar Questions Show [27:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today at 1pm EST, we’re holding our next UIE Virtual Seminar, The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content.
In this 90-minute online presentation, I’ll share the results of years of research examining how the best sites navigate users to their content. I’ll introduce you to the concept of the Scent of Information, the biggest [...]

UIEtips 9/18/07: Time for Content to Become More Scientific
Time and time again in usability testing, I watch users struggle with web sites. I’d like to say that the problems I see in testing are always unique and novel, but they aren’t. We’ve been seeing very similar problems with all of the sites we’ve tested.
What problems [...]

Handling and presenting large amounts of data is often a challenge many organizations are faced with. There are issues such as the number of fields that must be shown, the height and width of the cells the data must fit in, visual noise and redundant content, filtering and sorting mechanisms, vertical and horizontal labeling, and, [...]

Editing your site’s content can be an exhaustive and time-consuming job. However, it’s absolutely critical to your site’s success. In her great new book, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works, Ginny Redish gives several helpful guidelines that design teams should keep in mind when working on their site’s key messages.

Jonathan Murphy details the exciting aspects of carewords from Gerry McGovern’s latest book “Killer Web Content.”

It is at the 54th Annual Conference of the Society of Technical Communicators, this week in Minneapolis, where I’m getting a glimpse into what I believe to be the demise of technical writing.

It’s natural, once we learn some shortcut for those hard-to-explain-otherwise concepts, they become part of our common parlance. Over time, we use them so frequently, we forget their origin and they fall into our regular vocabulary.

This is great, as long as we never leave the office or try to talk to anyone else. As soon as we do, we might as well be speaking Estonian. We’ve all had experiences where we’ve let one of these terms, intended for use only with our colleagues, slip out in discussion with an outsider. The look of puzzlement on their face is always warranted.

Unfortunately, we can’t see that look when we accidentally leave one of these shortcuts sitting on our web site. And that’s just what BestWestern.com did when they included terms like “Trip Planner”, “Promotions & Programs”, and “Packages” in their tool bar.