“Thinking mobile” goes beyond scaling down an existing app to fit a smaller screen or making decisions about what content to include. The ability of an app to delight its users is largely dependent on the context in which it is being used. People are using their devices seemingly everywhere to do almost everything these [...]

“The problem with this is there’s too much clutter.” That’s what the legal secretary told me when we were studying her firm’s intranet home page. In fact, the page was pretty sparse in layout. The text was nicely laid out in a readable font, with different weights given to headings and body text. Overall, it [...]

Content is the substance that draws and keeps the users at the site. It’s what sells our products, describes our services, and provides our support. And it’s what teams struggle with the most. When you break it down, the elements behind content strategy, such as information architecture, copywriting, search engine optimization, and content management, are [...]

How do you bridge the gap between the search engine and your site? You want that transition to be as smooth and natural for your users as possible. Ideally, they would start with their search, arrive at your site and accomplish what they set out to. Often times, it doesn’t work out that easily. Shari Thurow offers techniques and tricks to satisfy the goals of your users.

When approaching your information architecture, you’ll realize most sets of content can be organized in more than one way. You need to figure out which works best for your audience, your content, and your project’s goal. Donna Spencer shows you the most popular approaches, and offers tips on when and how to use each.

At this year’s User Interface Conference, Kristina Halvorson presented “Message and Medium: Better Content by Design.” Here’s a sample of her talk from the conference.

There’s an on-going debate in the design community: are teams better off with generalists or specialists? Those taking the generalist side argue that a breadth of abilities helps more. On the specialists’ side, they claim it is the depth of specific abilities delivering the benefit. From our research in what makes up the most successful [...]

On July 13 our new conference series, the Web App Masters Tour 2010 made its final stop. It was an ambitious task to organize a 2 day conference in 4 cities with 14 of the best and brightest in web application design. We had to provide more than just inspiration. We needed to make sure [...]

In our next seminar, Site Search Analytics, Lou Rosenfeld, who helped establish the field of information architecture, will show you how to take advantage of your site’s query data, data that’s sitting on your server right now.

A couple of days ago, I had the honor to once again see Kristina Halvorson inspire a gathering of developers and designers. Wedged between sessions on CSS3 and HTML5, Kristina introduced the crowd to the world of Content Strategy. And the audience loved it! It’s no surprise why. After all, content is the substance that [...]