When you study how designs get made as much as we have, you start to notice something: good design is directly related to effort. Good design takes a lot of work. Bad design, as the bumper sticker says, “it just happens.” You won’t find this to be any more true than in the design of [...]

If you’re like me, (and hopefully you’re not,) you have books and magazines scattered all over your house. For reasons I can’t completely explain, I always want reading material in arms reach, so I’ve haphazardly distributed my library in every possible room. There’s even reading material in the bathroom. (I once bumped into the editor of my favorite magazine [...]

Our May 7 UIE Virtual Seminar is right around the corner.  If you are struggling with how to organize a vast amount of information for your users, then you’re not going to want to miss this UIE Virtual Seminar. UIE Virtual Seminar New Ways to Think about Taxonomy: The Role of Taxonomies in Your Organization [...]

My article, Design Cop-out #2: Breadcrumbs, is one of the most controversial I’ve written in recent years. People either agree completely or think I’ve gone off the deep end. When people disagree, it’s often because they think I’m suggesting that we stop putting breadcrumbs in our designs. I’m not suggesting this at all. I’ve defined [...]

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 [...]

The design process is filled with tradeoffs. We have to decide what functions are in and what functions are left on the cutting room floor. We have to decide how we’re going to present the functions to the user and what we’re going to hide from them. And we have to decide what problems we’re [...]

We’ve got another great UIE Virtual Seminar coming up: The Scent of a Web Page: The Five Types of Navigation Pages Date: July 17th, 2008 — 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT You work hard providing top-notch content on your site. Will your users find it? If they don’t find [...]

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.

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Donna (Maurer) Spencer, a world-renowned information architect and owner of the freelance agency MaadMob, based in Canberra, Australia.

In this episode I asked Donna, “What separates good Information Architects from great Information Architects?”