“This is a perfect opportunity for us to use that mega menu we wanted to try out.” That’s what I heard a few weeks ago, sitting in a client meeting. The client was dealing with balancing a lot of navigation while keeping their home page free for the important messages they want everyone to see. [...]

[We've built this year's User Interface 16 Conference around eight important challenges facing today's UX Professionals. This is the first in a series of posts where I discuss my thoughts on those challenges and how I came to pick the expert who will be your guide at UI16. Enjoy! – Jared] What happens over time [...]

We’re celebrating this year’s Web App Masters Tour fantastic program by giving everyone access to last year’s great show. The recordings and slide decks contain great information like dealing with complex navigation, integrating social components, moving away from static forms, and using design patterns. You’ll hear from top web app masters like Luke Wroblewski, Hagan [...]

Information architecture exists in all levels of design, from the most abstract to the most concrete. Everything from thinking about the content of the site right down to embedding a navigation strategy determines the structure of a website. Through his experience, Dan Brown has developed a set of principles for information architecture.

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.

Today we’re revisiting search patterns by sharing the followup podcast Jared Spool recorded with Mark Burrell of Endeca. Jared and Mark discuss a few bonus questions from the previous Virtual Seminar. Included in the full post are a few highlights from the podcast.

The other day, I listened to a fascinating interview that John Jantsch conducted with Vanessa Fox, author of Marketing In The Age of Google. Listening to her, I got this idea about links like “Products”, which we see on a lot of corporate sites. Vanessa was talking about these words from an SEO perspective, explaining [...]

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.

Web applications can get wild. You know the kind; something that’s on your corporate intranet with an obscure purpose, hundreds of screens and some kind of navigation kudzu growing in every direction. Hagan Rivers is one of our favorite wranglers of such apps.

Listen to a sample of Hagan’s Escaping Navigation Hell from the Web App Masters Tour in this episode of the SpoolCast.

Recently in UIEtips, we featured part 1 of the Interviews with the Masters. Julie Zhuo shared how Facebook handles design changes and public reaction to these changes. If you didn’t get a chance to listen, Julie’s podcast shares some fascinating Facebook processes that you’ll want to hear. Bill Scott’s podcast looked at design patterns and [...]