Overview: Online Architecture

"... infographics are often taken at face value... And it is hard to fact check infographics... Fast Company republished 10 facts from Buffer. Fact checking one of the facts in that list went like this: The fact quoted an infographic -> that quoted a blog post at Huffington Post -> which in turn quoted another infographic -> which quoted a blog…

"Fold is a platform for telling stories. It makes it simple to add multimedia background information or create context... the main story reads as all stories do, straight down vertically. But contextual information is placed to the side of the main story, on a horizontal line. That information can be video, photos, or links to other sites..."…

To be rolled out next time someone wants to "skip the analyses and wireframes - just give us the mockups": "An interface's visual hierarchy relies on the same principles of aesthetics used by the Renaissance masters, but on top of that (or rather beneath it) there's the subtext of secondary goals - promoting specific content, encouraging user…

" Top tasks are the small set of tasks ... that matter most to your customers. Make these tasks work well, and you’ll be on the right track. Get them wrong, and chances are you’ll lose the customer. Top Tasks Management is a model that says: “Focus on what really matters (the top tasks) and defocus on what matters less (the tiny tasks).” Tiny ta…

Stunning use of CSS & HTML5 to create an online exhibition exploring the stories of 30 endangered species. Best viewed in Chrome. - In Pieces - 30 Endangered Species, 30 Pieces.

"Most visitors to departmental and agency content want to see what the current position is, so there is a need to manage historical content. Users expect this to be available. In the past there have been different approaches to this. Having a single government website gives us an opportunity to make this consistent, manageable and effective for u…

"Images with text over them ... do make a post more enticing to your followers or friends... Buffer's Pablo, which creates these images, out of beta." - Buffer Officially Launches its Image Creation Tool Pablo

"Google is now clearly marking websites in mobile search results that it considers mobile friendly and if that tag isn’t getting displayed around your content, your website may see a drop in mobile traffic. Responsive design is definitely the way to go but will that be enough. How do you confirm if your web pages are considered mobile friendly by…

"the system ... counts the number of incorrect facts within a page ... by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings." - Google wan…

"From the responsive layouts to the improved APIs ... we’ve reimagined every aspect of the WIRED experience... I want to walk you through our thinking on the new site—to tell you about the technology and design innovations that make this iteration of WIRED possible. We settled on a card-based motif for both its flexibility and configurability..…

"some people have the sense that data somehow makes designers less powerful, that you’re basing decisions based purely on mechanical measures rather than designer intuition and genius... data is what ... turns designers from artists into the most important decision makers in a company... prototypes can really only get you to local maxima ... the…

"Newsrooms don't need large budgets for analyzing data--they can easily access basic data tools that are free or inexpensive." - Drilling Down: A Quick Guide to Free and Inexpensive Data Tools | Global Investigative Journalism Network

I freely admit: I've been a fanboy of the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) since studying their design principles. Those principles are still good. Everything else, it turns out, was not.

"an engine to generate custom sets of tags for each Web site visitor.... the next step is to assemble the tag data into detailed individual profiles for personalization, testing, attribution, and other purposes... These features go beyond Web page tags to capture data from mobile apps, from ad pixels served on external Web sites, and from other s…

"Designers can create in-depth, documented case studies of their work. The best ones clarify the complex choices designers have to make and explain their thinking behind UX and visual decisions. They document and communicate that knowledge clearly, helping our design community to develop a more empathetic, human‐centered way of speaking about our …

Good overview of Circa's approach: "A new model for online journalism is emerging, focusing on the atomization of news stories into “bite-sized chunks” of information aimed at mobile audiences."

"By news homepage, I mean any way for a user to first encounter content. A push notification could very well be the new news homepage. ... An article or a newsletter ... Overcast or Soundcloud or iTunes may be your homepage.... Homepage, to me, is simply a shorthand version for any of these things. " Neat overview. Just remember, however you desi…

"There’s a common misconception out there that user centered design means being led by the user... In some instances, being user centered means ignoring or even going against explicit user wishes in order to better serve the user. Sound confusing? " Then read: - Be user centered, not user led - MindTheProduct

"an inspiring design experiment... Earth: A Primer, a new interactive book for the iPad... instead of simply telling you about geological processes, it actually lets you control them. Each topic’s page pairs text and a simulation... Like a deity in training, you can sculpt mountains, summon rain storms, and move tectonic plates with your fingertip…

Sets out "... the five characteristics of an innovation that determine its use... how well an innovation addresses these characteristics will determine people's long-term adoption of an innovation." and, for good measure, sets out the implications for design teams of each characteristic, because "Design teams can address many components of thes…

With a very nice longform, multimedia html5 presentation to boot. "In this bustling environment, there is less news and more noise. ..." More news but even more noise, rather.

"Since Taylor launched an earlier version of the site at The Boston Globe in 2007, In Focus has known for longform photo storytelling, featuring huge, high-quality images.... If you’re pandering to social media, if you’re going for clickbait, it cuts away at any sort of storytelling." - Q&A: How Alan Taylor, online photography pioneer, is rethin…

"The best infographics are clear, easy to digest, and eye-catching. But the process of distilling data into a neat little chart, bar graph, or venn diagram usually requires pages and pages of messy preparatory sketches, which are rarely seen by the public. Infographic Designers’ Sketchbooks ... take readers behind the scenes of the creative proce…

"But in our Information Architecture courses, we invariably get asked about a few persistent questions that many designers from a variety of backgrounds seem to struggle with. Like most design problems, these questions rarely have an absolute, black-and-white answer. But there are specific considerations that can help you answer these questions a…

"In this gallery are our favorite graphics of the year. " The Best Science Visualizations of the Year | WIRED

"We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content ... the result of the rise of mobile technologies... from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated togeth…

"With 95% confidence we conclude that an increase in ranking “the intranet search helps me find the information I need” results in a higher valuation of the respondents intranet as a whole. The impact for the same question related to menus was statistically insignificant." Not quite the deathknell for information architects and resellers of stic…

"It can actually have a tremendous impact on visitors perception of your website, whether they can easily find what they are looking for, and ultimately whether they purchase what you are selling." Pretty sell-focused, but there's no better force to refine an information architecture than assigning a value to each click ... and each bounce! - Ho…

"An image is the gateway to your emotional memory... And on the visual web an image is the gateway to accessing almost all content and information... we are adapting to a different kind of a web, one that will be increasingly visual... [but] the only available methods to surface and categorize photos are beyond basic; we need something intuitive…

Great article on improving intranet UX, and useful inspiration for any website manager: "During the online cardsorting sessions I covered over 1000 content items and got nearly 36,000 individual responses. The first batch ... designed to elicit our main navigation labels. Subsequent tests then checked that the chosen names would suit all the intr…