Overview: Online Architecture

"we’ve applied econometric principles to the results of over 200 intranet surveys and… statistically pinpointed which intranet attributes most impact a user’s perception of their intranet. This first post... showing what employees prefer to look and find when they view their company’s intranet." Some surprising results, For example, although I'…

"There’s no learning without mistakes." Pin this one on the wall. Seriously! - The 5 Most Common Mistakes in Design — The Year of the Looking Glass — Medium

How much more could Google News be? See "... a presentation that a German designer came up with that involved a wholesale redesign and re-thinking of what Google News is and does." Lots of good stuff here. Particularly like how 'smart personalisation' is used to help penetrate the filter bubble: "automatically suggest related stories on a news t…

A fun interactive setting out the 'ideal team & process' required for building interactives. Rarely seen in real life, sadly. - One Approach Leading Interactive Expeditions: Eric Cade Schoenborn | Creative Director | Knight Foundation

what it says in the box - How to Create Amazing Infographics - Design School

"Charted automatically visualizes data. Give it the link to a data file and Charted returns a beautiful, shareable visualization of that data... open-sourced and available for anyone to use at charted.co... it adjusts to any screen, automatically updates itself" - Introducing Charted - Data Lab - Medium

"AB Tasty, the French A/B testing specialist, has published this guide for the benefit of those who are implementing A/B testing and would like to know how to conduct truly effective tests."

"Politico has redesigned its website for the first time in its seven year history, and The Guardian's U.S. recent refresh marks the first time it's redesigned almost entirely in public, with its readers' input. Here's a look at the thinking behind the redesigns, and what the publishers were able to pull off." - Politico, HBR, The Guardian: W…

"How we made our first comics-journalism feature-and the tools for you to make one, too ... We thought we would walk through some of design process and also document some of the code tricks we learned along the way. The final products are a web viewer, Pulp, and the comic-maker interface, Pulp Press... released as a free and open source project…

"By submitting your content and your keyword through nTopic we determine statistically how relevant your content is to the keyword and make recommendations on how to improve it. Getting your nTopic score is completely free, but you must upgrade to get access to keyword recommendations. "

"Search engines, especially Google, have gotten remarkably good at understanding searchers' intent—what we mean to search for, even if that's not exactly what we search for. How in the world do they do this? It's incredibly complex, but in today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the basics—what we all need to know about how entities are connected i…

Great overview of product design and development documentation in a world of agile development: "Documentation is instrumental for concepting, designing, creating and measuring the performance of products. But ... there’s nothing about a thick stack of paperwork which resembles the experience of your real product. ... thick deliverables created …

Nothing here about geolocation, augmented reality ... but good points anyway. Via @nosemonkey ""In a world where notifications are full experiences in and of themselves, the screen of app icons makes less and less sense... Why open the Facebook app when you can get the content as a notification and take action... right there at the notification o…

"The news media sector has become heavily dependent on traffic from Facebook and Google. A reliance now dangerously close to addiction. Maybe it’s time to refocus on direct access... Which company in the world wouldn’t be seen as fragile when depending so much on a small set of uncontrollable distributors? for a news, value-added type media, the…

"The Guardian has a new setup for its liveblogs that aims to fix some of their eternal problems — chief among them that they’re great for in-the-moment following along, but cryptic and unnavigable after the fact" - The Guardian has a new format for liveblogs to make them more readable » Nieman Journalism Lab

A useful look at how user-centricity has leapt out of the web department and into the business strategy: "... Quartz ... Gawker, BuzzFeed and Tumblr... are increasingly thinking about what they do as providing a service, not just as a business that generates content and then delivers it to people.... you have to experiment, and iterate rapidly, …

"The New York Times today introduced “Watching,” a major new feature on the NYTimes.com homepage on desktop and on the mobile website. Watching is a stream of developing and noteworthy news designed to amplify the scope and urgency of The Times’s digital report. Watching offers a tailored feed of the news of the moment, such as early outlines of …

Others have written on the return of the enewsletter, but I don't think anyone saw it as the home page: "Yes, the homepage is still dead, which is why our new front door is quite different from most. ... we are offering an efficient briefing on global business news, ... intended to be read straight through, like a well written memo from a trusted…

"when an email newsletter, which looks look superb on desktop, fails to render properly on a mobile device, respondents either hit delete or unsubscribe." - Responsive Email Design: Benefits, How-To, Examples + More | JUST™ Creative

"Chartist is noteworthy because it doesn't just make existing charts smaller or bigger, it changes the the way the data is displayed so that it makes sense on whichever size screen it's being viewed on. A chart showing each of the 12 months along its x axis when displayed in a full-width browser window, for example, will change to show only six m…

"... you have two sides facing each other: the Social Login providers who say that it's a must to drive more conversions, and the cool outsiders who state that "it doesn't worth it, that it screws up your UX and that it's intrusive." The Social Login landscape is full of traps, let's see how to avoid them." - 7 Social Login Myths Debunked — Abou…

"The Guardian released a beta version of its new website to get reader feedback as it continues to tweak its design.... Content discovery is a major focus ... “container model” allows the paper to implement a responsive design while also retaining a story hierarchy, user experience director... Each item contains a story, which are put together…

Beat this: "Each day, HBR.org publish five to seven pieces of top-notch content with a staff of fewer than 10 full-time digital editors and no full-time writers ... four million unique visitors every month." What really stood out for me was how they get the "expert take", using the Content Partnership model I used when trying to decentralise com…

Kepler’s Tally of Planets is a wonderful NYTimes.com interactive feature: "NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered more than 950 confirmed planets orbiting distant stars. Planets with a known size and orbit are shown below" - Kepler’s Tally of Planets - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

"We are moving toward a new Internet paradigm where Google responds to questions with answers, rather than redirections to bog-pits of branded content – and marketers loathe it.... People want to read things that are relevant, interesting, and not predicated on barely veiled advertising guile. Mercifully, search engine technology is catching up. T…

"There has been a lot of discussion lately about long-form content and how it is changing the content marketing playbook.... Is long-form content really worth the extra effort? It seems that way. SERPIQ recently completed an analysis of the top 10 search results for more than 20,000 keywords and revealed a surprising pattern. The length of cont…

At last, someone else using gardening metaphors when discussing content strategy & information architecture: "The stream—that great glut of ideas, opinions, updates, and ephemera that pours through us every day—is the dominant way we organize content.... Problem is, the stream’s emphasis on the new above all else imposes a short lifespan on conte…

a neat service that A/B tests headlines for WordPress posts and helps you figure out the one that will bring the most traffic. It’s called BayesianWitch. - Feature Friday: A/B Testing Headlines On WordPress – AVC

A beautiful, HTML5 exploration of the HEART methodology: Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task Success. " different members of your team have different ideas about the goals of your project. This process provides an opportunity to build consensus about where you're headed." - How to Choose the Right UX Metrics for Your Product

"The original converted 7.6% better than the new variation... The leads from the long form version of the page were better in quality ... in most cases long form copy doesn't just boost your conversions, but it also increases your rankings too." Indepth and (inevitably) long analysis. Huge feedback. - How Content Length Affects Rankings and…