“A few interfaces to traversing a space are the standard Windows GUI, a Nokia mobile telephone menu system, a text adventure, DOS. Put aside what the entire map looks like and how it’s presented on the screen — whether it’s a network or a hierarchy. Put aside how the memory of navigation is presented, other windows open in the background, or a numerical crumbtrail in the corner. What remains? What remains is for each node there are a number of exits and a number of items attached to it.”

Includes useful samples and descriptions of Navigation (Bread crumbs, Double tab, Meta Navigation, Outgoing Links, Sitemap, Split Navigation, Matrix Navigation, Repeated Menu), Page Elements (News box, Home, List builder, List browser, Tabbing, Paging, Wizard, Parts Selector), Searching (Search, Advanced Search, Search Area) and eCommerce (Shopping cart, Identify, Registering).

“What do people do on the Web? Most of them spend a lot of time looking for things. A Web site is like any other public place where people come to look, to learn, to search, or to experience. And as in any public place, visitors will succeed in what they came to do only if the site gives them a clear indication of: *where they are; *where they can go; *what they will find there. There are many ways to accomplish this, but one design strategy underlies every successful navigation system: it is a visual model of the hierarchy that’s inherent in the content. Another way of saying this: A good navigation system uses the site’s information structure as the basis for a visual hierarchy that guides the user experience.”

“Design techniques for static information are well understood, their descriptions and discourse thorough and well-evolved. But these techniques fail when dynamic information is considered. There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing. To approach these problems, this thesis introduces a visualization process titled Organic Information Design. The resulting systems employ simulated organic properties in an interactive, visually refined environment to glean qualitative facts from large bodies of quantitative data generated by dynamic information sources.” (This is Benjamin Fry’s Master’s Thesis, MIT Media Lab Aesthetics & Computation Group, Professor John Maeda, 8.6M PDF.)

“This article is for anyone involved in Web site design, not just engineers, so it avoids addressing every low-level technical nuance of cookies. Instead it explores technical considerations, interface design challenges, and — perhaps most importantly — ethical issues.”

“Design techniques for static information are well understood, their descriptions and discourse thorough and well-evolved. But these techniques fail when dynamic information is considered. There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing. To approach these problems, this thesis introduces a visualization process titled Organic Information Design. The resulting systems employ simulated organic properties in an interactive, visually refined environment to glean qualitative facts from large bodies of quantitative data generated by dynamic information sources.” (This is Benjamin Fry’s Master’s Thesis, MIT Media Lab Aesthetics & Computation Group, Professor John Maeda, 8.6M PDF.)

“Q: I tried to apply CSS to my hyperlinks and the hovering didn’t work. How come? Is this another case of browsers being stupid? A: While it’s always possible that you have a stupid browser — that’s not really for me to say — it is more often the case that the styles have simply been written in the wrong order.”

“Exercises in Style was inspired by a work of the same name by the French writer Raymond Queneau. In that book, Queneau spun as many variations as he could — over 100 — out of a mundane, two-part text about two chance encounters with a mildly irritating character during the course of a day. He started by telling it in every conceivable tense, then by doing it in free verse and as a sonnet, as a telegram, in pig latin, as a series of exclamations, in an indifferent voice… you name it.”

“The comparison is based on both fileformat specifications Macromedia Flash and SVG… Please note that this a comparison for people dealing with integrated dynamic content generation systems. We are aware, that both .SWF and .SVG have their particular advantages/disadvantages — in some parts they are concurrencing each other, in some not.”

“If you attended the first Information Architecture Summit, you might remember Seth as one of the main rabble-rousers; he really got many of the librarians present all hot and bothered by his comments on how overrated information organization actually is. After time at marchFirst and ZEFER, Seth is now enjoying his new role as the ACIA’s southeast Asia correspondent. He also squeezes in some user experience consulting when he can, drawing from experience working for such clients as AltaVista, Tower Records, and National Geographic. In this interview Seth has a lot of important stuff to say, especially about which information architecture metrics are good and which aren’t…”

“The Palo Alto firm Ideo may be best known for designing eye-catching objects — the Apple mouse, the Palm V, Nike sunglasses, Oral-B’s Squish Grip toothbrush for kids. But there are lesser-known groups in the company working on things that are harder to wrap your head — much less your hands — around. Ideo has studios that include disciplines as far afield as architecture, cognitive psychology, interior design, cultural anthropology and even linguistics. And these groups are designing environments, services and experiences. These teams are taking the firm’s core strength — a deep understanding of how people really use things — and applying it to a variety of design challenges from hospital walls to HTML pages.”

“The comparison is based on both fileformat specifications Macromedia Flash and SVG… Please note that this a comparison for people dealing with integrated dynamic content generation systems. We are aware, that both .SWF and .SVG have their particular advantages/disadvantages — in some parts they are concurrencing each other, in some not.”

“This study is an attempt to measure how much information is produced in the world each year. We look at several media and estimate yearly production, accumulated stock, rates of growth, and other variables of interest. If you want to understand what we’ve done, we offer different recommendations, depending on the degree to which you suffer from information overload…”

“‘I finally thought, to hell with it, I might as well do something I enjoy, so I started working on a comic called Lloyd Llewellyn just for fun,” he continues. “I drew this story off the top of my head in a way it could never be reprinted — it was full-color and really lavish — but when I finished it I thought, I’m not gonna just sit around with this. So I looked to see who the interesting comics publishers were, and decided to send it to Fantagraphics. A week later I got a call from [publisher] Gary Groth, who said, ‘We’d love to give you your own monthly comic.’ That call changed everything for me and was the best moment of my life.’”

“The Palo Alto firm Ideo may be best known for designing eye-catching objects — the Apple mouse, the Palm V, Nike sunglasses, Oral-B’s Squish Grip toothbrush for kids. But there are lesser-known groups in the company working on things that are harder to wrap your head — much less your hands — around. Ideo has studios that include disciplines as far afield as architecture, cognitive psychology, interior design, cultural anthropology and even linguistics. And these groups are designing environments, services and experiences. These teams are taking the firm’s core strength — a deep understanding of how people really use things — and applying it to a variety of design challenges from hospital walls to HTML pages.”