Information Architecture

24 Nov 2009 1008H

New thoughts on shopping carts and the e-commerce experience

Today observed my wife shopping online and cussing out the webpage at checkout. You see, she is one of the many people — not a majority of users certainly, but definitely a persona to be designed for — out there who I observed at Sears, MyGofer, Hallmark, Borders, Wilton, so on — who use the [...]

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10 Feb 2009 2159H

1 million Xbox users running the Netflix service

That’s a lot of users. I know our family’s done our fair share of contributing to those minutes. It works pretty darn good, except, you can’t pick your movies in XBox Dashboard, you have to go to Netflix and put them in queue, which is half-assed, being a political decision to not cannibalize from Microsoft’s [...]

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12 Nov 2008 0918H

Lumping & splitting among information architects, user experience people, and interactionists

Of all the lousy times to be looking for a new gig, there’s a recession and a marriage banquet and an election and all these things with starting a new life. But I really can’t complain because at least the interviews keep coming, so that signals to me that the market is still fairly strong.
So, [...]

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21 Oct 2008 1447H

Are carousels abused?

Probably. We talk about carousels but no one properly seems to know what are the appropriate contexts around when to use them.
For those not in the know, carousels are a kind of web user interface widget that essentially displays a subset of a larger set of information in a loop, and typically not only shows [...]

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08 Sep 2008 0706H

Just because it works in a u-test. . .

doesn’t necessarily mean that the user will be incented (incentivized?) to take an action. In other words, beyond the role that user experience plays in making things findable and easy to use — for those of us who work in e-commerce, anyway — there is this other role we play in promotion of features.
For instance, [...]

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17 Aug 2008 0647H

Biting the hand that feeds you

Seems a recent post at grokdotcom has inflamed the information architecture community: hardly worth mentioning really but for the strident responses drawn to that flame. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that interaction design or information architecture is faulty or point out how they are incomplete, and most mature disciplines at some point in [...]

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05 Aug 2008 0800H

In re: interaction design v. information architecture

At one time, before the dotcom world ended, people would put out these crazy job descriptions where they wanted what used to be called a webmaster: someone who coded, designed, researched, and managed the web services for a company or an organization. They wanted someone who was familiar with major scripting and programming languages, someone [...]

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02 Jun 2008 0624H

UX-dojo-storming PotteryBarn.com

Oh. Looks like W-S brands’ UX & Dev teams down at the north end of Van Ness have been hard at work lately. Let’s look the numbers:

#21 on the Internet Retailer Top 100,
$1.1 billion worth of stuff sold online last year, up 19% from the previous year,
7.1 million visitors a month,
6% conversion rate,
Average ticket of [...]

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06 Mar 2008 0906H

Reworking wireframes

Probably one of the most frustrating things about this type of work is the amount of rework that is required due to changing or poorly gathered business requirements, and in fact, sometimes the business side is actually using hard code and layouts as a kind of sandbox for their own ideas before rejecting or accepting [...]

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16 Feb 2008 0950H

The end of cart?

Rehashing an old post from last year, but, now, everywhere it can be seen that the walls that form that decade-old convention of shopping cart as a label are crumbling down. Bag, basket — “my gear” even, on one site — it does not really seem to matter to people, so long as there is [...]

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