The Dubious Waves of Error

From the customer’s point of view, an error message is a crisis.  When you’re hit by an error on a website, you’re in trouble – by definition.   To make things worse, the message can be so cryptic it stops you dead.  A  poorly-designed error message drives you to a competitor’s site, on the phone with the call center, back to paper-based processes, or just giving up.

Don’t let this happen to your users!  It’ll take work, but make the effort to establish consistent and effective messages and standards for your websites.  The end result should be simple; the error message tells your visitors what went wrong, helps them over any barriers, and lets them get on with their business.

User Research on the Team

Customers need websites that work. Business owners need projects that deliver on organizational goals. IT developers need to know what to build.  Enter user experience: the profession that bridges the gaps.

eGovernment Challenges and Information Architecture

Government work provides profound, often deeply frustrating, and generally amazing wide-reaching opportunities to apply our IA/UX powers in the service of millions. But this year’s Information Architecture Summit had no sessions specifically about IA in government settings.

And so I asked... “Shall we lunch?”

Service Design and the Customer’s Journey

Call it by other names – multi-channel service design, customer relationship management, cross-channel experience design, customer experience. We’re talking about how people interact with a whole system, over time.

Searching for the Fundamental Flaw

I daydream occasionally about a hypothetical candy box of doctorates, from which I might some day pluck a thesis to pursue. The creamy center of each potential research project is a variation on the urgent question HEY,WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON HERE!

Metadata, Taxonomies, Vocabularies - Do What?

Imagine standing in front of a wall of cubbies filled with parchment scrolls, and not being to find the Tractatus you know exists in there. Or no – make that try to find the right health insurance claim form on your corporate intranet. Your predicament is as old as civilization itself. And content classification structures, including tools like metadata and taxonomy, were invented thousands of years ago to deal with it.

Citizen-Centric Portals

I'm working on a citizen-facing, U.S. government portal in the early stages of becoming an exemplar for e-Government services. I did a peer review to identify other sites that also: 1) Steward and present content from across organizations, 2) Require close inter-organizational coordination for user authentication to deliver secure access to applications and data, and 3) Have to pull everyone involved up by the bootstraps to get the job done.

IA Summit in Second Life

We simulcast three sessions from the 2008 IA Summit into Second Life. Here's Andrew Hinton delivering his closing plenary
"Linkosophy." Also simulcast were Jared Spool's opening plenary "Journey to the Center of Design" and Jason Hobbs' "Hotel Yeoville."

Wayfinding in Second Life - An IA Puzzle

The founders of the Nonprofit Commons sim in Second Life asked me for input on how to improve navigation for visitors to this 3D environment. The sim houses the virtual offices of more than 25 nonprofits, including CARE, Alzheimer Society of Ontario, AngelAID, Transgender Resource Center, Missouri Humanities Council, Techsoup, and the IA Institute.

IA in Second Life - Redux

The remixed Information Architecture in Second Life: Summit Redux slidedeck was presented this weekend to DCIA, the Washington, DC information architecture crowd. The deck summarizes observations of panelists Josh Knauer, Andrew Hinton, Lori Bell, Beth Kanter, and Sarah Dilling on 1) opportunities for information architecture work in Web 3D and 2) how IAs can use Second Life as a platform for collaboration and education.