UX 101: The Wireframe
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If you develop web sites you're probably pretty familiar with the wireframe, and if you're a user experience designer you're probably rolling your eyes at yet another post about what a wireframe is and what it's good for. If, on the other hand, you're not involved in the mucky details of site design and development, wireframes may seem a little mysterious. If that's you, you're not alone. The fact is wireframes are commonly misunderstood by stakeholders, especially when they're new to the web. I regularly have to explain to clients what a wireframe is, how we use wireframes, and sometimes, why they should pay attention to them. If you're new to wireframes, I'm here to get you up to speed on what a wireframe is and how to read one. If you already know all about them, maybe you can use this post to educate your stakeholders.
Using Remember the Milk as a Capture and Coding Tool
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Built as a to-do list, Remember the Milk is surprisingly capable as a qualitative analysis tool.
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Plan a Content Strategy and Go Places
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Now that the web world has largely bought into information architecture and interaction design, we're starting to realize what we've always known: content is king. Coming up with a good information architecture is critical for any site, but you can't design a great information architecture without having a solid handle on the information you're architecting.
It seems pretty obvious, right? Unfortunately not everyone gets it – yet. It's not like these people don't think content is important. They know it is; they just haven't been convinced that there's any reason to put structure around the process of defining it. So, how do you convince someone that content strategy is important?
I've started likening developing a content strategy to planning a trip. Whether you're going on a honeymoon or creating a site about bicycle maintenance, you're planning to be somewhere you're not right now.
When planning a trip there are three high-level questions that need to be answered:
- Where are we going?
- How will we get there?
- What will we do once we're there?
Let's give the analogy a little workout.
How to Make Master Objects in Omnigraffle
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When wireframing, often you have a group of objects that appear on multiple canvases but in different locations. Take a page footer for example. Since the content of each wireframe varies in height, the footer needs to be positioned differently on each page. Adobe products support this with Smart Objects and the Library; Axure does it with Masters. In Omnigraffle, however, this capability is less obvious.
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Using VoiceOver for Low-Cost Accessibility Testing
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Mac OS X's VoiceOver screenreader is a quick and simple tool to check for accessibility issues. Best of all, it's free. Here's a brief video to get you acquainted.
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