Archive for the 'Design Tips' Category

Much has been written about the correct placement and style for effectively integrating search on a site, yet a fundamental issue with such search remains: the results are too broad and are difficult to sift through. Alleviating this problem is a simple case of letting the user put their search query into context. That is, if we provide a mechanism for letting the user search within specific categories, the probability of that user finding information pertaining to their interests is greatly increased. This mechanism is what I refer to as “categorical search.”

Categorical search is by no means a new idea; in fact, it has been around for hundreds of years. Can you imagine searching for a book in a library or a video in a video store without genres? What if you had to search through an Atlas for a city without being able to choose the country first? How useful would the yellow pages be if business types were not grouped together?

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When starting a web development project, there are many advantages to hiring a user experience architect first. The most important of these are:

1. to ensure a usable product that matches the goals of your company
2. to obtain a definitions guide which can protect against scope creep, synchronize efforts and protect against costly revisions
3. to acquire accurate estimates for project development by providing detailed and unambiguous specifications

Ensure a usable product that matches the goals of your company and reduces support costs

By hiring a web developer first, the process of refining features to address the users’ and company’s goals can be missed entirely, giving less attention for the sake of feature development, and even postponement until integration of usability efforts is much more difficult and less effective. Unlike web developers, user experience architects specialize in evaluating user behavior and task analysis which is invaluable in creating sites with which people can feel accomplished and can enjoy interacting.

Although, a web developer will produce a functional solution, without the expertise of the user experience architect, the result may not be an effective solution; that is to say, it may work technically but your users may not be able to easily accomplish their tasks.

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Information architectures and accompanying sitemaps often illustrate page relations with single channels linking them. These architectures are sub-optimal because they do not take advantage of the principle of multiple varied access points to key destinations which can increase the traffic flow to said goals.

Providing multiple and varied pathways to key destinations is a fundamental tenant of both urban planning and building architecture, and thinking of its application in those fields can shed light on this principle’s vast potential in website architecture.

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