The best way I’ve been able to sum up Interaction Design is that it is “Blueprinting User Behavior” – Joshua Lane
Before tackling styleframes, you need to nail your wireframes. At the moment, they need a bit of sophistication. Presentation of materials also needs to spiffy up. Don’t be stubborn and don’t you worry. Iterations upon iterations is completely part of the entire design process.
Understanding and Creating Navigation
Navigation is concerned with the connections between the different displays that are available in a hypermedia system. Designers can think of the overall arrangement of these connections as forming a structure through which the users of their products are going to be navigating.
Remember, as the maker you see the “top view.” But the people navigating your redesign will probably not. If you have ever gone into a modern, historic, or reconstructed maze … sometimes created by planting tall, thick hedges to create winding paths like hallways in a baffling pattern … you can imagine the feelings of hypertext users who are inside the maze but do not have your “top view” understanding of how the maze is laid out or where they are in it. Ways of navigating are broken down and discussed in class.
Adding and Building Taxonomy
Taxonomy—how you organize your data—determines direction and UI design, and influences future site and application development. This is where you develop a controlled vocabulary for your redesign. You’ll often hear things like categories or tag clouds when taxonomy is brought up. This really allows users to enter a piece of content from multiple gateways.
It is critical to prescribe a suitable user interface to support faceted filtering if you’re designing a site that has a plethora of content to search.
Faceted filtering allows you to narrow down a large list of objects to a manageable size by applying flexible combinations of attribute filters in any order. I’ve been saying in class repeatedly, we need to design digestible information.
Rather than forcing you down fixed paths within a website’s information architecture, faceted filtering allows you to multi-dimensionally slice-n-dice the information in a manner that best accommodates your specific needs. Read more.
Information Hierarchy and Flow
This is where we get into flow – throughout my entire career this is my favorite part of the design or UI/UX process. It involves a a lot of stepping in your user’s shoes, paper prototyping, and visual-story-telling.
When designing a website, it is important that each web page in the web adheres to a consistent design format. Not only does does this improve the website aesthetics, the consistency and predictability makes navigation and site usage easier for visitors. The use of background images, colors, fonts, menus, etc. should be set once and applied consistently throughout the website. Read more.
Great Online Examples
I’ve picked out a couple of interfaces that I think achieve superb navigation, concrete taxonomy systems, as well as consistency in orientation and feedback. Take a sneak peak below and click to them when you get the chance. You are more than welcome to comment to the post your thoughts and feelings.
Newsmap
CNN
World Bank Group
Free Templates and Downloadables
I’m always impressed when a student creates their own templates, but if you’re really not a pro at this stuff…take a look at a couple of resources you can download from Mashable. If you use these templates, be sure to credit the source. Stealing is not an option nor forgivable in this class.
What I’m listening to at work right now:
G-Eazy’s “Fried Rice” (ft. Onra) by g-eazy
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