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Information Architecture Blog | I.T and User Testing Information, Designing for Mobile Web

Playbooks For UX Designers

Whether you’re a student looking to land your first job in UX design or a design manager growing a design team, Playbook answers common questions that UX designers might encounter at any stage of their career to help them achieve their career goals.

The Playbook shares tips and actionable advice about getting your first product job, growing as a design manager, building a design system, and being a successful freelancer. The action items come from the people who know best: product designers, founders, design managers, and consultants from small companies, just like global players such as Google, Facebook, and Adobe.

https://askplaybook.com/

The Best UX Research Methods in a Pinch

Jordan Bowman wrote a great post to help you find the right UX research method for your project. In “The Best UX Research Methods in a Pinch,” he takes a closer look at six methods that don’t take much time or money but give you the insights you need, quickly and effectively.

https://uxtools.co/blog/best-ux-research-methods-in-a-pinch/

The Design Systems Guide

Getting a design system right is hard. There are so many different types of design systems and so many ways of setting up one and maintaining it over time. Fortunately, there is plenty of incredible resources all around design systems. But where do you even start? What would be a good process to use to make sure that your efforts don’t hit the wall of tough deadlines and final tweaks? The Design System Guide, kindly released by Romina Kavcic, has got your back. The guide is a very comprehensive interactive book on the foundations of design systems, design metrics, design tokens, checklists, and handy resources for managing design systems.

https://thedesignsystem.guide/

Dashboard Design Patterns

Dashboards present complex data sets at a glance. But what does effective dashboard design look like? How do you find the right balance between displaying everything that’s important and ensuring the dashboard is easy to use without overwhelming the user?

The interdisciplinary research lab VisHub at the University of Edinburgh published a set of dashboard design patterns to support the design and creative exploration of dashboard design. It dives deeper into every aspect of dashboards — from components and meta information to visual representation, interaction, and page layout. 

https://dashboarddesignpatterns.github.io/patterns.html

Good Design Principles

Establishing a set of design principles for a project or brand can help teams create more consistent user experiences. They aid decision-making and make it easier to keep the product aligned. If you plan to establish a set of design principles for your product, we came across useful resources that will help you get started.

Ben Brignell curates an open-source collection of 195 design principles and methods. It features both heuristic design principles and design principles developed by companies specifically for their products. All of them are searchable and tagged, from hardware and infrastructure to language and organizations.

https://principles.design/

The biggest checklist for of inclusive design…. ever!

…ever?? Yes!

A lot of aspects add up to an inclusive web experience. Considerations that might not come to one’s mind in the first place — like the use of inclusive language or providing alternatives or descriptions for complex visualizations.Or, accessible considerations such as providing transcripts for audio content.

To get your site on the best track of becoming truly inclusive, the magical Heydon Pickering has put together an Inclusive Design Checklist. The biggest and most comprehensive one available. It includes items for accessibility, performance, device support, interoperability, and language.

Do check it out!

 

Axure RP 6 released!

The popular wireframing tool has just been updated to v6!

Aside from a number of fixes, the most notable features of this version are:

  • Sketch Effects – Sketch Effects enable you to give your wireframes a more sketchy, grayscale look and feel to allow the audience to focus on the information architecture, interactions, and functions of the prototype more than the “finished” look
  • New Wireframing Tools – wireframes are now faster to build and easier to maintain by adding Global and Page Guides, a Location and Size tooltip, Format Painter, ability to Copy and Paste. Annotations, and a new Custom Style engine where custom styles can be applied to rollovers.
  • Improved Text Editing – Axure RP was upgraded to use WPF in the Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0.  The new text engine allows information architects to add text editing at zoomed levels, line spacing, and Open Type Fonts. There is also some text padding in shape widgets.
  • Page Styles – you can finally center pages, apply background colours and background images without having to do it manually!
  • Richer Prototypes – Axure RP6 now has animations for moving and fading, Math and String functions, Drag and Drop interactions, and new Dynamic Panel Events to respond to moving, changes in visibility, and changes in state.
  • More Specification Control – You are now able to organize the content, optionally include headers, filter widget tables by annotation values, generate a master usage report, generate all of the widget text, configure column widths for two column layout, and configure the screenshot size. And you can also format the page notes and annotate master instances.
  • AxShare integration – You can now manage an account of up to 10 active prototypes. It supports RP files (up to 10 MB) created in version 6 or earlier and all generated prototypes will have the version 6 skin. You now also have access to a new Discuss tab next to the sitemap in the prototype (which you can disable), as well as a page for viewing the discussion topics in your AxShare account.

Axure RP 6 is available for both PC and MAC here.

Good times! 🙂

 

Top tips for working with developers

Strategies for working with developersWorking in a busy office is one of the best parts of being a designer or information architect – you can bounce off ideas, discuss projects with others and get their input, and you can generally have a good laugh.

That is until the time comes where a new project is being started or requirements are being updated. Usually then some sort of “rivalry” will ensue, and in 90% of the cases it will be between a designer or information architect and a developer or development coordinator. Scope was not fully explained or defined, the design is too complicated to build, or data is not coming from the sources it was meant to.

In those times frustration can quickly result in stress and lack of commitment to a project. Let’s see what we would do to remedy that…
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