Category: Design

  • Prototyping tools

    Scott McDowell has written an article for Boxes and Arrows called Visio Replacement? You Be the Judge about tools for prototyping rich interaction designs. We recently adopted Axure here at Extractable and we’re very jazzed about the way it’s enabling us to do IA work and interaction design and tie together wireframes with sitemaps and…

  • Hey, look – it's another book on interaction design

    This one, Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design is new from Peachpit: In this unique book, Dawes invites readers inside a series of his personal projects to get a view of his process–his creative seeing, making, and playing. He encourages designers to look beyond the normal tools of their trade to find…

  • Lance Arthur is back and says web design is dead (film at 11)

    The legendary Lance Arthur, missing in action from the web scene for half a decade now (he was spending much of that time with some complicated email service scheme I don’t understand and more recently has been helping to launch Squarespace, the magazine/community CMS Christina Wodtke and company have productized via the revamped Box and…

  • Yahoo redesign driven by data

    Mark noticed this Businessweek article on how Yahoo! mined their user-click data to inform the redesign of their home page (How Yahoo! Gave Itself A Face-Lift): To avoid design by committee, Yahoo deferred almost every decision to an impartial judge: data generated by users’ clicks. “We have this culture of data,” Bhat explains. “It is…

  • Hammers vs. saws

    Over at Juxtaprose (just added to our blogroll), Jay Fienberg recently wrote about the danger of making a fetish of any one particular tool in your toolkit: But, no matter how magical a saw, it’s not so great for the people who need to drive nails. And, it’s not like hammers work and saws don’t…

  • What makes good design?

    On the IxDA list, LukeW asked which metrics or criteria can be used to judge “good” interaction design. Kim Goodwin wrote an excellent reply, saying “A few of us at Cooper were kicking this question around with Hugh Dubberly several years ago. We came up with 4 criteria we felt applied to all sorts of…