Siolon

Information Architecture (IA) is one of the most important and exciting concepts in designing applications, but it also one of the least understood by a majority of designers, programmers, business analysts, etc. Hopefully through the following overview of the major concepts and benefits you can immediately improve both the utility and finabitliy of information in your application. After all, content (information) is the most important thing to any application so doesn’t it deserve some foresight? Defining Information Architecture (IA) The Findability Flower The Information Architecture Institute has the following definition to begin our study. They define IA as: The structural design of shared information (read more...)

If you spend anytime at all doing interface design work you know the value-added from wireframes early on in the development process. It helps to point the customer to what’s important in the early-going, namely, labels, location of content, navigation, etc while not worrying about the font or what color the background is going to be. It’s this stage that information architects flex their muscles. I have created a wireframe for MOSS 2007. It is based on the master page that comes out-of-the-box with SharePoint 2007. If you want to make it WSS-specific, all you really have (read more...)

When I started becoming interested in the SharePoint world I was immediately drawn to the end-user adoption of the technology. I came across Mark Miller’s blog EndUserSharePoint.com, and I was instantly hooked in. The articles stay away from the ethereal issues that implementers get caught in and stick with the questions that are pertinent to users that are actually using the application. I contacted Mark to contribute to his fantastic catalog of contributors, and he passed some my way. In the last week I handled questions from two users already! One deals with a technical use of (read more...)

I hate JavaScript. I mean I really hate JavaScript. Dealing with different implementations of the DOM between browsers is a menace I couldn’t duplicate if I tried. I’ve tried JS libraries from Mootools, script.aculo.us, and so on until recently. I knew jQuery existed, but I didn’t realize how powerful the language was until recently. When I realized I could select and manipulate DOM elements with CSS selectors then I was off to the races! I love how it’s tailored for designers who already understand that syntax. There is no more getElementById(”search”) or other garbage, because (read more...)

Everyone, especially computer people, love lists of resources. I do as well, and I decided it’s time to share many of the resources that have helped me in my career. All of these resources (except for the print books) are either freeware, open source, or the application offers a free version.Firefox Firebug  - Essential tool for CSS/JavaScript debugging. YSlow - Firebug add-on to help determine performance bottlenecks. Web Developer Toolbar - Provides tools to compliment Firebug. Fireftp - The best FTP client and in a browser no less! Dust-Me Selectors - Scans the page against your current style sheet to determine extraneous styles. Server (read more...)