Ideas & Issues

At this year’s IA Summit, Joe Sokohl gave a talk titled The Digital Place You Love is Gone, which touched on the loss people feel when a digital space they know well changes. People don’t like change in the digital realm any more than they like it in the “real” world. Such change can make […]

Between late 2012, when Jony Ive replaced Scott Forstall as the lead of Human Interface at Apple, and the release of iOS 7 at the end of 2013, there was an explosion of writing online about what these developments meant for the design powerhouse and, as a consequence, for the future of product and software design

Personalization was pioneered by Amazon when it introduced its book recommendation system (essentially a precursor of predictive analytics) in the late ’90s. Based on book purchasing history, a user was shown related book titles. Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group championed the book recommendation system as a success–users did not have to do anything, the system

Interface design often depends on the icon to communicate functionality to a user in one compact image. Some icons even become a part of our digital language.  The magnifying glass, the house, the printer… these are all universal icons [1]. Recently, the hamburger icon has been debated for inclusion though research is steadily revealing its

Just because empathy is becoming a popular term in design doesn’t mean we should discount it. Using empathy in user testing can help create a better experience for users and better results for you. Empathy allows a person to understand and share another person’s feelings from their perspective. It is not sympathy which in order

With the advent of mobile technology and user apps, technology companies and users are increasingly invested in finding ways to incorporate everyday learning seamlessly into their daily routine. Learning a foreign language is one of the many areas where mobile apps are fast growing. The high demand for different languages and learning methods are the

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the 16th annual IA Summit in Minneapolis, MN. According to its homepage, the IA Summit is “the world’s most prestigious gathering of information architects, user experience designers, content strategists, and all those who work to create and manage information spaces.” The conference was nothing short of amazing–it

In the last year, many significant events influenced the world of front-end web development. I felt two of them look important than the others. The first event is, without doubt, the completion of HTML5 standard. My pick for the second significant event is related to ReactJS from Facebook. In terms of isomorphic web apps, ReactJS

Despite our collectively dim memories of the rough and tumble days of dial-up, you would be hard pressed to find someone willing to wait more than a few seconds for a website to load without a sigh at the very least, if not an aggressive eye roll. The negative impact of slow speed on usability

With the “Internet of Things” (IoT) on the rise, we can now tangibly conceptualize our information spaces like never before: digital and physical lines have become blurred. The IoT makes this a plausible reality by having constant internet interconnectivity embedded in everyday objects. According to the Oxford Dictionaries, the IoT is defined as: “The interconnection