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Column: Beautiful Information

UXmatters has published 17 editions of the column Beautiful Information.

Top 3 Trending Beautiful Information Columns

  1. The UX Customer Experience: Communicating Effectively with Stakeholders and Clients

    Beautiful Information

    Discovering patterns in knowledge spaces

    A column by Jonathan Follett
    January 22, 2009

    “To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.”—Milton Glaser

    User experience and its associated fields of expertise—such as usability, information architecture, interaction design, and user interface design—have expanded rapidly over the past decade to accommodate what seems like insatiable demand, as the world moves toward an increasingly digital existence.

    As UX professionals, we often take technology for granted, accepting the massive complexity and rapid change in our field as the norm—and perhaps even something to embrace and enjoy. With this outlook and because we’re steeped in our daily professional activities, it becomes all too easy for us to forget that ours is not the usual point of view, and the technological change we expect, the expert jargon we speak, and the processes we use are foreign and confusing to other people. So, while we focus our attention on the users of digital products, we can sometimes be remiss in our treatment of another important audience—the stakeholders and clients with whom we collaborate to complete our assignments and projects. Read More

  2. Envisioning the Whole Digital Person

    Beautiful Information

    Discovering patterns in knowledge spaces

    A column by Jonathan Follett
    February 20, 2007

    Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce transactions, to our online research. As storage becomes cheaper and data pipes become faster, we are doing more and more online—and in the process, saving a record of our digital lives, whether we like it or not.

    As a human society, we’re quite possibly looking at the largest surge of recorded information that has ever taken place, and at this point, we have only the most rudimentary tools for managing all this information—in part because we cannot predict what standards will be in place in 10, 50, or 100 years.

    In the public sector, the information glut has risen to the point of crisis. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal from December 29, 2005, “Oh, Has Uncle Sam Got Mail,” “the White House is expected to turn over more than 100 million emails to the National Archives” when President Bush leaves office. The article goes on to describe the bottleneck at the National Archives, where they cannot easily convert the information they receive to searchable, retrievable formats. The National Archives has retained Lockheed Martin to solve this data storage fiasco, and Lockheed Martin has recommended using HTML as the standard document format—and using digital adaptors to translate that into a new language when it becomes obsolete.” Read More

  3. The Ever-Evolving Arrow: Universal Control Symbol

    Beautiful Information

    Discovering patterns in knowledge spaces

    A column by Jonathan Follett
    October 5, 2009

    Symbols and icons can be both friend and enemy to UX designers. They can convey a great deal of information in the span of just a few pixels or utterly confuse users, depending on the context. The careful application of icons, however, can greatly enhance software, enabling quick access to a feature or function, using a minimal amount of screen real estate.

    Of the many choices for icons, the arrow falls into that small group of supposedly universal symbols that we can expect most people using a Web site or application to understand intuitively. (Others include the X, plus (+) and minus (–) signs, and—maybe—the stop sign.)

    The arrow and its brethren are everywhere on our computer screens. For example, a quick examination of the Firefox 3.0 browser, shown in Figure 1 in its standard configuration, yields eight examples of arrows—Forward, Back, and Reload buttons, scroll bar controls, and drop-down menus that reveal search engine, history, and bookmark choices. Read More

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