Losing my Fidelity

Over the years I’ve watched my wireframes go from scribbles on the back of a napkin to architectural-looking blueprints complete with gradients and icons and detailed pagination mechanisms. And, truth be told, it saddens me. The spirit in which wireframes were intended, way back when we first realized that websites had to be planned out, was to get ideas for content down on paper before we started plodding away at development. They should inform, not dictate, the information architecture, content development, and visual design processes that follow.

Entity-Based Information Architecture in Drupal 7

In Drupal 7, the idea of "make everything a node" doesn't quite hold water as it did in the past since content types have been abstracted as a type of fieldable entity. Here are some basic litmus tests to use when deciding which entity type should be utilized for satisfying requirements.

Thank you, Virginia.gov, for a Better User Experience

State government websites have the enormous challenge of presenting a unified presence on the web while also giving autonomy to the hundreds of organization sites within them - and on a limited budget.

The incredible shrinking main navigation

Recently someone mentioned to me the main navigation on cnn.com. I've read that site every day for about 6 years, but I couldn't tell you what even one of the main navigation items was. Lorem? Ipsum? No idea. What's interesting about this to me is that it was never a conscious decision on my part. I never realized that I never used it - I just didn't because, apparently, I didn't need it.

Now that I'm paying more attention, I'm noticing all kinds of creative ways that online publishing sites are de-emphasizing main navigation in favor of robust and well-designed homepages, user-driven navigation, and tag linking techniques. In this blog entry I share a few of these different techniques.

Build attractive site maps in minutes using OmniGraffle

OmniGraffle's built-in diagram styles are pretty sweet, essentially building/connecting/arranging shapes for you while you just type up an outline. However, for more complicated hierarchical diagrams like site maps, things can get ugly in a hurry once you exceed a certain number of shapes - which is why I built my own custom diagram style and made it publicly available.