Ruth Stalker-Firth

A structural engineer once told me that he would always win pictionary if he was teamed with another engineer. Structural engineers have a symbolic language of their own and use it, normally in the workplace, to communicate more accurately. To the onlooker it is all triangles, little circles and arrows. But to the trained eye they represent bridge spans with fixed supports under uniform loads. Similarly, electrical engineers use seemingly incomprehensible symbols to describe apparatus layout. (more…)

So, you have decided to create your own website. You have read all the latest articles, bought a domain name, and now you are staring at your holding page wondering what your website is for and what you should put on it.

Never fear, function-behaviour-structure (FBS) theory can help. FBS is a popular artificial intelligence design theory and like all good fairy godmothers, it will answer your three questions:

1. Function: What is the purpose of your website?
2. Behaviour: What will your website do?
3. Structure: What structure will your website take? (more…)

Card sorts are an easy way to see if the current architecture of a website is working. They encourage users to volunteer all sorts of information that wouldn’t necessary come out in a standard one-on-one interviewing session. Card sorts can also be used to illustrate to stakeholders how their opinions, terminology, and politics impact site usability.

Read the full article only on Digital Web Magazine and an accompanying card sort analysis using a spreadsheet at http://www.ruthstalkerfirth.com/card-sort-analysis-using-a-spreadsheet

When Jurassic Park was on at the cinema, I remember laughing out loud with a couple of my computing mates when the young girl, Lex, looks at a computer screen and says: “It’s a UNIX system. I know this.” At the time, UNIX didn’t have much in the way of a graphical-user interface (GUI), unless you wanted to write one yourself. And it definitely looked nothing like the screen she recognised. Nowadays, a quick look around the many Linux and UNIX distributions demonstrates that GUIs are everywhere. There are probably some as fancy as the screen she was looking at before she got the Jurassic system up and running again to save them all from being eaten by dinosaurs.

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