What users believe they know about a UI strongly impacts how they use it. Mismatched mental models are common, especially with designs that try something new.

Mental models are one of the most important concepts in human–computer interaction (HCI). Indeed, we spend a good deal of time covering their design implications in our full-day seminar on Principles of Interface Design.

Here, I'll report a few examples from our usability studies. Not coincidentally, using concrete examples often helps people understand abstract concepts (such as mental models).

First, though, you have to suffer one bit of theory — namely the definition of mental models. A mental model is what the user believes about the system at hand.

Source: www.useit.com Posted by bee 578 days, 2 hours, 28 minutes ago

Launched on October 1st, 2010, the new AEP Now (the official intranet) is a contemporary approach to internal communications at AEP.

The site has been redesigned to encourage interaction and allow employees to contribute towards developing the culture of the company in a rich and meaningful way.

Source: joshuadavid.me Posted by bee 588 days, 19 hours, 42 minutes ago

Building a working interface from the wireframes and visual prototype.

News delivery design With several stakeholders interested in news delivery across the intranet, this was an important part of the redesign.

In the existing intranet, a news story would appear on the homepage with a URL from the latest news section and then drop into an archive, with a different URL.

So the same story had 2 different URLs in its lifetime travelling from homepage to archive. A nightmare for analytics and evaluation and back-linking.

The news archive itself was just a bulleted list of text headlines, grouped by month, buried in a structure that was difficult to navigate and, to my mind, did not encourage anyone to browse through back-issues (implemented with cookies).

Source: intranetdiary.blogspot.com Posted by support 597 days, 8 hours, 18 minutes ago

Content strategy is starting to get its much-deserved time in the spotlight as part of the user experience design family. As basic examples of confusing/bizarre content like this one and this one show, getting serious about content is way overdue. But I’m a little worried that we haven’t seen much talk on how to measure the effectiveness of web content. It is unfortunate that in some companies it is still a struggle to sell the benefits of UX design, but it is the reality, so we have to deal with it.

Selling content strategy to clients and stakeholders is, of course, not the only reason why measuring its effectiveness is important. It is also essential as part of the whole design process

Source: www.elezea.com Posted by bee 598 days, 7 hours, 19 minutes ago

As I have said in the past, we use a very iterative approach to our design work here at AEP. And leading up to the launch of our redesigned intranet (scheduled to launch on October 1), I thought it would be interesting to have a glimpse at some of the concepts that led us to the final creative.

These are sketches; loose-knit ideas that show a visual evolution in our design and design thinking. There were dozens of different constraints we were working with and it took us some time to devise a solution that not only moved the brand forward but also (and more importantly) supported the needs and desires of our audience, the 20,000 employees of AEP.

Source: joshuadavid.me Posted by bee 611 days, 21 hours, 16 minutes ago

Some while back I posted an article which asked the question: how long should the intranet homepage be? I then discused what attractive intranets look like, providing examples of modern designs, including some long homepages. This generated some discussion and debate. Most recently, it has led Toby Ward to write some passionate posts about...

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by AlexManchester 644 days, 13 hours, 16 minutes ago

The winds of change are blowing for intranets. Every intranet survey run in the wider community has shown that 50% of intranet teams are planning (or hoping) to redesign their sites.

With any redesign comes the opportunity for a fresh new look and feel. Drawing their inspiration from the best of public-facing sites, intranets are shrugging off their dated appearance and joining the modern age.

These design improvements matter. As discussed in the earlier article Should the intranet look sexy?, intranet sites don’t have a marketing role, but they do need to have a professional and engaging appearance......

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by bee 657 days, 18 hours, 54 minutes ago

IBF 24 - the phenomenal 24 hour online broadcast from the Intranet Benchmarking Forum took place on 2-3 June 2010. The archive series is now being released week by week.

Source: www.ibforum.com Posted by fayeandrews75 658 days, 5 hours, 17 minutes ago

I’m overseeing the design of our new intranet, and the ‘look n feel’, structure and navigation are crucial to my mind in helping people adopt the new system. I’d like to tell you the old menu names we’re dumping, and the new ones we’re using for our top level navigation.

I’m also able to share the top level menus from several other intranets thanks to the generous nature of my Twitter friends who shared their navigation terminology with me. I trust that none of us are giving away sensitive company information. By their very nature, intranets can seem ‘secret’. While we can all see what goes on with other people’s customer facing websites, we don’t often know what goes on inside other companies of course.

Source: kilobox.net Posted by bee 717 days, 4 hours, 47 minutes ago

Customers crave speed on the Web, and they reward organizations that make things fast and simple.

Why is Google successful? Because it delivers better and faster results than its competitors. Google truly understands the customer's need for speed. "At Google, we've gathered hard data to reinforce our intuition that "speed matters" on the Internet," Jake Brutlag of Google wrote in 2009. "We've always viewed speed as a competitive advantage."

"We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible," Google states.

Source: www.gerrymcgovern.com Posted by support 725 days, 19 hours, 56 minutes ago