Happy New Year! I just read about Pion – a tool from Atomic Labs which works with all the leading web analytics products available today. I will learn more about it and write what I find out. A free edition is available as well as paid service levels.
Archive for User Experience – Page 2
Wow – how time flies. I’ve gone too long without posting!
New Relic appears to be an interesting performance and app monitoring package with a modern interface and great tools. I came across it the other day looking for some other web analytics information. A free trial is available, so I may give it a run and write about it here.
Until next time…!
I’m still keeping lists of useful sites as I learn about information architecture (IA) concepts, taxonomy, user experience (UX) and knowledge management. The Taxonomy Guide at the University of Toronto in Canada contains many useful links and resources on these topics.
The University of Minnesota, Duluth is not to be outdone by UToronto – there are dozens of links to IA materials at their site. This site digs deep into IA methods such as card sorting, content inventory methods, prototyping and wireframing.
Here’s another site chock full of IA links.
Something for everyone…
There is definitely a site out there for everyone. This site is all about site indexes and there is even a special index group (SIG) dedicated to building a site index for any site.
Picking up again on the taxonomy topic, I found that Heather Hedden has written and spoken extensively about taxonomies, indexing and search. Her site contains links to numerous whitepapers, articles and presentations.
There’s even a Taxonomy Bootcamp (gasp!) in D.C. this November. It is co-located with some other related events such as the Knowledge Management World conference, the SharePoint Symposium and the Enterprise Search Summit.
Before getting too deep into a new information architecture, it may be time to chill out and take a content inventory.
I read about WooRank just today and I like it. Of course a paid offering exists, but the free offering covers a lot of ground when you need a quick read when evaluating a new website. It quickly summarizes traffic, search engine ranking, SEO qualities, server and other info to get you started quickly. If you need some background history on a site or domain, supplement the WooRank data with info from Netcraft.com.
While looking for Information Architecture (IA) tools recently, I just came across a new Firefox plugin which will be useful for User Interface (UI) prototyping and design called FluidIA. I’ve been using the Pencil plugin for Firefox off and on for a year now, so it will be nice to work with a new tool. FluidIA promises Fluid Information Architecture in the category of agile UI prototyping, which sets a high bar for usability and end results.
Along the same theme of this post…. have a look at the Midwest User Experience 2011 conference slides from last week. Something here for everyone, and a neat little web analytics presentation as well. Enjoy!
In a merciful move to encourage (or shame) users into upgrading browsers, Microsoft has launched a campaign including a website to begin a countdown to a world free of its infamous Internet Explorer version 6 browser. Ask any developer about IE6 and you’ll get an earful of complaints about how it breaks sites coded with the best intentions and legal html and css. Enjoy the site, and tell a friend who might still run IE6 that the time is right to upgrade. (Unfortunately web developers still may need to keep a version around for testing purposes.)
Don’t let the fact that this link will take you to a page written in Brazilian Portuguese (my second language) hold you back: all the links are to content written in English. The IdealMind blog contains many valuable tips and discussions about web development, web analytics and more. But this list of conversion rate tips all in one place is a great find. What’s more, there’s a link to the post which originally inspired IdealMind’s author: a link to more than 600 (at the present time) links to help you improve your site’s conversion rate. Enjoy!