You're sitting with friends , driving on the highway or just chilling at home when suddenly you have an idea. It's a new mobile App or website that you're positive can solve a real problem. Things just spiral up from there. SWOT analysis , future projections and these EPIC Designs are all that's playing in your head. You start noticing the finer things in every app you have and analyze every website you like. That's it -- you feel your dream will come true and your idea will be the next big thing...

Picasso is purported to have remarked, "Good artists borrow, but great artists steal." He probably did not mean it in a literal sense. He wanted to inspire us from great works of arts and re-interpret or re-imagine them in a different way. Here are some references that have inspired us to become better designers.   1. Balsamiq: Its simple, sketchy interface evokes a sense of nostalgia of our playing with crayons as children. The clients don't get distracted by little details, allowing us to focus on important things such as navigation, content prioritization, quantity of...

Sometimes in a mad scramble to meet deadlines, we “have” to get Omnigraffle and Visio to play nice with each other. Here are some workarounds for those pesky issues to make the best of a tough situation. Please add to the list based on your own experiences. Set a Master Template Use either Visio or Omnigraffle as the master tool with the other contributing only on page level design. Standardize layout, fonts, stencils, alignment and grid on one master page that is imported and followed closely on the other. Obviously, ensure the...

An Age Old Problem DFU recently engaged in a project with a client to develop a new sitemap, focusing specifically on restructuring the global navigation and labeling conventions. The challenge for this project was the large volume of content: thousands of pages spanning various directories and subdirectories. The crux of the project was to conduct an open card sort remotely to determine the user’s mental model for the best labels and content groupings on the site. We’ve conducted dozens of card sorts over the years with OptimalSort, our trusted online application for...

Does Social Media Work for Retirement Systems? In the past few years, "social media" has gone from a buzz-word known by few, to a communication tool used by many. Facebook and Twitter dominate as channels for timely and effective communication for hundreds of millions of users across the globe. These individuals represent various industries, interests, hobbies, organizational affiliations and other relationships. While most of us see the value of social media in our personal lives and have embraced it, leveraging social media for our organizations and companies is less prevalent,...

The South by South West interactive conference hit Austin on March 11 with a wave of nearly 15,000 interactive professionals (not to mention the 13,000 music and 9,000 film badge-holding attendees). Although the interactive portion of the conference was the largest in its 12 year history, many attendees lamented that the large number of participants compromised the quality of panels and presentations. Conceivably, in order to meet the needs of 15,000 conference-goers, the number of panels had to be increased from years past, which some believe lead to...

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