Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Fred Leise

Fred Leise — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:38:02 GMT

Nice article. Here’s another resource: The American Society of Indexers as a web indexing SIG. You can check out their website at http://www.web-indexing.org/.

Fred Leise — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:24 GMT

Please note that the authors of this article are Karl Fast, Mike Steckel and Fred Leise.

Fred Leise — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:24 GMT

The authors of this article are Karl Fast, Mike Steckel and Fred Leise.

Fred Leise — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:11:53 GMT

Intuitect is a commercially viable tool that was used even during its beta trials last fall to design a website with over 1,000 pages and 50 different wireframes.

From the beginning, our product has been based on strong connections with the IA and UX community, and we have been working for a year and a half to develop the features that are most helpful to those users. We continue to develop our tool based on feedback from current and potential customers.

We invite everyone to download our 30-day free trail and see for themselves whether such capabilities as drag-and-drop sitemaps, cascading wireframe updates and one-click prototyping meet your needs.

We always work with our customers to make sure that our tool meets their needs.

Fred Leise — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 16:19:33 GMT

Richard, thanks for your comments. You are right that I also do quantitative auditing in addition to the heuristic evaluation discussed here. Your suggestion that “accessibility” might be better termed “findability” is a good one. I was using “accessible” in its more traditional meaning.

Fred Leise — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 20:41:34 GMT

Mark and Alexander,

Thanks for your kind words.

I’m glad you can see the value in how the heuristics will help you when discussing your work with clients. Anything that we can do to increase client’s understanding of our work is always important.

I can say that it was precisely in trying to define what the difficulties with a client’s content were that led me to the development of the heuristics.

Fred Leise — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:01:32 GMT

Rajesh,

I realized that in the rush of preparation for the IA Summit, I never answered your query. I don’t that that increasing the number of people working on content analysis will increase the perception of its objectivity. Rather, what is important is providing concrete examples to the client. Just saying, “Your site doesn’t meet the heuristic of collocation.” isn’t enough. Rather we have to point out the five different places where information on the same subject is spread and then point out that because there are not links among the sections that users will most likely not be able to find all of the information that is relevant to them.

Certainly one must be careful of bias or preconceived notions in any work that we do, so having someone else to validate or verify our results can also be helpful.

Fred Leise — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 15:50:17 GMT

Tom,

Thanks for your kind remarks about the article. Glad it is of help to you.

A quantitative analysis/evaluation really focuses on specific numbers: How many different page templates are currently used? How many document types do we have and what are they? What is our most-used content? How current is content? How many content authors do we have, etc? Essentially items that can be directly measured or counted.

Obviously there is a place for quantitative analysis also, in addition to the types of qualitative analyses I discuss here.

Fred