Rebecca Greenfield interviews Liz Danzico, the creator of the MFA Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts, on her new role as NPR’s first-ever creative director. Danzico’s been tasked to shape NPR’s user experience. “Everyone knows what public radio sounds like … But If you ask someone what NPR looks like, what it […]

Dede Frederick, a graduate student of web design, set up a study of whether readers preferred parallax scrolling. He designed two hotel websites similar in every way, except that one featured parallax scrolling and one did not, then surveyed students. The survey focused on five areas of the user experience: usability, enjoyment, fun, satisfaction, and […]

A detailed introduction to what typography is and why it matters to your readers. The post outlines various things to consider when selecting a typeface and size to maximize readability, believability, and even to ease cognitive load of your reader.

Conversions don’t have to be about sales — there are other key performance indicators that speak to what readers do on your website. User experience design guru Jakob Nielsen breaks down how to measure the relative success rate of any desirable user activity — such as “subscribe to newsletter,” using a certain feature, or “read […]

“Scrolling as king” has received much attention in the journalism and tech space, especially in the post-Snow Fall era. Former Google and Facebook product designer Paul Adams, however, says screens of all sizes and swaths of data are leading Web design back to a longtime storytelling approach, the card. The designs of Twitter, Google, Pinterest, […]

Frank Chimero, a designer, presents his talk on what it means to design for screens and to make software for anything from your computer to a shoe. We’ve talked about reimagining how news stories are told, so we’re interested in what it means to create content that is platform-orthodox instead of platform-agnostic.

As storytelling forms become more complex and include text, photos, videos and graphics, the movie industry’s process of storyboarding can help organize those elements in a more visual and structured way. “Storyboards can be used in the planning process to isolate the most important steps and then visualize them, creating a map to refer to […]

Mario Garcia goes behind the scenes of the Guardian’s latest interactive on the NSA files and what the revelations mean for you. One of the major points is that this was a digital-native project. “We created something that is simply non-replicable in print. But totally appropriate to the story we were trying to tell,” says Gabriel Dance, […]

Miranda Mulligan, executive editor of the Knight Lab, shared four tools created by the lab to assist journalists in making information more meaningful. The tools include a simple way to make interactive timelines with a Google spreadsheet, a tool to create inline audio citations, a mapping tool, and a tool to explore advanced Twitter searches.

Jen Cardello uses the HealthCare.gov site to illustrate 10 ways to improve the usability during the account setup process. That process is users’ first impression of a service, and a poor experience during that process can lead to three problems: increased service costs to you, increased cognitive strain to your users, and a negative halo […]