Imran Ali

Visio Stencils for Information Architects

Nick Finck has helpfully published a number of Visio templates for quickly assembling prototype web interfaces. Finck's set of three templates are free to download cover the production of Wireframes, Site Maps and Process Flows.

Download the templates here...

Innovative Game Design Symposium

The website for next month's Innovative Game Design Symposium, in Maastricht, has a unique Flash-based UI, presenting the entire site in one zoom-able screen.

The reader starts with a visual map of the site - sections such as schedules, organisers, biographies, are represented as thumbnail blocks of text. The reader then zooms-in and pans-around the text at a readable size.

The interface is an interesting and very intuitive alternative to traditional page and frame based navigation, enabling the reader to quickly move through a hierarchical information structure.

Flickr

With around 200'000 members, serving 2.2m photos at a rate of around 30'000 images each day, Flickr continues to delight and impress with its intuitive and fun and photosharing network...a great illustration of some of Donald Norman's Emotional Design concepts.

Like Gmail, one of its greatest strengths is the novel application of HTML+CSS in creating highly intuitive interface elements, notably the ability to click any editable section of a page, make changes and save without refreshing the page.

Also, in Fruit At The Bottom, Matt Jones writes about the value of Flickr's footer-positioned, task-based navigation as an interface device more likely to encourage exploration...something to consider for Wanadoo UK's casino-like home page!