Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has some tips for implementing Scrolling and Scrollbars. He specifically looks at custom scrollbars created in Flash and show examples of those that fail and succeed.

Peter Morville presents his User Experience Design Honeycomb which is a visual diagram to show the relationship between the different facets of UX. Peter explains it as:

When I broadened my interest from IA to UX, I found the need for a new diagram to illustrate the facets of user experience – especially to help clients understand why they must move beyond usability – and so with a little help from my friends developed the user experience honeycomb.

Controlled Vocabularies Cut Off the Long Tail is an excellent article by Joshua Porter that discusses an interesting property of folksonomies – the long tail.

The Long Tail paradigm is about the discovery of information, not just the finding of it. The distinction I’m making here between discovery and finding is that users who discover information didn’t need to know it was there to begin with, and so couldn’t have been trying to find it. In a word: serendipity.

Thomas Vander Wal has a great article that is Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies. The article has clear descriptions and some nice diagrams that will help you better understand how we look at folksonomies.

D. Keith Robinson explains how to use Page Description Diagrams in your site designs. These diagrams are useful tools that provide a text-only alternative to wireframes. Clients often get confused when looking at wireframes, so these diagrams can be presented to the client at the earlier stages of the design process.

Martijn van Welie has a very comprehenisve list of Design Patterns for Interaction Design. His list is very well organized into categories ranging from e-Commerce to navigation to searching.

Neil Turner offers 5 reasons why you should Beware of Opening Links in a New Window then offers a number of suggesting for dealing with this issue.

[link via 456 Berea Street]

Joshua Porter has been busy writing a great collections of articles that deal with Folksonomies – or the classification of things using tags. Flickr and del.icio.us are two great examples of sites that use Folksonomies.

• A Self-Referential Demonstration of the Power of the Del.icio.us Folksonomy
• Folksonomy Notes: Considering the Downsides, Behavioral Trends, and Adaptation
• Controlled Vocabularies and Folksonomies: Why Change is Good
• I’ve Heard of Folksonomies. Now How do I Apply them to My Site?

Luke Wroblewski has a series of good articles that explains the importance of consistant form design in web applications. The articles can be found at:

• Web Application Form Layout – Part I
• Web Application Form Layout – Part II

Peter Morville has created a nice list of links as it relates to Information Architecture Research The links deal with research in the design process, and contain literature most relevant to the practice of information architecture.