In UI terms, a lightbox draws the user’s attention to a dialog box, error message, or other design element in the middle of the screen by dimming the rest of the screen.

Yes, the lightbox has some benefits. It shows you an Important Message within the context of the page you were just looking at. And it doesn’t get blocked by popup killers. And it looks super-cool, especially when used as a slideshow.

But lightboxes are starting to crop up everywhere. In my Yahoo mail (I hope the guy got paid a lot for that), in half the applications I interact with, even in my own website (OK, I put it there, but that was 2 years ago when it was super-cool and cutting edge).

Is anyone else starting to suffer from lightbox fatigue?

(I love that she mentions ravelry.com, my favorite web community, as an example!)

PDF is ideal for emailing, but it takes a little work to create a clickable PDF prototype in Visio. Here’s what I discovered.

1. Create hyperlinks on the foreground, not background — and use the document stencil to manage revisions

It’s pretty standard practice when wireframing in Visio to put the standard page elements — header, footer, navigation — on a background page so that these elements automatically repeat on every page. However, when you publish a PDF, Visio doesn’t create hyperlinks from the background layer. For an interactive PDF prototype, the hyperlinks have to live on the foreground pages. This means that for a standard page layout, all the navigational elements have to reside on each page in the wireframe.

You could copy and paste the navigational elements onto every page, but that’s a beast to maintain. Instead, use the document stencil (credit to this explanation at User Experience & Design blog).

Here’s how it works:

1. Create a navigation panel, using a distinct shape for each link. For example, to create 5 tabs across the top of a page, make each tab a separate text block.
2. To add hyperlinks, press CTRL-K to open the hyperlink dialog. Next to Sub-address (not Address), click Browse and find the page within your wireframe that you want to link to. (Or enter a complete URL next to Address.) Click OK.
3. Repeat 1 and 2 as needed. Once the navigation area is done, group it (select all the items, then Shift-CTRL-G).
4. Open the Document Stencil: File>Shapes>Show Document Stencil.
5. Drag the grouped navigation elements onto the document stencil pane.
6. Right-click the grouped elements (probably called “Master.16″ or something like that) and rename it (i.e. “NavBar”).
7. On each of your wireframe pages, drag this element onto the foreground and position it accordingly.
8. If you ever need to make changes to this navigation group, right-click it in the document stencil and choose Edit Master>Edit Master Shape. Any changes you make will automatically be updated in the other pages.

2. Use PDF menu in Visio, not print to Adobe PDF in printer menu

For the hyperlinks in the PDF to work correctly, use the PDF menu in Visio (Adobe PDF>Convert to Adobe PDF). For some reason, if you use File>Print and choose Adobe PDF as the printer, the hyperlinks in the PDF don’t work.

(Don’t ask me why, I’m just happy to have found a workaround.)

The final result will have live links on every page. To change the over states of buttons or create additional interactive elements, you’ll need to edit the file in Acrobat (avoid this step until you are certain the file is finished, otherwise if you regenerate the PDF from Visio, the Acrobat changes are lost).

3. Take it to the next level

This article on Boxes & Arrows provides a fantastic review of how to create clickable PDF prototypes with layers, multimedia and more. It focuses on using Acrobat’s advanced editing tools.

The issue includes my summary of a talk given by Adaptive Path’s Sarah Nelson and David Verba, entitled “Lessons Learned from Web Applications and User Centered Design“.

In their talk, they defined Ajax and Web 2.0 and then offered insights into how these developments in web application design offer both opportunities and challenges in designing effective user experiences.

Some sliders allow changes to the top and bottom of a range of values:

Movoto.com

Kayak.com

Other sliders are designed to help the user choose a value (especially useful when it’s a hard value to remember):

Yahoo! UI Library - RBG Slider Control

Some sliders even include sparklines (small data displays), a very data-rich approach:

Prisjakt.nu (via IXDA-Discuss):

Oakland CrimeSpotting

Other than the obvious cool factor, there are definite advantages to using sliders:

• instant feedback allows the user to focus on the data itself, rather than on manipulating it
• it’s much faster to modify a number of criteria at once (price, bedrooms, bathrooms) while keeping the cursor in one place (compared to a bunch of drop-down lists)
• small changes to the chosen ranges display right away, allowing for faster decision making

There’s always a downside:

• Sliders aren’t good for small adjustments or for choosing very specific values, because they require too much fine coordination (not everyone uses a mouse, and some of us have a lot of cat hair on the mouse’s infrared sensor, which makes it jump around a lot)
• People who aren’t used to seeing sliders may not even notice it’s there, and get frustrated.

Nonetheless, sliders are a very useful design element, so get going and use one! Better yet, use one on every page!

Oakland Crimespotting

Created by Stamen Design, Oakland Crimespotting uses data from CrimeWatch, Oakland’s community mapping website. Crime reports are grouped by violent crimes, property crime, and “quality of life” crimes. Data on the map can be adjusted with a slider that is also a bar graph of recent crime reports.

A detail view (”Crime Reports”) offers more information about the nature of a crime and a close-up view of the location. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for a specific geographic area.

The site puts crime information into the hands of the community, allowing residents to research and investigate patterns of activity, and to ask questions. As the site’s creators write, “As citizens we have a right to public information. A clear understanding of our environment is essential to an informed citizenry.”

Los Angeles Times Homicide Map

The LA Times Homicide Project by Jill Leovy combines homicide data from the LA County Coroner’s Office with original reporting. The filtering and user interface are stunning, and I can’t think of a better example of an information-rich data display.

Names and photos of the homicide victims are included next to the map. This humanizes the data in a powerful way, making it impossible to look at the map as just a warning about “dangerous” neighborhoods. There may be patterns to discover in the demographic and geographic information presented, but the tragic human side of the story makes it much more than just statistics. Sadly, new data (i.e. people) are added weekly.

However, I must admit to a surprising fascination with TwitterVision:

This mashup of twitter nonsense with Google Maps is actually sort of … well, reassuring. Somehow, plotting all these bits of trivia on a world map makes the continents seem like cozy neighbors, and the differences between us not so great. The more banal experiences of daily life are really rather similar (especially among the web-savvy set).

So, enjoy your latte, Michigan, and Spain-guy, I hope you get your phone call!

JsVis, by Kyle Sholtz, is a JavaScript framework for creating “Snowflake graphs” like this one:

There is a lot of potential for visualizing complex relationships with this sort of tool. The basic layout is best for tree structures, but a thread on the discussion board indicates that there is a non-tree display method (particle model layout) which warrants investigation.

Timeplot is a “DHTML-based AJAXy widget for plotting time series and overlay time-based events over them (with the same data formats that Timeline supports).” Timeplot requires no software installation, server-side or client-side, and can be used with a simple comma-delimited file or with XML. The graph has a liquid layout size so it doesn’t impact your site’s design.

The example below shows an interactive look 3 factors: New Legal Permanent Residents in the U.S. (per year) vs. U.S. Population vs. U.S. History.

My example of a timeplot

Exhibit 2.0 “creates interactive data-rich web pages without ever touching a database or a web server, or doing any programming.”

Timeline “is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.”

My example of a timeline