When it comes to digital design, information architecture is all about enhancing the user experience (UX). Your website, software, and app must be designed in a way that is easy for your users to navigate.
The information must be divided into small parts. Also, information should be communicated concisely so the user can find the content they are looking for without any hassle. The process requires you to study your target audience thoroughly, define the context of your business, and provide valuable content.
Just like at the time of building a house, an architect needs a blueprint that has all the details. This includes floor plans and position of doors and windows. Information architecture gives the designer a blueprint for the users’ experience of the website.
The elements of information architecture include search systems, navigation systems, organization structuring, tags, and labeling systems. Information architecture allows you to build a website that is optimized for maximum conversion. Let’s have a look at a few ways in which information architecture affects the usability of your site.
Information Architecture Improves the User’s Experience
The toughest part of redesigning or improving a user interface is to figure out which features are most vital. By developing infrastructure, designers must involve the stakeholders. Usually, however, stakeholders are not familiar with the process of designing.
Still, they can provide you valuable information on how to communicate the content. This allows you to figure out the highlights of the project and lets you prioritize it accordingly as a designer. Information architecture (IA) will enable you to save valuable time while you build an improved product. That is what information architecture is all about.
IA Helps Correct Content Gaps
A designer may not have excellent command over the content he or she is integrating into the website. Still, they still must make sure that there are no gaps in the content. This is where information architecture comes in extremely handy for design professionals.
It provides you with a blueprint that projects content grouping, intuitive control, decision-congestion, recursive paths, and unused areas. According to designers, “IA has a tremendous impact on product design by making it easier for users to find important information.”
IA also differentiates between main content and extra information. This helps fill content gaps suitably. Additionally, IA helps enhance the overall quality of your website and improves SEO.
Information Architecture Mental Models and Improved Design
The mental model refers to the intuitive perception of an individual or a group of people. It explains a person’s thought process and how they think something works in the real world.
In simple terms, it is how an individual perceives their surroundings to deduce conclusions. Information architecture helps you understand your target audience’s mental model. This not only expands the designer’s knowledge, but it also allows them to customize a successful user experience.
How to Install MySQL 8 Database Server on CentOS 8
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MySQL is a free, open-source and one of the most popular database systems around the globe. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MySQL 8 on CentOS 8 server.
As COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, spreads, it’s more important than ever to cancel unnecessary outings and use social distancing measures to try and limit how many people get infected. In other words, you’re going to be spending a lot of time inside. Here are some of the best video games to help you pass the time.
Some are classics, others are more recent, but all of them should help keep you occupied during the coming weeks and months depending on how long the pandemic continues. Even if they don’t completely distract you from our government’s inept and lie-filled response to the crisis, their dense beauty or brain-teasing complexity can hopefully restore your spirit a little.
Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS4, Xbox One, PC)
Maybe you bought Rockstar’s 19th-century wilderness simulator back when it came out. Maybe you got it recently as a gift or picked it up during a sale and then let it sit there on your TV stand collecting dust. Either way you probably haven’t finished it, or found even a tenth of what there is to discover and look at. It’s a big, beautiful game where you can pick up and leave civilization behind whenever you want.
Civilization VI (PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch, iOS)
Speaking of civilization, if you’ve ever wished you could just completely break the world and then remake it in your own image and manage it as if you were a bureaucratic god, you’ve probably toyed with playing a Civilization game. If you have you know it’s easy for hours of your life to slip by unnoticed as you fine-tune tax policy and construct new religions determined to make your society not just work but flourish. If you haven’t there’s no better time to try and work out all of those pent up, half-baked ideas about war, peace, and social engineering on a world that you can always simply reboot with the click of a button.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch, Wii U)
Some people have cars they dream about buying, or trips they’d go on if they ever came into some money. I have games that I think about playing if only the rest of my life ground to a halt. Breath of the Wild remains at the top of that list. I have spent dozens of hours running through its grass and teasing out its puzzles, and I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. Even if you could go outside it wouldn’t be as bright and colorful as it is in Breath of the Willd. Singer St. Vincent spent 300 hours playing it. Now you can, too.
No Man’s Sky (PS4, Xbox One, PC)
What Breath of the Wild does for the great outdoors, No Man’s Sky does for the galaxy. If you heard some bad things about it when it first launched, don’t worry. It’s all been fixed now, and then some. You can fly to dozens of planets, treating each one like a sandbox by exploring, creating, and crafting, then fly to a dozen more. Some of the spaceships are even alive. Plus, there are other people to meet in the game now. Maybe they’ll even invite you over to their own bespoke tiny homes for tea and space cookies.
Dragon Quest XI (PS4, Switch, PC)
Imagine a Final Fantasy game drawn by the guy who created Dragon Ball. That’s the pitch for the Dragon Quest series, and according to former Kotaku video producer Tim Rogers, Dragon Quest XI is the best one in the whole lot. Rogers liked it so much he played hundreds of hours of the Japanese version before going through and beating the English version as well. And the best part about this colorful love letter to classic JRPGs? It doesn’t even really get started until dozens of hours in. Yes. It’s one of those. If you need a comfort snack to last you for weeks, look no farther.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (PS4, Xbox One, PC)
There are a ton of Assassin’s Creed games, and a lot of them are pretty good, but none is as long and as chock full of weird details and extraneous content as Odyssey. It starts on a small island, and then moves to a bigger island, and then before you know it you have your own ship and are exploring the whole of ancient Greece. You don’t even need to visit most of the islands, but if you do, there will be a handful of characters waiting to tell you their stories and send you into a shimmering grotto or torch-lit cave to slay their enemies for them. And you will. And then you’ll do it again and again, drunk on the freedom of being able to climb anything and then dive off of it without dying.
Total War: Shogun 2 (PC)
There have been a lot of good Total War games. Some of the best ones have come out in just the last few years. Plenty of earlier ones still hold up just fine, though, including Shogun 2. Its battle systems and strategic possibilities have stood the test of time so much that the newer games are still basically just refining them. Sure, if you have a shiny new gaming rig that can play anything, dive into Total War: Warhammer 2 or Total War: Three Kingdoms. But if you want to painstakingly plan out some grand military campaigns and just have a work laptop because you never planned to spend days or possibly weeks at home playing a video game, Shogun2 will do you just fine.
The Witcher 3 (PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch)
The Witcher 3 is a chilling mix of medieval fantasy and The X-Files where you can get drunk, play cards, box, and discover who murdered a farmhand’s family all in one night. Hands down one of the best games of the last decade. Play this game whether you’re quarantined or not.
Super Metroid (Switch, Wii U, New 3DS)
I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend you took at least some of this time to play through a retro classic or two. Super Metroid is one of the best games from one of the best series on one of the best consoles of all time. Maybe a global pandemic isn’t the right time to be hunting through dark alien structures for parasites shaped like giant jellyfish. Or maybe that’s precisely the time to do it, facing the fear and challenge of being in a cramped, confined space with bombs and missiles until you come out the other side with your faith in the majesty of life reaffirmed.
Crusader Kings 2 (PC)
Crusader Kings 2 is such a good game we reviewed it twice. It’s a politics simulator for people who care about people—what they want, what they fear, what lies they tell about you behind your back. As with all the best simulators, you can keep running it over and over again and get different results each time. Feeling cut off from your family, friends, or coworkers? Play Crusader Kings 2 to remind yourself of the myriad ways people can stab one another in the back, then take some solace in the fact that you’ve finally got some time alone.
Monster Hunter: World (PS4, Xbox One, PC)
Want to kill the same creature over and over again, have it feel slightly different each time, and then use what you killed to make better weapons and cooler armor to go and kill even bigger ones? This is the central formula for lots of games, but Monster Hunter: World has so much fun with it that it’s hard not to want to keep coming back. It’s like going on a camping trip where sometimes you’re hiking through lush valleys and other times you’re slaying giant dinosaurs, and you always end the night cooking a big hunk of their meat over the fire while goofing around with friends.
Persona 5 (PS4, PS3)
Lots of schools are shutting down. Persona 5’s is still open, full of people to cheer up and extracurricular activities to take your mind off things. You also occasionally go into nightmare dungeons and enlist demons to help you beat up evil adults. There’s a running joke that while a lot of people love Persona 5 and have played it for dozens of hours, most still have never beaten it. Eventually you just graduate and move on, looking back fondly on the time you and your friends did that bullshit you thought was really important instead of going to class because it made you feel super cool. Now’s your chance to go back and turn in all those homework assignments the dog ate.
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC, PS3, Xbox 360)
Skyrim is a sprawling, open-world RPG that exists on almost every gaming device and platform for a reason: All it takes is a few fire spells, sword swings, and dragon yells to transport you back to the land of Tamriel like you’d been born there. I don’t even like Bethesda’s RPGs that much and I still get a fuzzy feeling every time I trek through a dense forest or up a snowy mountain hunting for somebody else’s business to entangle myself in. You don’t even need to finish the game. You can just go buy a house and live there.
Amazon delivery infrastructure strained as COVID-19 outbreak sparks surge in online shopping
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Amazon’s fulfillment center in Dupont, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
With thousands of Americans telecommuting and self-isolating to slow the spread of COVID-19, Amazon’s Prime and Fresh delivery services are grappling with high demand and inventory issues, as warehouse workers report increased order volumes.
Amazon is out of stock on a number of household staples and popular items, according to the company’s COVID-19 response page.
“You will also notice that some of our delivery promises are longer than usual,” the site says. “We are working around the clock with our selling partners to ensure availability on all of our products, and bring on additional capacity to deliver all of your orders.”
The consumer impact: Amazon can no longer guarantee two-day delivery on all Prime orders and some of the program’s 150 million subscribers customers are already experiencing delays. The Amazon Fresh website warns grocery deliveries “may be temporarily unavailable due to increased demand.” Amazon Fresh did not have any delivery windows available in the Seattle area as of Monday morning.
The increased demand comes as Amazon navigates supply chain threats from slowed or shuttered factories in China. Amazon did not immediately respond to questions about the delays.
The worker impact: The Seattle tech giant has asked all employees who can work from home to do so, an option unavailable to warehouse workers and delivery drivers. The company is providing two weeks of paid time off to all employees diagnosed with the virus or placed under quarantine.
Amazon is spending $25 million to help its network of independent delivery drivers, Amazon Flex workers, and seasonal employees deal with disruptions caused by the outbreak. The Amazon Relief Fund will provide grants equal to about two weeks’ pay for workers who have the virus or are quarantined. Grants are also available to workers facing financial or other hardships. Several warehouse worker groups have been circulating blog posts and petitions calling for more comprehensive sick time.
Other changes: Amazon has paused all fulfillment center tours, canceled large events, and shifted to virtual job interviews.
Bottom line: High demand is already causing delays for Amazon Prime and Fresh customers, a phenomenon that could be exacerbated by slowed imports or outbreaks of the virus among warehouse workers, who are already fielding high volumes of orders. Experts predict Amazon’s delivery infrastructure “will falter,” Motherboard reports.
However, some predict that Amazon will be one of the companies least impacted by a potential recession despite the disruptions. Analysts with RBC Capital Markets wrote on March 13 that Amazon “will be only modestly impacted” during a global financial crisis, due to growing reliance on the company for consumer staples, and expectations of continued growth in its Amazon Web Services cloud division.
In an all-out effort to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, health and government officials worldwide have mandated travel restrictions, closed schools and businesses, and set limits on public gatherings. People have also been urged to practice social distancing in public spaces, and to isolate themselves at home as much as possible. This rapid and widespread shift in rules and behavior has left much of the world looking very different than it did a few months ago, with emptied streets, schools, workplaces, and restaurants, and almost everyone staying home. Gathered below, some recent scenes from this pandemic, and the people coping with the many problems it is causing.
Expatriates returning from Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon wait to be re-tested in a Kuwaiti health ministry containment and screening zone for COVID-19 in Kuwait City on March 16, 2020.
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Yasser Al-Zayyat / AFP / Getty)
First step is to create a AWS account and Bitbucket account if you haven’t already!
There are going to be 2 environments, 1 for the web requests and 1 for queue jobs, so that we do not process long running queue jobs in the same place and have our server reject/delay requests because of resources are being used:
Beanstalk web application
Create new Beanstalk application
Create new environment, choose Web server environment
Choose PHP Platform
Choose Sample application (for now)
Click on the button Configure more options (bottom right)
Choose High availability (using Spot and On-Demand instances)
Click Modify under the Software section, and check the box to Enable Log Streaming. This step will stream the access and error logs in CloudWatch which you can later group and query them, so that our life is easier when our application is in production.
This is all for a sample application, click create environment
Beanstalk worker application
Create new Beanstalk application
Create new environment, choose Worker environment
Choose PHP Platform
Choose Sample application (for now)
Click on the button Configure more options (bottom right)
Choose High availability (using Spot and On-Demand instances)
Click Modify under the Software section, and check the box to Enable Log Streaming. This step will stream the access and error logs in CloudWatch which you can later group and query them, so that our life is easier when our application is in production.
This is all for a sample application worker, click create environment
RDS for database
I would recommend that you never manage the database on your own! it will give you a lot of headaches (depending on the size of the team). So just go and create an RDS instance which is managed by AWS and you do not have to worry about availability, best practices, configurations, backups, monitoring etc.
Study Shows How Long COVID-19 Virus Lives on Different Materials: Plastic, Steel, Copper, Cardboard, Air
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A new study reveals how long the COVID-19 virus can survive on a variety of different and common materials.
The research, conducted by U.S. government scientists from multiple organizations as well as UCLA and Princeton, looked at four likely materials: Air, as that’s what transmits droplets from coughing or sneezing; copper, which is prized for its antibacterial properties; cardboard, as that’s what most things delivered to our homes arrive in; plastic, as it’s a common surface that’s easy to clean; and stainless steel, also a common surface that’s easy to clean.
I would not have guessed the virus would live longest on plastic and steel. Then again, the benefit of those materials is that they’re generally easy to clean, at least when they’re more or less planar, as in the surfaces of dispensers or countertops. As long as those surfaces are regularly disinfected, I’d be less wary of touching them than a polypropylene bottle cap freshly stocked (i.e. handled) on a store shelf.
The research was funded by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH); the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP, RC-2635) of the U.S. Department of Defense.
You can download a PDF of the full study (which, it should be noted, has not yet been peer-reviewed) here [PDF].
The US Army Bombed a Hawaiian Lava Flow. It Didn’t Work.
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An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times:
Why were two apparently unexploded bombs sticking out of a lava tube on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa? That’s what Kawika Singson, a photographer, wondered in February when he was hiking on Mauna Loa, the colossal shield volcano that rises 55,700 feet from its base below the sea to its summit. Singson had stumbled upon relics of one of volcanology’s more quixotic disaster response plans. These devices, described in more detail recently in the U.S. Geological Survey Hawaiian Volcano Observatory’s Volcano Watch blog, were two of 40 dropped by the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1935 in an attempt to stop lava from plowing into Hilo, the most populous town on the island of Hawaii. While Hilo was spared as the lava flow naturally lost its forward momentum, it wasn’t the last time that humanity tried to fight volcanic fire with fire of its own. History is filled with schemes to stop molten kinetic rock, and the ineffective 1935 bombing and others show that lava flows are very rarely "a force we humans can reckon with," said Janine Krippner, a volcanologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program… That December, a pond of lava breached its levees and advanced on Hilo at a rate of a mile per day. Fearing it would reach the town and its watershed, Thomas Jaggar, the founder and first director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, called on the Army Air Corps. On Dec. 27, 10 Keystone B-3 and B-4 biplane bombers struck the lava flow, targeting its tubes and channels. Half these bombs were packed with 355 pounds of TNT. The other half were not explosive, and instead designed to emit smoke so the pilots could see where the bona fide bombs landed. Singson found one of those inert devices last month. On Jan. 2, 1936, the lava flows ceased. Jaggar was convinced the bombing worked, but other experts thought it was a coincidence. Pilots did spot several imploded lava tubes, but their collapses were insufficient to block the flow of lava. A similar operation was attempted in 1942, again to not much effect. The conclusion reached by the Times’ reporter? "Dense, superheated lava does whatever it wants."
Many Ohioans have been assigned a new polling location for the March 17 primary election, and voters are urged to use the state’s search tool to determine their correct polling place.
The change to nearly 150 polling locations is due to recent coronavirus concerns. The locations are within nursing homes, and Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced the changes in order to limit public contact with vulnerable senior citizens.
The changes include 16 locations in Franklin County. There are others scattered in rural and small-town areas throughout the state.
CLICK HERE for an interactive map of the 144 polling places with a changed location for the upcoming primary. If known, the new polling location is provided by clicking on each point.
The Ohio Secretary of State’s office has been updating the list of affected locations on a new website, ohiosos.gov/coronafacts.
LaRose is urging Ohio voters to either vote early or search for their polling location to determine exactly where they should vote on March 17.
This article was republished with permission from Ohio Capital Journal. For more in Ohio political news, visit www.ohiocapitaljournal.com.
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The Ohio Capital Journal is a hard-hitting, independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to connecting Ohioans to their state government and its impact on their lives. The Capital Journal combines Ohio state government coverage with relentless investigative journalism, deep dives into the consequences of policy, political insight and principled commentary.
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Colorectal cancer diagnoses from 49 to 50 rose 46%
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An analysis of colorectal cancer rates among US adults finds a 46% increase in new diagnoses from ages 49 to 50, researchers report.
The finding indicates that many latent cases are likely going undiagnosed until routine screenings begin at 50.
Researchers found that almost 93% of the cases discovered at age 50 were invasive, meaning that most would require more aggressive treatment including surgery and likely existed for some time before diagnosis.
“Our findings suggest a high case burden of preclinical, undetected early onset colorectal cancers in patients younger than 50 that is not reflected in observed incidence rates,” says lead study author Jordan Karlitz, associate clinical professor of medicine at Tulane University School of Medicine and staff gastroenterologist at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System.
Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the US. As rates for younger adults continue to rise, considerable debate exists about whether to lower the age for recommended screenings.
In 2018, the American Cancer Society called for routine screenings to start at 45. However, the US Preventive Services Task Force, which sets federal screenings standards, currently recommends average risk screening begin at age 50. The agency is studying the issue to determine whether changes will improve outcomes.
Those against beginning screenings at age 45 have argued that incidence rates in people aged 45 to 49 years remain relatively low compared to those aged 50 to 54 years.
Study authors suspect some may underestimate the risks for those in their mid-to-late 40s because incident data for those age ranges would likely only include cases caught because they presented symptoms and/or have a family history of cancer, in contrast to those 50 and older who have cancers also detected due to screening.
To assess this, researchers examined colorectal cancer incidence rates in one-year increments between the ages of 30 to 60 from the year 2000 to 2015. They suspected that if they found many undetected asymptomatic cases of the disease they would also see a marked increase in cases between 49 and 50 when screenings begin.
The findings showed a steep increase from 34.9 diagnoses per 100,000 people at age 49 to 51 cases per 100,000 at age 50. The findings also showed sharp increases in both men (52.9%) and women (39.1%), in white (46.2%) and black (47.3%) populations in colon (51.4%) and rectal (37.6%) cancers in this one-year age transition.
Prior studies did not report these incidence increases from age 49 to 50 because they only analyzed age group ranges.
Researchers also examined the stage at which doctors caught the cancers and found a spike in localized and regional cancers, requiring surgery and possibly chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
The study adds fuel to the debate about whether screenings should begin at age 45. Karlitz says the combined burden of undetected and detected early onset colorectal cancer cases for those 45 to 49 may actually approach that of individuals in their early 50s.
“Our data support that the incidence of colorectal cancer increases substantially among individuals in their early 50s compared with individuals in their late 40s, not because rates are truly lower among those aged 45 to 49 years, but because colorectal cancers are present but undetected until diagnosed when screening is ultimately initiated.
The study’s population-based design limited researchers’ ability to determine exactly which patients had cancers detected at age 50 through screening versus diagnostic testing.
“Nevertheless, the significantly high rate of invasive cases supports that almost all cancers accounted for in the rate increase from age 49 to 50 required aggressive treatment, regardless of how they were detected,” Karlitz says.
The paper appears in JAMA Network Open. Additional coauthors are from Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and Tulane.
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