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I bookmark a lot of pages and sites which I find interesting, inspirational and informative every day! I’d like to share some of them with you here. In general they are about user experience, usability, UCD, accessbility and design. In general, but not always!!

• Color Theory for Designers, Part 1: The Meaning of Color – Smashing …
  Color in design is very subjective. What evokes one reaction in one person may evoke a very different reaction in somone else. Sometimes this is due to personal preference, and other times due to cultural background. Color theory is a science in itself. Studying how colors affect different people, either individually or as a group, is something some people build their careers on. And there’s a lot to it. Something as simple as changing the exact hue or saturation of a color can evoke a completely different feeling. Cultural differences mean that something that’s happy and uplifting in one country can be depressing in another.
• Hierarchical Task Analysis
  As UX professionals, we have a great many analytical and descriptive tools available to us. In fact, there are so many that it can sometimes be difficult to decide which tool is most appropriate for a given task! Hierarchical task analysis (HTA) is an underused approach in user experience, but one you can easily apply when either modifying an existing design or creating a new design.
• Taming the Elephant in the Room: Brand Perception and Bias
  People’s preconceived notions can be another elephant in the room—a barrier to achieving accurate and actionable feedback on a concept or design.
• Browse if the new black
  Search, search, search. Everyone is talking about search these days. Bing, semantic search, site search. That’s all you hear. Don’t get me wrong: search is wildly important to our daily experiences on the web. I’ve written a bit on search on this blog. And I work for LexisNexis, whose core business is based on search.
• Usability Metrics (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  Although measuring usability can cost four times as much as conducting qualitative studies (which often generate better insight), metrics are sometimes worth the expense. Among other things, metrics can help managers track design progress and support decisions about when to release a product.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

I bookmark a lot of pages and sites which I find interesting, inspirational and informative every day! I’d like to share some of them with you here. In general they are about user experience, usability, UCD, accessbility and design. In general, but not always!!

• 10×10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris
  10×10 is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.
• Making Users Buy Online – The Importance of Building …
  With online sales rising to 9.8% of the total retail sales in the UK in 2008* and 12.6% of businesses selling online (Office of National Statistics), the role of company websites is still enhancing often becoming a central part of the offered customer experience.
• Design the stakeholder experience | Front to back
  To get the stakeholders on track for a successful UX project, use your skills and design the stakeholder experience.
• Video: The right way to wireframe
• Improve conversions by connecting with your audience
  Lots of people design sites based on what they would like to see. However, what makes sense to a designer may not make sense to their target audience. If designers seek to create a conversion-friendly web experience we’re going to have to learn about our audience and what makes them tick.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

I bookmark a lot of pages and sites which I find interesting, inspirational and informative every day! I’d like to share some of them with you here. In general they are about user experience, usability, UCD, accessbility and design. In general, but not always!!

• LukeW | User Experience Diagrams
• Card Games for Information Architects
  This article reviews 6 simple but powerful research techniques you can use to improve the information architecture of your product or web site. None of these activities require a computer. You simply need a bunch of cards, a participant and a desk.
• 10 ways you can use photos to influence the user experience | cxpartners
  As a photographer I understand how to take photos that will result in a certain reaction from the viewer. We have all seen photos that have influenced our thoughts, our feelings and ultimately our own behaviour.

  The classic image placeholder

  So why as UX designers do we ignore photos when they can be so powerful? The classic wireframes image placeholder represents nothing but a missed opportunity.

  In this article I will identify just how important choosing the right photographs can be, as well as proposing a new method for denoting photos in our wireframes.

• Better User Experience With Storytelling
  Stories have defined our world. They have been with us since the dawn of communication, from cave walls to the tall tales recounted around fires. They have continued to evolve with their purpose remaining the same; To entertain, to share common experiences, to teach, and to pass on traditions.
• Forum Nokia – User Experience Programme
• Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment
  In of itself, Agile does a good job of flexing to the winds of change. But one has to ask whether it was devised to treat a symptom of the larger cause: the business doesn’t know what it wants. While Agile enables the development team to better cope with this, it doesn’t solve the problem and in most cases creates new problems.
• A/B Test Case Study: Single Page vs. Multi-Step Checkoutc
  o when we started re-working the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store, we challenged ourselves to take it to the next level — and we cut the checkout process down to just single page.

  Structurally, the new single-page checkout looks very much like the two-page checkout, with shipping information first, followed by billing and confirmation.

  With A/B split testing, 50% of traffic was redirected to the original checkout, while the other 50% was served the new single-page checkout. After only 300 transactions, the winner was clear and we stopped the experiment after 606 transactions. Google Website Optimizer concluded that the single-page checkout outperformed the out-of-the-box checkout by a whopping 21.8%. But what does that 21.8% really mean?

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

I bookmark a lot of pages and sites which I find interesting, inspirational and informative every day! I’d like to share some of them with you here. In general they are about user experience, usability, UCD, accessbility and design. In general, but not always!!

• The Affinity Diagram (KJ Analysis)
  Some problems are really messy. You have lots of pieces of information that do not seem to fit together. To make matters worse, much of the information is scattered around the place and is probably not written down. People disagree about what the real problem is (if the get that far) and meetings achieve nothing, breaking up in disarray.
  This kind of problem is something of a quality professional's nightmare. There is seldom any solid quantitative data available to nail things down – it is all snippets and pieces of qualitative gossip and opinion.
  The Affinity Diagram is just the tool for solving this kind of mess, and KJ is the most common way of building the diagram.
  It is also useful as a way of organising the results of a Brainstorm, where you start with a creative idea in mind and generate number of possible ideas around it.
• Fundamentals of Leadership: Communicating a Vision
  Today's business climate of outsourcing, in-sourcing, virtual teams, and ROI-driven objectives can leave a manager at any level feeling powerless. Yet, we often see examples of those who can elicit unwavering support from their teams, driving highly effective projects, and getting the best performance from employees despite ever-increasing workloads. What is it about these individuals that makes them stand out as great leaders? Generally, the answer is the difference between a strict management model and one that includes basic principals of leadership. There are recognizable characteristics in great leaders and simple strategies anyone can adopt to improve employee performance and change the work environment for the better.
• Focus Groups Reconsidered
  Focus groups have a poor reputation in the design community. They’ve been around since the 1940s and look increasingly old-fashioned against the prevailing wave of ethnographic techniques now in vogue. If you sort through a pack of IDEO method cards you’ll find focus groups omitted with prejudice.
• The Differences between Usability and User Experience – InsideRIA
  "Usability refers to the ease with which a user can accomplish his or her goals using any tool. (…) Somewhat in contrast, user experience refers to the way a user perceives his or her interaction with a system. User experience design encompasses both interaction design and visual design and seeks to promote an interface that is pleasing to the user." (RJ Owen – InsideRIA)
• ignore the code: Realism in UI Design
  The history of the visual design of user interfaces can be described as a gradual change towards more realism. As computers have become faster, designers have added increasingly realistic details such as color, 3D effects, shadows, translucency, and even simple physics. Some of these changes have helped usability. Shadows behind windows help us see which window is active. The physicality of the iPhone’s user interface makes the device more natural to use.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

I bookmark a lot of pages and sites which I find interesting, inspirational and informative every day! I’d like to share some of them with you here. In general they are about user experience, usability, UCD, accessbility and design. In general, but not always!!

• eCommerce ROI: Why Usability ALWAYS Beats Advertising | Useful Usability
  The Return On Investment for eCommerce Usability Will Always Beat Online Advertising, Because of the Principle of Amortized Improved Conversion
• 4 ways to combat usability testing avoidance
  Working with users during the design process will untie project knots and boost team productivity and focus. But there always seems to be an excuse for not testing. Here are 4 ways to counter the excuses and make usability testing happen.
• UX ROI: User Experience Return on Investment
  Calculating and even trying to understand what all adds up to the UX ROI is difficult task. When we are faced with clients and investors – ROI is something they often ask for. How to even start thinking about return on investment in the field of user experience? Here I’m talking about UX ROI discussion tool and other metrics.
• Bloug: Site search best practices
  A client recently asked me to help come up with a list of "world-class" implementations of site search. "World-class" is always a red flag term for me, because it's a crutch term that suggests that there isn't a clear idea of what constitutes actual quality.
• Prototyping: Types of Prototypes
  Based on key factors, such as the problem to be solved or the mandate of the customer, determine the purpose of the prototype. Select the type of prototype that best satisfies the purpose.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!