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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!!

• Designing for Service: Creating an Experience Advantage
  We are surrounded by things that have been designed—from the utensils we eat with, to the vehicles that transport us, to the machines we interact with. We use and experience designed artifacts everyday. Yet most people think of designers as only having applied the surface treatment to a thing conceived by someone else.
• OpenHallway: Unmoderated remote usability testing with screen recording
  Inspired by the 5 second test, a lot web-based services have cropped up to support remote usability testing. In the past few years, I've been experimenting with some of these to conduct super small, unmoderated remote usability testing sessions. I've used Morae extensively in the past, but for most of my needs, that's like using a sledgehammer on a pushpin.
• Prototyping with Omnigraffle: show/hide annotations " Fuzzy Thoughts
  We use Omnigraffle Pro to generate prototypes and wireframes from one source document. It allows us to link elements (buttons, page regions, etc.) to different pages within the same document, or to run scripts. We can then export a PDF or HTML version of our static wireframes into a clickable prototype easily
• Calls to Action
  Causing action through persuasion: Attention; Interest; Desire; Action.
• "What are you suggesting?" Using images to influence:
  Here’s a little trick from psychology. Let’s say we’re having a conversation and I want to nudge the conversation in a certain direction; I want to influence what comes to mind for you. To do this, I might try using associative priming. Basically, I’ll tell a few stories or inject specific language into our conversation that your brain will pick up on, bringing associated mental objects into short term memory. A few minutes later, I might ask you a certain question. If I’ve done a good job at priming, there’s a good chance I can predict how you might respond (I suspect this is one way magicians are able to predict what someone is thinking!).

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!!

• Try the "Lightening Quick" Mental Model Method
  When I was making a lot of mental models in the get-it-to-market-yesterday dot com boom of the late 1990's, I used a technique that resulted in a mental model plus gap analysis brainstorm in the course of one day. Now that it's the not-in-this-economy post economic slump, I think it's time to put this technique to use again. Today, in fact, I got together with a group of nine talented design agency folks and we spent 2.75 hours putting together a set of towers based on 24 individual stories, and then spent rest of the day brainstorming ideas to support those towers. Here's how we did it.
• Playing Well with Others: Design Principles for Social Augmented …
  Technical barriers to delivering augmented reality (AR) experiences on a broad scale are falling rapidly
• The Craft of Interaction Design
  The following text is a transcript of a talk by Gillian Crampton-Smith at Innovation Forum Interaction Design, Potsdam, March 2007. The aim of the two-day conference was to focus on all aspects of interface and interaction design: mobile telephone and media interfaces, problem solutions and product visions, web pages and virtual worlds, art and commerce, business and science. Using both concrete projects and visionary concepts, current developments in interaction design were presented and discussed by regional and international experts from the design, research and business worlds.
• The Panic Status Board
  …The idea quickly grew beyond “Project Status”, and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information. What you’re actually looking at is an internal-only webpage that updates frequently using AJAX which shows:
• Do’s and Don’ts of Usability Testing
  Usability testing is one of the least glamorous, but most important aspects of user experience research. Over the years, it has also been one of the forms of user research we have performed most frequently. In doing so, we’ve learned quite a few best practices and encountered some potential pitfalls. We think it’s important that we share what we’ve learned with the many stakeholders, designers, and engineers who might find this information helpful.
• Autocomplete design pattern
  Problem summary: The user needs to enter information into a text box which is prone to be mis-typed, hard to remember, or ambiguous.

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!!

• Designing Mobile Search: Turning Limitations into Opportunities …
  Designing a mobile finding experience requires thinking in terms of turning limitations into opportunities.
• Organized Approach to Emotional Response Testing
  The Product Reaction Cards are part of the Desirability Toolkit that suggests facilitators ask users to choose the cards that "best describe the product or how using the product made them feel" and then ask them to narrow their selection to just five cards. The cards selection process is then followed by an interview where the participant explains why they selected those five cards.
• Where Do Heuristics Come From?
  What I learned in the process of developing style guidelines for voting system documentation (which, astonishingly, took about a year) is that most heuristics—accepted principles—used in evaluating user interfaces come from three sources: lore or folk wisdom, specialist experience, and research.
• The User Centered Design Conundrum
  When I mention design research to clients unfamiliar with user–centered design, I am often confronted with a blank stare. At first, I thought that I simply might be doing it wrong: selecting the wrong kinds of clients with which to work, or associating myself with the wrong kind of companies—but after attending events and meet-ups frequented by UX professionals, I’ve learned that I’m not alone. The problem—willful ignorance to the benefits of design research— is a pervasive one.
• Web Design Criticism: A How-To
  Web design is a relatively young field. It’s youthful, growing and made up of people from all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom lack formal design training. We have learned, and still are learning, as we go. It was there, as part of that training, that I learned about critiquing, both giving and receiving, through regular design reviews.

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!!

• Search is the Web’s fun and wicked problem
  Search is the Web's most powerful and frustrating tool. It's the conduit to unfathomable amounts of information, yet it requires a fair degree of user education to reach its full potential. It's odd that something so important is so hard to harness.
• Get on the same page with personas
  Personas are a vital tool in designing a product or interface that connects with its users. When you don’t have clear personas as your designing guide, other factors get in the way. Ultimately the interaction fails: it gets made for ease of the coder rather than ease of the user, features get added that don’t present a strong benefit to the user, without a single vision everyone ends up compromising and nothing gets accomplished thoroughly. Below are a few key nuggets I took from the sources at the end of this post.
• Conversion Room: Improve your web-forms and increase conversions
  As a follow up to our previous post "Is your website easy to buy from?", we're now going to take a deeper look at web-forms. Web-forms are often the only communication point your website visitors have with your business, yet unfortunately they are often a neglected after thought for many websites.
• LukeW | An Event Apart: 10 Secrets from a UX Design Strategist’s Toolbox
  Sarah Nelson's 10 Secrets from a UX Design Strategist’s Toolbox talk at An Event Apart San Francisco detailed a number of ways to manage collaborative design sessions.
• Winning Content: Thoughts on influence and content strategy
  Blog on content and editorial.

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!!

• 15 Ways to Increase Trust in Your Landing Pages | Unbounce
  Web visitors are a fickle bunch. They’ll stop by your landing page after becoming interested in your banner ad or Google AdWords ad, and then they’ll put on their “Judge Every Book By It’s Cover” hat and give you roughly 5 seconds to impress them.
• Content strategy is, in fact, the next big thing
  I think it’s because the reality of social media initiatives—that they’re internal commitments, not advertising campaigns—has derailed more than a few organizations from really implementing effective, measurable programs. Most companies can’t sustain social media engagement because they lack the internal editorial infrastructure to support it.
• Managing UX teams
  I gave a talk yesterday at the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) conference about managing user experience teams. (It’s a version of a talk that I gave last year at the IA Summit and again at UX Week.) In it, I talk about the importance of personality in hiring, and how personality and can make or break a fit.
• Surprise as a design strategy
  "A surprise reaction to a product can be beneficial to both a designer and a user. The designer benefits from a surprise reaction because it can capture attention to the product, leading to increased product recall and recognition, and increased word-of-mouth. Or, as Jennifer Hudson puts it, the surprise element 'elevates a piece beyond the banal'. A surprise reaction has its origin in encountering an unexpected event. The product user benefits from the surprise, because it makes the product more interesting to interact with. In addition, it requires updating, extending or revising the knowledge the expectation was based on. This implies that a user can learn something new about a product or product aspect." (Geke D.S. Ludden, Hendrik N.J. Schifferstein & Paul Hekkert)
• Experience Maps
  An interesting depiction of user experience has surfaced the other week over at the nForm blog in the form of an experience map. Gene and his team has come up with a way to represent gaming related experiences of three distinct gamers. In a way then this is a merger between a persona and a time based representation. The other interesting thing about this is the visualization and separation of at least three types of experiences: ongoing, exploratory and influenced. Each type of experience has been shown in a standardized and specific way. Furthermore, the diagram also captures and represents a variety of channels which the personas are utilizing at a given point in time. Overall, it’s always interesting to see when designers attempt to convey such comprehensive and unified high level deliverables.

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