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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!!

• 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)!

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!!

• Numeric Filters: Issues and Best Practices
  Filters with numeric values remain among the most confusing, because many sites have not been able to design usable numeric filters that people can use in an intuitive manner.
• Laban Movement Analysis for User Experience Design
  Laban Movement Analysis provides a language for notating and documenting physical movement—mostly for dance choreography, but in acting as well. Its purpose is to document specific movements in dance. There are three aspects of Laban Movement Analysis that my experience and research tell me have some interesting implications for UX design.
• Rapid Desirability Testing: A Case Study
  In the design process we follow at my company, Mad*Pow Media Solutions, once we have defined the conceptual direction and content strategy for a given design and refined our design approach through user research and iterative usability testing, we start applying visual design. Generally, we take a key screen whose structure and functionality we have finalized—for example, a layout for a home page or a dashboard page—and explore three alternatives for visual style. These three alternative visual designs, or comps, include the same content, but reflect different choices for color palette and imagery.
• What You Really Get From a Heuristic Evaluation
  Every user experience researcher I know gets requests to do heuristic evaluations. But it isn't always clear that the requester actually knows what is involved in doing a heuristic evaluation. That happens. If I had a dollar for every time someone called asking for a focus group when what they ended up needing was a usability test, I could take a very nice holiday on Aruba.
• Observer-expectancy effect
  The observer-expectancy effect (also called the experimenter-expectancy effect, observer effect, or experimenter effect) is a form of reactivity, in which a researcher's cognitive bias causes them to unconsciously influence the participants of an experiment. It is a significant threat to a study's internal validity, and is therefore typically controlled using a double-blind experimental design.
• Hawthorne effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied.

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

Here’s an interesting video on eyetracking mobile phone usage:

From: http://eyetracking.me/?p=316

It still suffers from the problem that you are not testing in a natural usage pattern. People don’t use a mobile phone in a fixed position, which I imagine introduces some error into the results – which, in turn, can reduce the efficacy of some of the findings.

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!!

• Fantastic Information Architecture and Data Visualization Resources
  Information architecture can be a daunting subject for designers who’ve never tried it before. Also, creating successful infographics and visualizations takes skill and practice, along with some advance planning. But anyone with graphic design skills can learn to create infographics that are effective and get data across in a user-friendly manner.
• The Business Case for A/B Testing
  Does design of a sales page matters? Traditional reasoning says that the product always remains the same no matter how you dress it up on the sales page. So, one should focus on making the product more awesome rather than investing time to make it look awesome. Well, the reasoning sounds plausible in theory but the data says it is not well grounded.
• Color Theory for Web Design: The Meaning of Color
  Color in design is very subjective. What evokes one reaction in one person may evoke a very different reaction in someone 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.
• The top 5 new rules of productivity
  We all want to increase productivity and get more done with our working hours. There’s just one problem: Most people’s view of productivity comes from an industrial age view of work.
• Navigating the latest in navigation trends
  We’ve been following three new navigational trends that we think will change the way the industry traditionally builds navigation systems and how users interact with them.

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!!

• Better User Experience With Storytelling, Part 2 – Smashing Magazine
  Concluding this two-part article, we hear from creative professionals who are leading the way in this relatively new world of combining the craft of storytelling with user experience. We’ll also see how storytelling can be applied to more than just interactive experiences: we find it in everything from packaging to architecture.
• The Usability Mindset: What You Need to Know Before Implementing User …
  To succeed, you're going to have to shift the core belief system of your organization. If you can't pull this off, you'll encounter resistance at every turn, and your project is destined for failure.
• Hierarchy of Need
  The Hierarchy of Needs was devised by the psychologist Abraham Maslow (1943) and is a theory of motivation. The hierarchy comprises the following five needs: 1. Physiological, 2. Safety, 3. Social, 4. Esteem, 5. Self-actualisation. Maslow argued that the lower-order 'deficiency needs' (1-3) have to be met before the higher-order 'growth needs' (4-5) can be satisfied. As each of the needs is satisfied, so the need at the next level becomes more important to the individual.
• Creating successful style guires
  Style guides are a great way to ensure user experience consistency when developing an application and a way to communicate user experience standards across an organization. They can be application specific, platform specific, and may encompass enterprise-wide standards. A style guide can help make the development of user interfaces more efficient and help ensure good user interface design practices.
• The user experience design career path
  User experience (UX) design has a reputation for being both hard to get into and hard to progress from. I talked about how to get into UX design in my last article, so now I want to talk about where you go once you get in. In some ways, this is actually a harder problem. There are books that introduce you to UX design but none that really show you how to branch out once you’ve established yourself as a UX designer
• THE USAGE LIFECYCLE
  When you start framing design in terms of the usage lifecycle, you begin to see how each stage has different design challenges. What was a huge show-stopping issue for users at first contact is never a problem for them in later stages. What is a complex issue during regular use never occurs to someone just starting out. In this way the point at which people are in the lifecycle determines context for the user as much as anything else. Just as much as we need to “know your user” we need to know what they’re doing…rather, where they are in the usage lifecycle.
• FormFiftyFive – Design inspiration from around the world

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