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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 Superior Shopping Experiences | UX Magazine
  Imagine shopping in a store where the displays never change. Customers select items by browsing through monolithic aisles of products. Store displays are minimal and uninteresting. Items in the displays are hard to find or even unavailable. This doesn't seem like a great shopping experience, does it? Yet this is what online shoppers experience (and accept as standard) on many large e-commerce sites.
• Usability Marathon. Tim Bosenick. Measure User Experience
  Qualitative studies allow receiving quick and valid feedback that is needed during the development process of an interface. Another reason is that qualitative tests are usually cheaper than tests with a larger sample size. But this larger sample size is needed when it comes to really «measure» user experience.
• Juicy Studio: Developing sites for users with Cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties
  When people think about accessibility of web content, there's a tendency to concentrate on people with visual impairments. People with cognitive impairments and learning difficulties are often overlooked.

  This article by Roger Hudson, Russ Weakley, and Peter Firminger, examines the types of problems visitors may encounter when using the web, with insightful and practical suggestions on how to develop websites that are inclusive for people with cognitive impairments and learning difficulties.

• Study: Males vs. females in social networks | Royal Pingdom
  Have you ever wondered how many of Twitter’s users are women? Or men? What about Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, and other sites in the social media sphere?
• Accessible Colour Schemes
  Choosing a colour scheme for a website can be a challenge, but what about choosing an accessible colour scheme? By this we mean a colour scheme that provides sufficient contrast between the foreground and background colours to ensure that the text is legible. The aim of this website is to suggest some colour combinations that meet accessibility guidelines and demonstrate that website colour schemes don't have to be boring to make them accessible.

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!!

• UXBASIS
  UX Basis is way of combining the numerous tools available to us and forming a unified process that sits within a digital agency and it’s other important departments – creative, tech and client services. The beauty about the model is it is fully adaptive to any clients needs, can fit with tech’s agile process and incorporates creative and development at key stages in the creation process.
• 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines « Smashing Magazine
  Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites.
• Hundreds Tens Units / Products / Alan Chair
  Beautiful!
• The point of personas « People & Technology
  The first thing to realize about personas is that they are primarily roles that users take while interacting with a system. But, instead of referring to users collectively (or to their more abstract role), we create a persona as a tangible representation. This turns out to be a good thing from a psychological perspective since research shows people are more likely to feel positive about an individual than they are a group with similar characteristics.
• Integrating Prototyping Into Your Design Process – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
  Just like with any other UX research or design tool, context plays a critical role in determining how effective prototyping will be for you.

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!!

• Enhancing User Interaction With First Person User Interface « Smashing Magazine
  Though many computer applications and operating systems make use of real-world metaphors like the desktop, most software interface design has little to do with how we actually experience the real world. In lots of cases, there are great reasons not to directly mimic reality. Not doing so allows us to create interfaces that enable people to be more productive, communicate in new ways, or manage an increasing amount of information. In other words, to do things we can’t otherwise do in real life.
• We are Colorblind » Patterns for the Color Blind
  About 8% of the male population has some sort of color blindness. The color blind have the inability to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues. Because of this, the color blind have trouble with a lot of websites.
• Agile Card Wall – the process itself made UX design a more inclusive activity – Agile Experience Design
  Here is a list of reasons why it think this simple method of placing cards on a wall is so essential to team collaboration, trust, personal empowerment and ownership. The process itself made design a more inclusive activity.
• UX in the Boardroom: A Solid Case for Investing in UX :: UXmatters
  “I discovered what really matters to executives, learned how finances and budgets work, and realized the true value of user experience lies not in cost savings at all, but in intangibles.”
• Audience Segmentation Models :: UXmatters
  “Understanding the people who will ultimately engage with a product or service provides the foundation for user experience design.”

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

I recently gave a presentation about personas, and specifically how they can be used throughout a project lifecycle to ensure the highest quality. I thought I’d share that presentation with you. I’m a big fan of the approach to presentations advocated by Garr Reynolds in his book Presentation Zen. When I present my slides have no more than 1 – 3 words on them. That way people listen to what I’m saying. I also tell people that I am happy to share my slides and notes with anyone that would like them. My notes tend to be bullet points only, that way when I speak I’m not reading, I am working from my brain and it’s more of a conversation with the audience. This conversational tone is more engaging (I hope). Anyhow, on to the presentation!

Life before Personas

This is my vision for how life must have been for users before Personas came into widespread use. A barren desert with users wandering forlornly around the worlds of the internet and software. Stumbling around looking for an oasis of usability and accessibility!

It stuns me when I think that Personas really came into popular use after Cooper’s The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Things must have been (and were) pretty bad before that. Thankfully though, Personas are coming more and more into widespread use. There is still, however, some fear and reluctance towards their use.

Primarily this is down to the cost and time it can take to create them, and in some cases a failure to see the great benefits that they have. I think that we, as user experience professionals, need to be better at communicating their value and selling their uasefulness. Primarily we need to be able to demonstrate that the cost and time spent has far more value that just the Persona itself. (more…)

Web site design communities have long neglected the accessibility needs of disabled (be it visually, physically or otherwise) and older users.

However, accessibility is coming more to the fore, not least because of the increased exposure of Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998 (cf. the penalty imposed on the 2000 Olympics website, based on the Australian forerunner to Section 508).

However, much of the time accessibility is treated as an afterthought, rather than being approached in a proactive fashion from the onset of the design and development life cycle.

I’ve outlined 14 tips and techniques here that I feel are a good place to start on making your site accessible.

(more…)