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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!!

• How to Create a Web Content Strategy For Your Company
  These days, it's no longer enough to have an inviting storefront and amazing products on your shelves, whether physical or digital. Fueled by social media, with which even the search engines scrambling to keep up, the Web is now happening in real time. How can a small company stay competitive?
• Overcoming the Obstacles of Usability Testing | UX Booth
  When people hear about ‘usability testing,’ many things come to mind—eye-tracking cameras, big HCI labs, a long testing process, a lot of expenses, and maybe a little confusion as well. Even at this stage in the proverbial game, usability testing isn’t so well understood, and misconceptions abound.
• How to make destination guides distinctive « Grumpy Traveller
  As Jeremy Head rightly points out in his new post, there is so much destination guide content festering on the internet that much of it becomes interchangeable. Why, in essence, should you go to one site’s guides above another’s?
• Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology :: UXmatters
  My last column, “Specifying Behavior,” focused on the importance of interaction designers’ taking full responsibility for designing and clearly communicating the behavior of product user interfaces. At the conclusion of the Design Phase for a product release, interaction designers’ provide key design deliverables that play a crucial role in ensuring their solutions to design problems actually get built. These deliverables might take the form of high-fidelity, interactive prototypes; detailed storyboards that show every state of a user interface in sequence; detailed, comprehensive interaction design specifications; or some combination of these. Whatever form they take, producing these interaction design deliverables is a fundamental part of a successful product design process.
• Achieving and Balancing Consistency in User Interface Design :: UXmatters
  The Principle of Least Astonishment, in shorthand, encompasses what we, as designers, must achieve to ensure consistency in our designs. Consistency is a fundamental design principle [1] for usable user interfaces. But the thing that astonishes me is that it’s actually necessary to explain this principle. Surprise implies the unexpected. Of course, users want the response to a given action to be what they expect; otherwise, they would have done something else. In user interactions, the unexpected is pretty much the same as the unwanted. Surprise usually implies something bad rather than something positive—unless users already have such dismally low expectations of their software that they might think, Wow! It worked. I’m so astonished.

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!!

• How to be Insanely Productive and Still Keep Smiling | zen habits
  Do you want to be more productive? Maybe you do, but I’m sure you don’t want to feel stressed, overwhelmed, or unhappy – which happens to many super-productive people. But there is good news:
• UXMARKZ – Hand picked UX related resources
  UXMARKZ is a collection of hand picked UX related resources, updated daily. You will find interesting sites, articles, videos, images and slideshows from the field of interaction design, usability, information achitecture, user interface design and other. In order to prevent spam and keep the quality of listed resources, all submitions are moderated.
• Predicate, LLC | Editorial + Content Strategy | Predicate, LLC | Editorial + Content Strategy
  It’s 2010 and smart folks get it: the case for content strategy has been made. “Kill the ‘content phase,’” Margot Bloomstein tells us, “and help the web grow up!” But the question of approach, of *how* to do content strategy, remains fuzzy. Where does a content strategy begin and end? What’s optional and what’s required? Is there such a thing as everyday content strategy?
• Content Strategy – a knol by Jeffrey MacIntyre
  What is content strategy? Good question! We're working here to provide a basic definition of the field of interactive content strategy, its body of knowledge, and its practitioners.
• Complete Beginner’s Guide to Content Strategy | UX Booth
  A common occurrence: you or someone you know wants to create content and have it published online. A slightly less common occurrence? Having that same someone articulate high aspirations for their content. For those select few, instead of creating content destined for some digital landfill, their content is special; it’s going places and it’s taking them, their brand, and their experience with it.
• The Cooper Journal: Combating availability bias
  If you’re involved in the design of products, you run into this problem all the time. Stakeholders use their own most easily-retrieved examples to compare against, whether it’s the CEO who is influenced by the pundit he read that morning, or the product manager who knows that one guy who is just like your target market, or the designer who is really designing for himself — the self being the extreme “available example.”
• Creative Review – What Interns Really Want
  A recent CR blog post requested advice for new graduates and interns about how to navigate the world of work. But what about advice for employers in return? As part of their final project at LCC, graduates Paul Cooke & Jemma Mackle created Mind The Gap, which includes ten pieces of advice for employers from interns…

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!!

• Supporting User Experience Throughout the Product Development Process :: UXmatters
  Frequently, problems arise when capturing requirements. Some product people feel more comfortable describing requirements in terms of the user experience.
• Using Eye Tracking & Mouse Movements to Analyze Search Behavior | Eye Tracking Update
  For those in the business, it must be a pretty nice thing to see usability studies come of age. We’ve touched on recent debates regarding the relationship between what a user is looking at versus what they’re thinking about (Is it the same thing or is it something entirely different?), and it’s exciting to see further research into the details of eye tracking and usability. Data is easy to come by if you have the right equipment, but making sense of that data, analyzing it for usable information and gaining insight into the process is a much more difficult task.
• LukeW | Social Engagement Checklist
  Having recently heard several overviews of what fundamentally motivates people to engage with others, I decided to try turning these principles into a high-level checklist for social Web applications. These questions attempt to answer the most vexing social design question: "why would people participate in a new service/product?"
• Faceted Navigation: Typical Structures for Values « Experiencing Information
  Facets are categories that describe the properties of an object or collection of objects. Facet categories then have values. In faceted navigation schemes, the values are the things you click on to navigate to a set of items or to filter a list. The type of structure that those values have, however, can vary depending on the type of facet you are dealing with.
• Keep users in the flow by prompting for continuation
  A new trend on content-based websites seems is to animate a small box popping up at the bottom or top of the page, guiding users’ next move as they reach the end of an article. This technique is smart as it waits for just the right moment to break users’ attention.
• Skills to transition to content strategy | Intentional Design Inc.
  You may say that all this is fine and good to position content strategists as the management consultants of the content world, but what does an aspiring content strategist do with that information? What concrete steps can you take to make the move to content strategy?

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!!

• How content strategy fits into the user experience | Blog | Nick Finck | UX/IA Pro, Speaker, and Community Cultivator.
  A good portion of my talk covers workflow process and deliverable that are covered in greater detail in Kristina Halvorson’s book Content Strategy for the Web and Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld.
• Putting content back on top
  Now is the opportune time for us to start taking our content seriously. Over the past few years, there has been a surge in web devices that focus on portability and readability over processing power. With a changing attitude amongst key media players, content must no longer be ignored as a truly marketable asset.
• Where business analysis and user experience intersect: the benefits of collaboration
  According to Harvard Business Review editor Julia Kirby, 2010 may be the year for a resurgence in companies reconnecting with their users and focusing on user experience, but don’t forget about business analysis! It’s the BA’s job to ensure that the issues and business objectives are understood. When the solution involves end users (of a new or enhanced application/website/product), that’s where we need team up with a user experience (UX) professional.
• Content strategy and customer service: A talk with Ann Rockley
  Apparently, you can be a content strategist without knowing it. In June of 2008, after years of working as a writer, I got tapped by a recruiter looking to fill a content strategist position at eBay. Looking at the job description, I wouldn’t even have guessed I was qualified. After some tests and an interview, I was hired. I learned a tremendous amount, and got a taste of the many applications of content strategy to a large ecommerce site. By the time this piece is published, I’ll have rejoined eBay as a content strategist for a second contract.
• The 960 Grid System Made Easy
  This article is for web designers and front-end web developers who are interested in grid-based layout systems but are at a loss on how to decipher them.<br />
  <br />
  We’ll focus specifically on the 960 Grid System, but after reading this guide, you’ll find that most of the other grid systems out there are similar and will make much more sense after you understand a few basic principles.

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!!

• Updating Our Understanding of Perception and Cognition: Part I
  Research psychologists and neurophysiologists have been busy, and their efforts have greatly improved humankind’s understanding of perception and cognition.
• Recruiting Better Research Participants
  Recruiting the right participants is the foundation of effective user research, because your research results are only as good as the participants involved.
• 50 Sketching Resources for User Experience Designers | inspireUX – User …
  Sketching is a critical part of the User Experience Design process. Sketching allows us to explore ideas and iterate on concepts quickly and easily before creating detailed mockups. Below is a roundup of many different sketching articles, tools, templates, presentations, videos, books, and examples to help User Experience Designers learn more about sketching and how it benefits UX design.
• The Scent of Search
  The implications of Information Foraging Theory on designing user-centered websites have not gone unnoticed. Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool, among others, have put forth considered recommendations on how to enhance information scent on the web. Most of their guidelines, however, tend to assume that the designer has direct control over the explicit words used in the interface. While this is certainly the case for browse-based websites dependent on site-wide navigation and hyperlinks, it breaks down for search interfaces where both content and navigation are completely dynamic.
• Working your tone of voice online
  Applying a distinctive and consistent tone of voice to your online communications has many benefits – so long as you make sure that voice doesn't get in the way of web-writing essentials such as usability, accessibility and seo. Sticky Content's Dan Fielder, who developed our new advanced web writing training course, looks at how to work a tone of voice online.

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