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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!!

• Absorb Emulate and Innovate
  There’s something good to be said about mimicry. When artists learned their trade in the way old days (and often today), they were pushed by their teachers to emulate the great masters, to understand their choices, to learn their brush strokes. Sometimes, it would be years of emulation and copying before a student was set free to try her own hand at a creative work. In marketing (and in business innovation overall), I’ve made quite a habit of absorbing other ideas that make sense from other industries or verticals, emulating key elements of their methodology, and then innovating to make them make sense for me.
• 4 Unexpected Situations For Creating Content
  To an already busy small business owner or marketer, you may wonder, how in the world do I make time to create content? To blog once or more a week on top of everything else I already do?
• How to treat new employees
  A person’s first day on a new job is a stressful time even under the best of circumstances. You don’t know anyone there, you don’t know your job, you don’t know the written and unwritten rules of the workplace – and yet you have a burning desire to do well, to show your worth and to excel.
• Start – Treehotel
• Old Spice Sales Double With YouTube Campaign
• Balanced Arguments Are More Persuasive — PsyBlog
  Every argument has at least two sides, even if sometimes, we're not prepared to admit it. But in the heat of battle many people present their own side of the argument as though there's no alternative.

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!!

• Readability: the Optimal Line Length – Baymard Institute
  Having the right amount of characters on each line is key to the readability of your text. It shouldn’t merely be your design that dictates the width of your text, it should also be a matter of legibility.
• A List Apart: Articles: Art Direction and Design
  Glorifying the supposed arrival of art direction on the web is one of the latest trends in interactive design. There are several galleries devoted to it. There’s even a plug-in for it. Sadly, many designers don’t understand the difference between design and art direction; sadder still, many art directors don’t either: Art direction gives substance to design. Art direction adds humanity to design.
• How to Communicate Value and Engage Users Instantly | UX Movement
  Does your web site offer value to users? The chances are that it does, but users can’t see it. If users can’t see the value of your web site, there’s no chance they’ll stick around for long.
• Usability for Handheld Devices Versus Computers :: UXmatters
  Many people now use different mobile devices—including smartphones, digital cameras, MP3 players, eReaders, and GPSs (Global Positioning System)—in particular contexts. How are users interacting with these devices when they are away from their computers? How does the design of a device—including the controls its hardware provides, its interaction models, and its form factor—determine the design and usability of the software applications that run on it? How can we understand user experience on the move?
• Conversion Room: Introducing Web Analytics TV
  We’re excited to introduce Web Analytics TV – a fun and interactive source of information for everything Analytics related. This exciting series of YouTube videos is presented by Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski from the Google Analytics team. You can ask questions, and vote for your favourite questions from other viewers, via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and then have our experts answer them in the next installment.

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!!

• YouTube Blog: Should quality matter in web video?
  Since I started working in web video, the most common misconception I face is, web video equals low quality video. This week we asked “What do you think the differences are between making videos for the web versus other venues like film festivals or TV?” on YouTube's Facebook fan page. Though there were a lot of positive voices talking about the immediacy, democracy and audience engagement of web video, some of the comments unsurprisingly echoed this idea.
• Photos as Web Content (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  Users pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to "jazz up" Web pages.
• Ideal line length for content
  I’d like to design a site that uses optimal line lengths. I also want the line length to stay within the optimal range no matter what default font size the user has set in their browser. Is it possible?
• UXMovement: Applying the Golden Ratio to Web Layouts and Objects | Usability Counts | User Experience, Social Media
  1.618 is a number all serious designers should know. It’s known as the golden ratio found through out nature, art and architecture. Seashells, the Mona Lisa and the Parthenon all show the golden ratio. Our faces and bodies are also proportional to the golden ratio. It’s so omnipresent that it’s even found in sounds and intervals of time. If there ever was a mathematical way to explain and express natural beauty, the golden ratio is it.
• 4 lessons The Apprentice candidates should learn about focus groups–Making Websites Easy To Use
  Every year I watch The Apprentice I grumble to my partner about the appalling way the candidates grill focus group participants. Their approach is to either present them with an idea and ask if they like it, or they tell them about the concept, ask for thoughts and then argue the participants into submission. When this doesn’t work and the focus group clearly dislikes the concept they just ignore it and carry on regardless.

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!!

• A List Apart: Articles: The Discipline of Content Strategy
  We, the people who make websites, have been talking for fifteen years about user experience, information architecture, content management systems, coding, metadata, visual design, user research, and all the other disciplines that facilitate our users’ abilities to find and consume content.
• adaptive path » blog » Kim Cullen » “Um…hello? Is this thing on?” Personal Voice in UX Design.
  I recently finished a 6 month project here at AP and after the final presentation one of my teammates asked, “So how would you describe your design style? I don’t know anything about it.” It seemed an odd question given that we had been working together for the last several months and I had just presented extensive visual design deliverables. But when it came down to it those deliverables did not, in fact, reflect anything about my personal design style.
• Thoughts on Interaction Design – Welie.com » Blog Archive » Developing a Strategy and Vision (part 1)
  In my previous post on Strategy and Vision I discussed what they are and what the differences are. But of course what is far more interesting is how to develop a good vision and strategy. If you already have a vision you are in a luxury position and you ‘only’ need to find the best strategy. If you don’t have a vision yet, you have a lot of work ahead of you. However, it is not as bad as it seems because even if you have a vision there is still a lot to do. Let’s assume for now that you already have a vision.
• Larry Constantine on Agile Experience Design | Agile UX
  In part 1, Larry insists on deep philosophical differences and variance in practices… As a UX practitioner and Agile Coach, involved in various agile projects, I unfortunately have to confirm some of his observations:
• YouTube – WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson
  One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on-in exhilarating style-one of our key questions: Where do good ideas come from?

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!!

• Content Strategy: The Old, New Thing | Idea Engineers
  Recently, in the past year, you may have heard a lot of buzz about content strategy, as well as concepts such as ‘content curation,’ portable content and/or semantic web. Perhaps you have heard it said that content strategy is the next big thing in the interactive and digital worlds. Some proffer that ‘content is king,’ and that digital information will double or even triple in the next fear years. Others have asserted that content and content strategy will be the single most important factors in the future of the Web. For a lot of folks, these are quite bold statements that may or may not mean anything.
• What Motivates Us To Do Great Work? :: Articles :: The 99 Percent
  What motivates us to do great work? It’s an age-old question. But the age-old answers – rewards, recognition, money, stability – no longer seem to suffice. As we’ve shifted to a knowledge-based economy, it turns out that what drives us has shifted, too.
• Going Mobile: Designing for Different Screen Sizes | Promoting Your Mobile App :: UXmatters
  In this edition of Ask UXmatters—which is the first in a two-part series focusing on user experience design for mobile devices—our experts discuss<br />
  <br />
  designing for a wide range of devices with different screen sizes<br />
  promoting your mobile application
• » Using numbers to plan content Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive
  Something that’s fascinated me about online metrics since I started working in online (quite a long time ago in internet terms) is their immediacy. In fact, it’s their instancy… this real-time sense you get from actually watching people move in and out of a website or email or mobile platform—that really mesmerises. The numbers create a kind of certainty about the clicks, impressions, traffic volume… and based on those numbers we believe we can know what worked (or didn’t work). On the basis of these metrics we do more or less of the same.
• 10 great user experience blogs–Making Websites Easy To Use

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