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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 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)!

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)!

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)!