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I love Seth Godin – if you don’t already, I recommend that you take a look at his (short and inspirational) Seth’s Blog. Here’s a talk he gave at TED on marketing that sums up why Seth is so great!

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!!

• Information Gathering: A Roundup of UX Applications | UX Booth
  The number of applications available for User Experience professionals is ever-expanding much of this growth happening over the last year! As a consequence, experts are increasingly turning to novel tools in order to collect data and generate reports regards their websites. While some UX designers suggest that local testing is the best way to gather data, we decided to round up these up-and-coming applications and see just what makes them tick.
• Sketching Fundamentals | UX Booth
• Gestalt Principles Applied in Design
  Web designers, like other artists and craftsmen, impose structure on the environment. We enforce order and beauty on the formless void that is our blank computer screen.
• Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control? | Blog | design mind
  Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since Henry Chesbrough’s seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003. However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good time to reframe “Open” from a design point of view.
• The Six Elements Of An Experience « Customer Experience Matters
  SLICE-B breaks an experience down into six distinct components:<br />
  Start. The extent to which the customer is drawn into the experience.<br />
  Locate. The ease in which the customer can find what she needs.<br />
  Interact. The ease in which the customer can understand and control the experience.<br />
  Complete. The confidence that the customer has that her goal was accomplished.<br />
  End. The transition into next steps.<br />
  Brand Coherence. The reinforcement of a company’s brand.
• Shortboredsurfer – 11 Principles of Interaction Design explained
  This post isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of interaction design principles, its merely an introduction to the subject. And I’m definitely not going to attempt to enter the lions den of defining what ‘interaction design’ is, that’s for another day!

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!!

• Ten simple steps to make global travel websites more engaging | Tnooz
  Ever wonder what the most popular sites do to keep traffic and grow their business? While the specific formula for success is different for each site, there are some things in common that most popular sites do.
• A huge list of Style Guides and UI Guidelines » The UX Bookmark
  If you are a graphic designer or an interaction designer and have ever been tasked with creating a style guide or UI guidelines document (both are different and I’ve had the pleasure to work on both of them creating templates and the actual documents for brands and products), this list should help you out as a consolidated list of references. This list is going to be constantly updated (and will ultimately be a monster list, it’s quite modest for now) of publicly accessible style guides and UI guideline documents on the web. If you find any links not working or would like to suggest one that is not on the list, feel free to comment and let me know.
• 500 Internal Server Error
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• Twitter: 10 Psychological Insights — PsyBlog
  There are now 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves—double the figure from the previous year (Pew, 2009).<br />
  <br />
  So who tweets? Why? What are they talking about? And what is so engaging about all those little textual transmissions?
• Stop Designing Aesthetics, Start Designing Emotions | Webdesigner Depot
  Discussing emotion in design is a bit of a hot topic at the moment, it seems to be popping up in more and more blog posts and speaker sessions. In fact I saw at least three different web designers say that it was the subject of the talk which they had recently submitted for next year’s SXSWi.

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!!

• Reductionism in Web Design
  It’s important to define what reductionism is in the context of web design. While ideas towards reductionism vary depending on who you ask, a simple definition is that reductionist methods boil down complex things to simpler things, which might include modularizing the system into more digestible components; all of this while avoiding losses in value (fidelity) and usefulness.
• The Web Strategy Pyramid: A Well-balanced Web Strategy
  To deliver a site that gives users the experience they are looking for, we need to set it upon a solid foundation of content, usable navigation, and strong SEO practices.
• Beyond the Web Experience | Blog | Nick Finck | UX/IA Pro, Speaker, and Community Cultivator.
  I find it interesting that whenever I talk about experience design people assume I am talking about web based experiences only.  An experience is the holistic perspective, everything from experiencing interfaces, websites, physical interfaces, the environment, even the smells and tastes.  Within a single day I came across three seemingly un-related topics that were all tied into user experience.. or perhaps more accurately, the human experience. 
• Designing with Paper Prototyping | UX Booth
  Prototyping is key to any successful design. Paper prototyping is usually the first step, but does it fit into a world where mobile devices are king? Yes, but not using the conventional method. Combine the physicality of the device and the power of paper prototyping and you have a solution that’s fit for the new era of computing.
• Defining Design – Surface vs. Substance | Front to back
  What is design? Most people will answer that question by pointing to a designed object – the iPhone, for example. Now that’s good design! The Mini Cooper. London’s famous map of the Tube. Anything ever built by Norman Foster. That’s design, right?
• A List Apart: Articles: Flexible Fuel: Educating the Client on IA
  Information architecture (IA) means so much to our projects, from setting requirements to establishing the baseline layout for our design and development teams. But what does it mean to your clients? Do they see the value in IA? What happens when they change their minds? Can IA help manage the change control process? More than ever, we must ensure that our clients find value in and embrace IA—and it’s is our job to educate them.
• Links : Quantitative Research Methods and Statistics – Methodspace – home of the Research Methods community

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!!

• moritz.stefaner.eu – Elastic lists
  Elastic lists allow to navigate large, multi-dimensional info spaces with just a few clicks, never letting you run into situations with zero results. They enhance traditional UI approaches for facet browsers by visualizing weight proportions, animated transitions, emphasis of characteristic values and sparkline visualizations.
• How Organizations Can Best Support Beginner UX Designers | inspireUX – User Experience quotes and articles to inspire and connect the UX community
  There are many resources available for beginner UX designers to learn about the field on their own. In particular, Whitney Hess’ blog post series “So you wanna be a User Experience Designer” (part 1) (part 2) outlines a fantastic list of books, blogs, events, organizations, lists, workshops, conferences, and education references that can help those new to the field learn the ropes.
• Akamai Reveals 2 Seconds as the New Threshold of Acceptability for eCommerce Web Page Response Times
  The most compelling results reveal that two seconds is the new threshold in terms of an average online shopper’s expectation for a web page to load and 40 percent of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail or travel site. <br />
  <br />
  Additional findings indicate that quick page loading is a key factor in a consumer’s loyalty to an eCommerce site, especially for high spenders. 79 percent of online shoppers who experience a dissatisfying visit are less likely to buy from the same site again while 27 percent are less likely to buy from the same site’s physical store, suggesting that the impact of a bad online experience will reach beyond the web and can result in lost store sales.
• Demystifying Usability : New Study- Gender differences in Web Usability
  Comscore just released a new study last month (June 30 2010) entitled Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet (download here).<br />
  <br />
  The worldwide study adds some key insights into the growing research on gender differences on the Web and in particular around social networking usage. Why is this a big deal?
• The Four Phases of Design Thinking – Warren Berger – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review
  What can people in business learn from studying the ways successful designers solve problems and innovate? On the most basic level, they can learn to question, care, connect, and commit — four of the most important things successful designers do to achieve significant breakthroughs.
• Psychological Study of Web Designs | Abduzeedo | Graphic Design Inspiration and Photoshop Tutorials
  A website is the window to the soul of an Internet business as well as the people behind it. It may have a positive or may be a negative effect on your end result. If you take the time to think about what your visitors want and how they want to get it, then you’re already on the right track to creating a site that will tap into the psychological drives of your target audience.

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