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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 Companies Can Use Sentiment Analysis to Improve Their Business
  Automated sentiment analysis has recently been the focus of an intense debate in the blogosphere. How accurate is it? What is the methodology? In what context is it useful for a business or a brand?<br />
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  Sentiment analysis can be very useful for business if employed correctly. In this article, I will attempt to demystify the process, provide context, and offer some concrete examples of how businesses can utilize it.
• More from Eyjafjallajokull – The Big Picture – Boston.com
• Stopping shopping cart abandonment
  A good checkout process allows customers to quickly and easily make their purchases online without feeling overwhelmed or confused. However, it’s not uncommon for online retailers to face shopping cart abandonment rates of well over 50%. Implementing a single-page checkout is a natural first step for retailers looking to reduce their abandonment rate, but there are other factors that drive customers away from the checkout process.
• Design Patterns: Faceted Navigation
• Ubiquitous Service Design
  The difference between products and services is more than semantic. Products are tangible objects that exist in both time and space; services consist solely of acts or process(es), and exist in time only. The basic distinction between "things" and "processes" is the starting point for a focused investigation of services. Services are rendered; products are possessed. Services cannot be possessed; they can only be experienced, created or participated in. Though they are different, services and products are intimately and symbiotically linked.

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!!

• Try the "Lightening Quick" Mental Model Method
  When I was making a lot of mental models in the get-it-to-market-yesterday dot com boom of the late 1990's, I used a technique that resulted in a mental model plus gap analysis brainstorm in the course of one day. Now that it's the not-in-this-economy post economic slump, I think it's time to put this technique to use again. Today, in fact, I got together with a group of nine talented design agency folks and we spent 2.75 hours putting together a set of towers based on 24 individual stories, and then spent rest of the day brainstorming ideas to support those towers. Here's how we did it.
• Playing Well with Others: Design Principles for Social Augmented …
  Technical barriers to delivering augmented reality (AR) experiences on a broad scale are falling rapidly
• The Craft of Interaction Design
  The following text is a transcript of a talk by Gillian Crampton-Smith at Innovation Forum Interaction Design, Potsdam, March 2007. The aim of the two-day conference was to focus on all aspects of interface and interaction design: mobile telephone and media interfaces, problem solutions and product visions, web pages and virtual worlds, art and commerce, business and science. Using both concrete projects and visionary concepts, current developments in interaction design were presented and discussed by regional and international experts from the design, research and business worlds.
• The Panic Status Board
  …The idea quickly grew beyond “Project Status”, and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information. What you’re actually looking at is an internal-only webpage that updates frequently using AJAX which shows:
• Do’s and Don’ts of Usability Testing
  Usability testing is one of the least glamorous, but most important aspects of user experience research. Over the years, it has also been one of the forms of user research we have performed most frequently. In doing so, we’ve learned quite a few best practices and encountered some potential pitfalls. We think it’s important that we share what we’ve learned with the many stakeholders, designers, and engineers who might find this information helpful.
• Autocomplete design pattern
  Problem summary: The user needs to enter information into a text box which is prone to be mis-typed, hard to remember, or ambiguous.

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!!

• Interaction Design’s Early Formal Education & Beyond
  There are many interaction designers like myself whose growth into the field was a feat of organic if not chaotic chance. Our community of practice was born out of the convergence of people who did not have the option to be formerly trained in interaction design in almost any way what-so-ever. So we educated ourselves – sometimes alone and sometimes with the support of peers and mentors. It is a common presumption that because we did it this way we have to somehow hold out a universe where that path continues to not just be an option, but to be a viable one; and one that we even laud over other more formal ones.
• The more you try and practice Agile the less agile you become. And vice versa
  Tim’s post on Agile as a ‘Cargo Cult’ highlights a problem in the adoption of Agile, not only for software development but for creative and business processes. Everyone is trying to adapt to a rapid and disruptive world screwing with business models in every category. Organisations are looking to close the gap with nimble digital start-ups who are out-innovating them at a fraction of the cost-base. Agile seems to offer a well-packaged magic ability to compete in a new way.
• Fewer buttons means more conversions | Blog | Econsultancy
  Reducing the number of buttons on shopping basket pages can provide an instant boost to conversion rates, according to the results of an A/B test.
• Why microcopy matters
  When you’re writing for the web, small details make a big difference. Your microcopy should guide people through processes like registering and its tone should help them to trust your brand.
• More Like This: A Design Pattern :: UXmatters
  We’ll explore the simple, but very powerful design pattern called More Like This, which provides the information scent and motivation necessary to make customers navigational decisions quick, easy, and intuitive.
• Testing Content Concepts :: UXmatters
  Most companies haven’t given testing content the attention it deserves—partly because it’s challenging.
• Questionnaires in Usability Engineering FAQ
  Over the years, I have seen many questions asked about the use of questionnaires in usability engineering. The list on this page is a compilation of the questions I have heard most often and the answers I gave, should have given, or would have given if I had thought of it first.

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