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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!!

• interactions magazine | Solving complex problems through design
  What is it about design that makes it so well suited to solving complex problems? Why is design thinking such a promising avenue for business and government tackling seemingly intractable problems?
• Ten Things Your Employees Wish You Knew About Them | Fast Company
  If you think it's tough being a manager these days, try being an employee. Most are in the position of having to go with the flow because of the current economic conditions. But that doesn't necessarily mean they do so with a smile on their face. Here are ten things your employees wish you knew about them:
• Perception and the design of forms – Part 5: Proximity – Formulate Information Design
  This is the fifth article in our series about visual perception and the design of forms. We're focusing on 6 relevant principles of human perception, namely:<br />
  <br />
  Characteristics (things that are an aspect of a single object)<br />
  Shape<br />
  Size<br />
  Colour<br />
  Relationships (things that are about how multiple objects relate)<br />
  Figure/ground<br />
  Proximity<br />
  Similarity
• Why Users Fill Out Forms Faster With Top Aligned Labels | UXMovement.com
  Imag ine a user who is really excited about your prod uct or ser vice. They’re ready to sign up, so they go to your form page and start fill ing out their infor ma tion. The way you align your labels with your form fields can affect how easy it is for users to fill out the form. Do you want to give users a quick, easy and pain less expe ri ence or do you want to give them a has sle? If you want to make their expe­ri ence quick, easy and pain less, con sider using top aligned labels for your form fields.
• Use the 80-20 Rule to Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness
  80-20 rule proponent and analytics wizard Tim Ferriss has a website optimization case study of how an 80-20-optimized website received a 20%+ higher conversion rate.
• Ocado: Delivering on User Experience | UX Booth
  Good user experience design is about ensuring that at each point of engagement with your product, company, or service, you are crafting positive interactions. It is goal-oriented and outcome-focused because at each stage you are ensuring that users can easily achieve their objectives.

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 Limitations Improve Design | Webdesigner Depot
  We often complain about the multitude of limitations which we’re faced with every day as designers.<br />
  From browsers, to screen resolutions, to user interactions, we seem to constantly be struggling to find some way of thinking outside the tiny little box of “best practice” which we’re constrained by.<br />
  Limitations are abundant but are they really such a bad thing? Is it possible, even, that they actually produce far better results than if we did not have them?
• The Art and Tradition of Typography – fontblog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs
  or over 25 years Microsoft has been very focused on the development of type and type technologies. In order to fully understand the technical foundations of typography in Windows, a brief overview of some of the highlights of “typographic engineering” from the past 500 years can add some useful insight.
• Creating Passionate Users: An Interview with Josh Porter, Part 1 | Perfetti Media
  Social web sites and applications are everywhere: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, Craigslist, and Digg are just a few of the web sites taking advantage of the power of the Social Web. Web sites and applications that incorporate social features are the fastest growing properties on the web for good reason: they connect people, motivate, and engage them.  As a result, they grow very quickly and successfully.
• Improve Your E-Commerce Design With Brilliant Product Photos – Smashing Magazine
  Product photography could well be the single most important design aspect of any e-commerce website. Without the ability to touch, hold, smell, taste or otherwise handle the products they are interested in, potential customers have only images to interact with. Ultimately, the softer, tastier, flashier and more attractive your products look to shoppers, the more confident they’ll feel about purchasing from you and the better your conversion rate will be.
• How Choice Impairs Your Visitors | UX Booth
  Many sites provide an array of methods to interact with their offerings, but excesses in decision-making pressure can render less empowered visitors into a cyclone of stress from the barrage of questions being asked. As an industry, we place a great deal of emphasis on getting visitors to make decisions, but are we turning a straightforward path into a labyrinth with our need to know?
• Emotional Design with A.C.T. – Part 1 – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
  As UX professionals, we strive to design engaging experiences. These experiences help to forge relationships between the products we create and the people who use them. Whether you’re designing a website or a physical product, the formation of a relationship depends on how useful, usable and pleasurable the experience is. Ultimately, we form relationships with products and services for the same reasons we form relationships with people:

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!!

• SEOmoz | Lessons Learned from 21 Case Studies in Conversion Rate Optimization
  Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the newest darling of Internet Marketers, after all what good is traffic if it doesn’t convert. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending how you look at it), unlike Pay Per click (PPC) marketing, CRO isn’t a game of how much money you can throw. In fact, this field requires as much creativity, as it requires monetary investment. That’s what makes conversion rate optimization a fair arena. Your well-funded, bigger competitors can of course beat you at generating more traffic but they can’t beat you at the conversion rate game (unless you allow them to).
• How to Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration on Wireframes | Forum One: Internet Strategy, Social Media, User Experience and Web Site Development
• A List Apart: Articles: No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas
  No. One word, a complete sentence. We all learned to say it around our first birthday, so why do we have such a hard time saying it now when it comes to our work?<br />
  <br />
  Guilt. Fear. Pressure. Doubt. As we grow up, we begin to learn that not doing what others expect of us can lead to all sorts of negative consequences. It becomes easier to concede to their demands than to stand up for ourselves and for what is right.
• A List Apart: Articles: Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings
  During project-based work, every freelancer, agency, or internal department has “the kickoff meeting.” In theory, this meeting should have all the energy, excitement, and potential of the opening salvo of the Superbowl. Project team members should be inspired coming out of that meeting, full of ideas, and a desire to begin exploring solutions. Agencies and freelancers should begin to see their clients as friends and collaborators with unique insights that can only come from frank, open discussion of the design challenge at hand. But this rarely happens.
• From the Archive: American Cities Pre-1950 – Plog Photo Blog

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!!

• Get Mental Notes
  In the midst of a busy project it's all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great products. Mental Notes brings together 50 insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to the design of Web sites, Web apps, and software applications.
• Concerning Fidelity in Design
  People swear by their design processes. Rachel Glaves insists on sketching by hand; Dan Brown urges extensive wireframing; while Ryan Singer goes straight to HTML. Heated debates arise at conferences as advocates staunchly defend their favorite techniques.
• Interface – the ultimate mockup & prototyping tool for iPhone & iPad …
  A nice mockup & prototyping tool that runs right on your iPhone.
• Conversion Room: 7 ways to improve your call to action
  If you only had 5 seconds to sell your product, what would you do? Your landing pages have, on average, about 5 seconds before visitors decide to stay or bounce.
• Cooper Journal: Reconciling Market Segments and Personas
  Market segmentation and personas are two different techniques that are often perceived as conflicting methods, but they are actually complementary tools that organizations can use to design and sell successful products.
• A List Apart: Articles: Sign Up Forms Must Die
  I’ll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die. In the introduction to this book I described the process of stumbling upon or being recommended to a web service. You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form.

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!!

• Design Better And Faster With Rapid Prototyping – Smashing Magazine
  The old adage, “a picture speaks a thousand words” captures what user interface prototyping is all about: using visuals to describe thousands of words’ worth of design and development specifications that detail how a system should behave and look. In an iterative approach to user interface design, rapid prototyping is the process of quickly mocking up the future state of a system, be it a website or application, and validating it with a broader team of users, stakeholders, developers and designers. Doing this rapidly and iteratively generates feedback early and often in the process, improving the final design and reducing the need for changes during development.
• A Link Labeled "Products" (or "Solutions" or "Clients") is a Bad Idea …
  got this idea about links like “Products”, which we see on a lot of corporate sites. Vanessa was talking about these words from an SEO perspective, explaining that, when we use them as the headings and main navigation on the site, the search engines don’t know what to do.
• Graphic Design Theory: 50 Resources and Articles – Noupe
  But spending some time on the theory behind the graphic design principles we use every day can expand our design horizons. It can open up new avenues of creativity and experimentation that can lead our designs from just good, to fantastic. On that note, below are 50 excellent resources and articles that discuss graphic design theory, including layout, color theory, and typography. Feel free to share additional resources and articles in the comments.
• Website Response Times (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  Slow page rendering today is typically caused by server delays or overly fancy page widgets, not by big images. Users still hate slow sites and don't hesitate telling us.
• Using Stories for Design Ideas
  When we say that the design must “tell a story,” we are not just talking about games or interactive fiction, or even about turning a work application into an adventure (“Conquer the benefits allocation maze…”). Instead, we mean the kind of stories that help you create new designs. These stories are used to make you think of new possibilities, give you the tools to encourage a self-reflective kind of thinking—design thinking—or so you can imagine designs that will improve the lives of other people. Stories explore ideas from user research.
• Faceted Navigation: Layout and Display of Facets " Experiencing Information
  Overall, my interest in faceted navigation stems from the development and organization of workshop material on the subject. The intent is to address the primary questions designers face and identify possible solutions and directions. Where known, I’ve attempted to cite relevant literature, which is proving to be thin and/or indirect.
• How To Engage Customers In Your E-Commerce Website
  One of the most influential factors in our buying decisions is the opinions of our friends and relatives. Likewise, a large majority of online shoppers now trust what other customers say about the products they buy more than the e-tailers themselves. The reason is that we trust people who are “on our side,” even if we do not know them personally.

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