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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!!

• 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design
  Officially titled Design with Intent: 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design, it’s in the form of 101 simple cards, each illustrating a particular ‘gambit‘ for influencing people’s interactions with products, services, environments, and each other, via the design of systems. They’re loosely grouped according to eight ‘lenses‘ bringing different disciplinary perspectives on behaviour change.<br />
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  The intention is that the cards (download them here) are useful at the idea generation stage of the design process, helping designers, clients and – perhaps most importantly – potential users themselves explore behaviour change concepts from a number of disciplines, and think about how they might relate to the problem at hand. Judging by the impact of earlier iterations, the cards could also be useful in stakeholder workshops, and design / technology / computer science education.
• Are You Designing or Inspecting?
  Guidelines and heuristics are not interchangeable, but many UXers treat them that way. It’s common to hear someone saying that they’re doing a heuristic evaluation against X guidelines. But it doesn’t quite work like that.
• Coloring Outside the Wireframe: 3 Tips to Integrating Visual Design in the UX Field
  Having come from a start up where everyone did everything (from research to coding) I was worried about getting slotted into a specific phase of the design process, essentially “skinning” other designers’ work. I was assured that would not be the case. In my first 2 months I did, in fact, discover a sincere desire to redefine the role of visual design in the interaction process. However, up to this point visual design was typically tacked on at the end of projects.
• Developing a user experience strategy
  The term “user experience strategy” gets thrown around an awful lot in design circles, but few people have offered an explanation as to what it means or how to achieve it. Here’s a look at the Miskeeto approach.
• The Strange Connection between Entitlement, Social Innovation, and Interaction Design
  Students would contact me and describe how miserable they were with their jobs, asking for advice on new career paths or even entirely new professions. It wasn’t that their bosses were mean, or that their working hours were awful; it wasn’t even the larger issues we’ve all dealt with in the business context, like the misappropriation of designer as stylists, or the prioritization of technologists over designers. Instead, I began to hear how the benefits of ‘flow’ and ‘being creative’ and ‘solving really hard problems’ were being grossly outweighed by feelings of insignificance and irrelevance. My alumni were at the forefront of design, working at major consultancies and the heart of the Fortune 500 – and they didn’t feel like their work was meaningful.
• Mental Models and Usability
  Mental models have been studied by cognitive scientists as part of efforts to understand how humans know, perceive, make decisions, and construct behavior in a variety of environments. The relatively new field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has adopted and adapted these concepts to further the study in its main area of concern (usability). This document will describe mental models and usability. It will then discuss the applications and limitations of mental models as they help improve software usability. The concluding section will describe a study developed and conducted by the authors. This study suggests some potential areas for further research that could help both cognitive scientists and HCI practitioners make progress in understanding mental models.

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!!

• 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!!

• Triple Dog Dare Media – IBM Usability
  The following software was created by the IBM Ease of Use group. All we are doing is providing links to the software. We use the software in our usability and information architecture engagements, but we don't endorse it, or make any warranties, expressed or implied, blah blah blah. Use at your own risk. Has not been known to cause attention deficit disorder in small children or laboratory mice. Don't operate this equipment if you've had more than 8 martinis in the past hour. If there isn't a lifeguard on duty, then don't go into the pool.
• Rosenfeld Media – Card Sorting: Card sort analysis spreadsheet
  Over the past few years I have been slowly developing and refining a spreadsheet I use for analysis of card sorts. I have used it on many projects and find it invaluable for helping me manage the data and spot patterns.

  I use it to analyse results from physical (i.e. not software) open card sorts. It could quite easily be used for closed card sorts as well, though I haven't done that as I don't do closed sorts.

• Usability News – What’s the real value of Unmoderated Remote User Testing?
  URUT is an automated test process whereby a script or series of questions is prepared and packaged into an application. Test subjects may be invited in advance to participate, or intercepted when they enter a website. Hundreds of participants may be involved and all their data is gathered and analysed automatically. URUT can be both simple and quite sophisticated, and Fortune Global 2000 and Internet 200 companies are increasingly using Unmoderated Remote Usability Testing (URUT) as part of their user experience and usability research toolkit.
• Expert Ratings of Usability Maxims » The UX Bookmark
  Published in the ‘Ergonomics in Design’ journal in 1997. He collected and created this list of 34 thumb rules (given below in order of priority) that were found particularly useful during the design process by colleagues working in the human-computer interface (HCI) design field.

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!!

• Why your conversion rates no longer matter – iMediaConnection.com
  The ultimate measure of a website's success is its conversion rate — the percentage of visits that resulted in a sale or an inquiry. It is supposed to measure the degree to which the site converts visitors into customers. As such, it is deemed to provide the ultimate assessment of whether a site is successful or not. In a single number, it captures the appeal of the design, the ease (or otherwise) of navigation, the effectiveness of the sales pitch, and all the other factors that affect a visitor's willingness to buy from you.
• iPhone UX Reviews » Blog Archive » iPhone App Usability Heuristics
  Heuristic evaluations involve systematically inspecting a user-interface and judging its compliance with a set of heuristics. This method is a fast and effective way to identify usability flaws, however, the widely used heuristics put forth by Jakob Nielsen were originally created for desktop software. As a result the language and examples are not always appropriate for other platforms. Over the years, researchers and practitioners have evolved and expanded the heuristics to meet their needs. While there are many noteworthy efforts, nearly all of them were created before the iPhone was developed. With that in mind, I attempted to adapt Nielsen’s heuristics for the iPhone.
• How do you find usability testing participants? « Product Management Tips by Gopal Shenoy
• Facial Avoidance in Page Design « People & Technology
  The Fidelity studies show that not only were users disinclined to look at facial images of the type shown in Figure 1, but that a significant number of users were unable to find the text immediately adjacent when given a task requiring that information.
• Screening out liars from your user research- 90 Percent of Everything
  The whole point of user research is that you get to observe real members of your target user group interacting with your product. However, the cash incentive that you offer – typically £50 for an hour – is compelling enough to make some people bend the truth, and this is compounded by the chain of people involved in the recruitment. For example, if you outsource a research project to a UX consultancy, they will probably outsource the recruitment to a specialist agency, who in turn will may outsource to a number of independent freelancers. As the client sitting on the receiving end, you have to be confident that it’s being carried out in a rigorous way.

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