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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!!

• 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!!

• 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)!

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!!

• LukeW | User Experience Diagrams
• Card Games for Information Architects
  This article reviews 6 simple but powerful research techniques you can use to improve the information architecture of your product or web site. None of these activities require a computer. You simply need a bunch of cards, a participant and a desk.
• 10 ways you can use photos to influence the user experience | cxpartners
  As a photographer I understand how to take photos that will result in a certain reaction from the viewer. We have all seen photos that have influenced our thoughts, our feelings and ultimately our own behaviour.

  The classic image placeholder

  So why as UX designers do we ignore photos when they can be so powerful? The classic wireframes image placeholder represents nothing but a missed opportunity.

  In this article I will identify just how important choosing the right photographs can be, as well as proposing a new method for denoting photos in our wireframes.

• Better User Experience With Storytelling
  Stories have defined our world. They have been with us since the dawn of communication, from cave walls to the tall tales recounted around fires. They have continued to evolve with their purpose remaining the same; To entertain, to share common experiences, to teach, and to pass on traditions.
• Forum Nokia – User Experience Programme
• Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment
  In of itself, Agile does a good job of flexing to the winds of change. But one has to ask whether it was devised to treat a symptom of the larger cause: the business doesn’t know what it wants. While Agile enables the development team to better cope with this, it doesn’t solve the problem and in most cases creates new problems.
• A/B Test Case Study: Single Page vs. Multi-Step Checkoutc
  o when we started re-working the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store, we challenged ourselves to take it to the next level — and we cut the checkout process down to just single page.

  Structurally, the new single-page checkout looks very much like the two-page checkout, with shipping information first, followed by billing and confirmation.

  With A/B split testing, 50% of traffic was redirected to the original checkout, while the other 50% was served the new single-page checkout. After only 300 transactions, the winner was clear and we stopped the experiment after 606 transactions. Google Website Optimizer concluded that the single-page checkout outperformed the out-of-the-box checkout by a whopping 21.8%. But what does that 21.8% really mean?

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!!

• The Affinity Diagram (KJ Analysis)
  Some problems are really messy. You have lots of pieces of information that do not seem to fit together. To make matters worse, much of the information is scattered around the place and is probably not written down. People disagree about what the real problem is (if the get that far) and meetings achieve nothing, breaking up in disarray.
  This kind of problem is something of a quality professional's nightmare. There is seldom any solid quantitative data available to nail things down – it is all snippets and pieces of qualitative gossip and opinion.
  The Affinity Diagram is just the tool for solving this kind of mess, and KJ is the most common way of building the diagram.
  It is also useful as a way of organising the results of a Brainstorm, where you start with a creative idea in mind and generate number of possible ideas around it.
• Fundamentals of Leadership: Communicating a Vision
  Today's business climate of outsourcing, in-sourcing, virtual teams, and ROI-driven objectives can leave a manager at any level feeling powerless. Yet, we often see examples of those who can elicit unwavering support from their teams, driving highly effective projects, and getting the best performance from employees despite ever-increasing workloads. What is it about these individuals that makes them stand out as great leaders? Generally, the answer is the difference between a strict management model and one that includes basic principals of leadership. There are recognizable characteristics in great leaders and simple strategies anyone can adopt to improve employee performance and change the work environment for the better.
• Focus Groups Reconsidered
  Focus groups have a poor reputation in the design community. They’ve been around since the 1940s and look increasingly old-fashioned against the prevailing wave of ethnographic techniques now in vogue. If you sort through a pack of IDEO method cards you’ll find focus groups omitted with prejudice.
• The Differences between Usability and User Experience – InsideRIA
  "Usability refers to the ease with which a user can accomplish his or her goals using any tool. (…) Somewhat in contrast, user experience refers to the way a user perceives his or her interaction with a system. User experience design encompasses both interaction design and visual design and seeks to promote an interface that is pleasing to the user." (RJ Owen – InsideRIA)
• ignore the code: Realism in UI Design
  The history of the visual design of user interfaces can be described as a gradual change towards more realism. As computers have become faster, designers have added increasingly realistic details such as color, 3D effects, shadows, translucency, and even simple physics. Some of these changes have helped usability. Shadows behind windows help us see which window is active. The physicality of the iPhone’s user interface makes the device more natural to use.

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)!