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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!!

• 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!!

• 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)!

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!!

• Quantifying Usability
  Software development is built around quantitative measurements. Measurements such as the time it takes an application to load, the amount of memory used, or the load on the CPU. These measurements are all easy to calculate and are wonderfully quantitative. One of the reasons some organizations tend to discount usability (both in practice and in artifacts like the severity descriptions in bug tracking systems), is an inaccurate view that usability is an amorphous and subjective thing that simply can't be scientifically quantified and measured. That assumption is incorrect.
• COHORT ANALYSIS – MEASURING ENGAGEMENT OVER TIME
  A cohort analysis is a tool that helps measure user engagement over time. It helps UX designers know whether user engagement is actually getting better over time or is only appearing to improve because of growth.
• Faceted Navigation: Showing More Values part 2
• Perception and the design of forms – Part 1: Shape
  Most of us understand, in a general way, how it is that humans see. Light hits the eye, stimulating rods and cones and sending electrical signals down the optic nerve to the brain. But have you ever stopped to think about how this biological process leads to the rich visual space that we move about and interact with every day? For example, how is it that we can know, without thinking, that the computer monitor is closer to us than the window, which is closer again than the car parked on the street outside?
• The pros and cons of A/B testing | Making Websites Easy To Use
  The use of A/B testing, where customers get different versions of the same live site to interact with, is an increasingly popular tool for website owners. However, while the company may get useful feedback and data from this testing is it really the best way forward?

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!!

• Part 1: Five challenges on the journey to mastering travel inspiration
  Travel search is changing and understanding traveler inspiration is becoming increasingly important.<br />
  Either get closer to potential customers before they have made up their mind, or let someone else do it and watch the leisure traveler of tomorrow bypass completely the transactional websites that dominate travel today.
• Faceted Navigation: Showing More Values
  My workshop on faceted Navigation Design in Cologne at the IA Konferenz 2010 was a success, from my perspective. It really got me thinking about the details of design solutions and ways to structure discussion around very specific aspects of faceted navigation. I’m also now on the look-out for different examples and techniques. This post is about how to handle the display of values, in particular how to show additional values.
• 18 Great Examples of Sketched UI Wireframes and Mockups
  Whether you’re designing a user interface for a website or an iPhone app, it’s always a good idea to start with a wireframe. It can be a big time saver if you’re able to nail down the placement of major layout elements early on in a project.
• Why You Should Adopt An ‘Accessible Content Strategy’
  Before diving too deeply into this discussion about the need for an accessible content strategy, I have a confession to make. I have never worked on a project in which content accessibility was included in the requirements. You may think that makes me a little bit like those characters played by Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara in the movie “Waiting for Guffman”; that owned a travel agency, but had never left the town in which they were born.
• Involving Stakeholders in User Testing
  Besides usability specialists, all design team members should observe usability. It's also good to invite executives. Although biased conclusions are possible, they're far outweighed by the benefits of increased buy-in and empathy.
• Encouraging negative feedback during user testing
  Have you ever sat in a user testing session, watching a user really struggle with the task at hand only to have them tell you at the end everything was easy and straight forward? How do you encourage these participants to be negative? I’ve discovered a few techniques that might be able to help.

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!!

• Classification schemes and when to use them
  When you do information architecture work you’ll realize that most sets of content can be organized in more than one way. One of the challenges for an IA project is figuring out what way works best for your audience, your content and your project’s goals.
• The Differences Between Good Designers and Great Designers
  Four years ago Cameron Moll gave a presentation on 9 skills that separate good designers and great designers. It’s a great talk and if you have the chance I suggest you at least check out the PDF slidedeck. I think the points he makes in the presentation are still relevant today and go a long way in educating us in how designers should be approaching their interactive designs.
• The Art & Science of Evidence-Based Design
  Last year, I gave a presentation at MeshU that took a behind the scenes look at how we arrive at design decisions. I've since taken clients through variations of this presentation, which is always evolving because it corresponds to such a perennial and fundamental question in our field.
• Web Savvy Typography
  Typographic styles and conventions are ever changing. Periodically you need to replenish your knowledge and stay current about trends and activities in web typography. What is the best font family to use when styling a website? Should you use pixels, ems, or percents to size fonts? What is the best font color to use? How do you make titles and headlines that look good and improve your search engine optimization? How wide should a text column be? How should you use words in italics? Read further to learn about these guidelines and more for creating web savvy typography.
• Making sense of the data: Collaborative data analysis
  I've often said that most of the value in doing user research is in spending time with users — observing them, listening to them. This act, especially if done by everyone on the design team, can be unexpectedly enlightening. Insights are abundant. But it's data, right? Now that the team has done this observing, what do you know? What are you going to do with what you know? How do you figure that out?
• How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell – The Oatmeal
• Eight interaction design and architecture videos
  The disciplines of interaction design and architecture share a number of common traits—such as a focus on solving problems for people and encouraging people to interact with products and environments in new and exciting ways—and each discipline can learn much from the other.<br />
  These eight videos highlight the work of people who see and celebrate the connections between interaction design and architecture.

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