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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!!

• VisualDNA™ – We transform unknown users into known users
  Users profile themselves by taking one of our highly viral image quizzes – Our API sends the user's personality, interests, and purchase intent to your site – Your site is then able to provide more relevant content to the user
• Selling UX to small business
  It’s 2010 and everyone loves usability, right? It may may look that way from our comfortable perches atop the blogosphere, but if you’ve tried to sell usability services to small businesses, you know that it can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience.
• Designers, meet Agile
  As an interaction designer working in an Agile environment, I’ve recently been asked by several colleagues in non-Agile arenas – folks in agency settings, consultancies, or in-house software companies – what it’s really like in terms of design workflow and output. Their questions have touched on everything from the day-to-day differences to the quality of the designs coming out of the process, and their perspectives have ranged from casual-and-curious, to scared-and-skeptical (e.g., “Oh, it’s just a fad” and “There’s that vast Agile agenda again.”)
• Why User Competency Matters in Social Design
  In designing for social participation, we can consider user goals and needs — even interests, features, functionality, adoption and scaling issues. Best practices and popular ways of using social media guide us in our decisions. But there’s a basic concern we seem to often overlook: “What is the user good at?”
• interactions magazine | Technology First, Needs Last: The Research-Product Gulf
  I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: Design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories, but essentially useless when it comes to breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examining of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had a huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane, small, continual improvements. Call one a conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn’t happen.
• The Virtues of a UX Professional
  UX professionals can be an egotistical lot. We like to think that only certain people with certain qualities can do what we do. Not everybody has the right stuff to fly to the moon or storm the beaches at Normandy. And in a similar way (sort of) not everybody has what it takes to create great user experiences.

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!!

• From whole to hole: a recipe for a holistic design process
  Great interaction design is a delicious soup. You boil a variety of different ingredients and spices in the right proportion, and voila – pure bliss! Unlike other branches of design, however, it’s extremely hard to write a recipe for interaction design. By its very nature, the interaction design process needs to be fluid and dynamic.

  Interaction design tingles the complete experience over time. It tastes most satisfying in conditions when multifaceted flavors and ingredients are brought together. The bigger the challenges are —the more diverse and mixed the ingredients need to be. This beautiful paradox sits at the heart of the interaction design menu, very differently from other design cuisines.

• Google Liquid Galaxy live demo at TED
  Google's Liquid Galaxy is engineer Jason Holt's 20% time project, a wraparound view of 8 LCD screens providing a truly immersive experience of Google Earth and Street View.
• Rich Internet Application Screen Design
  Designing a rich Internet application (RIA) can test even an experienced design team. The hardest challenge is to blend Web and desktop paradigms to create a responsive and intuitive experience. Some paradigms that exist in the desktop environment are ill-suited for the Web, while many of the Web paradigms people are familiar with (paging, explicit refresh) are no longer necessary with RIA technologies like Flex and Ajax.
• Web Form Innovations on Mobile Devices
  Mobile Web forms tend to have significantly more constraints than their desktop cousins: mobile screens are smaller; connection speeds are slower; entering text is harder; and so on. As a result, it's generally a good idea to limit the number of Web forms in mobile applications and sites. In situations where you do have to get input from people on mobile devices, radio buttons, checkboxes, select menus, and lists tend to fare much better than open text fields.
• Beyond Usability: Cool, Usable and Persuasive Web Design
  Even die-hard web usability zealots agree that being easy to use is just a starting point. To be truly effective, a website must also be beautiful, inspiring and (in most cases) persuasive. But very few people are experts in usability, graphic design and marketing.

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

I love this concept – a really usable and innovative approach. The Eko light informs drivers just how long they will be waiting.

The Eko traffic light

Eko light is a simple yet, highly practical concept for traffic lights that not only helps preserve the environment by reducing pollution but promotes safer driving as … morewell. Eko can be easily installed onto existing traffic light systems without much effort while significantly improving overall traffic dynamics.

Designer Damjan Stanković has a really excellent idea here