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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!!

• Try the "Lightening Quick" Mental Model Method
  When I was making a lot of mental models in the get-it-to-market-yesterday dot com boom of the late 1990's, I used a technique that resulted in a mental model plus gap analysis brainstorm in the course of one day. Now that it's the not-in-this-economy post economic slump, I think it's time to put this technique to use again. Today, in fact, I got together with a group of nine talented design agency folks and we spent 2.75 hours putting together a set of towers based on 24 individual stories, and then spent rest of the day brainstorming ideas to support those towers. Here's how we did it.
• Playing Well with Others: Design Principles for Social Augmented …
  Technical barriers to delivering augmented reality (AR) experiences on a broad scale are falling rapidly
• The Craft of Interaction Design
  The following text is a transcript of a talk by Gillian Crampton-Smith at Innovation Forum Interaction Design, Potsdam, March 2007. The aim of the two-day conference was to focus on all aspects of interface and interaction design: mobile telephone and media interfaces, problem solutions and product visions, web pages and virtual worlds, art and commerce, business and science. Using both concrete projects and visionary concepts, current developments in interaction design were presented and discussed by regional and international experts from the design, research and business worlds.
• The Panic Status Board
  …The idea quickly grew beyond “Project Status”, and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information. What you’re actually looking at is an internal-only webpage that updates frequently using AJAX which shows:
• Do’s and Don’ts of Usability Testing
  Usability testing is one of the least glamorous, but most important aspects of user experience research. Over the years, it has also been one of the forms of user research we have performed most frequently. In doing so, we’ve learned quite a few best practices and encountered some potential pitfalls. We think it’s important that we share what we’ve learned with the many stakeholders, designers, and engineers who might find this information helpful.
• Autocomplete design pattern
  Problem summary: The user needs to enter information into a text box which is prone to be mis-typed, hard to remember, or ambiguous.

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!!

• Better User Experience With Storytelling, Part 2 – Smashing Magazine
  Concluding this two-part article, we hear from creative professionals who are leading the way in this relatively new world of combining the craft of storytelling with user experience. We’ll also see how storytelling can be applied to more than just interactive experiences: we find it in everything from packaging to architecture.
• The Usability Mindset: What You Need to Know Before Implementing User …
  To succeed, you're going to have to shift the core belief system of your organization. If you can't pull this off, you'll encounter resistance at every turn, and your project is destined for failure.
• Hierarchy of Need
  The Hierarchy of Needs was devised by the psychologist Abraham Maslow (1943) and is a theory of motivation. The hierarchy comprises the following five needs: 1. Physiological, 2. Safety, 3. Social, 4. Esteem, 5. Self-actualisation. Maslow argued that the lower-order 'deficiency needs' (1-3) have to be met before the higher-order 'growth needs' (4-5) can be satisfied. As each of the needs is satisfied, so the need at the next level becomes more important to the individual.
• Creating successful style guires
  Style guides are a great way to ensure user experience consistency when developing an application and a way to communicate user experience standards across an organization. They can be application specific, platform specific, and may encompass enterprise-wide standards. A style guide can help make the development of user interfaces more efficient and help ensure good user interface design practices.
• The user experience design career path
  User experience (UX) design has a reputation for being both hard to get into and hard to progress from. I talked about how to get into UX design in my last article, so now I want to talk about where you go once you get in. In some ways, this is actually a harder problem. There are books that introduce you to UX design but none that really show you how to branch out once you’ve established yourself as a UX designer
• THE USAGE LIFECYCLE
  When you start framing design in terms of the usage lifecycle, you begin to see how each stage has different design challenges. What was a huge show-stopping issue for users at first contact is never a problem for them in later stages. What is a complex issue during regular use never occurs to someone just starting out. In this way the point at which people are in the lifecycle determines context for the user as much as anything else. Just as much as we need to “know your user” we need to know what they’re doing…rather, where they are in the usage lifecycle.
• FormFiftyFive – Design inspiration from around the world

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!!

• iPhone Apps Need Low Starting Hurdles
  Most mobile applications are used only intermittently, so they must be especially easy during initial use. In particular, upfront registration shouldn't be required before users experience an app's benefits.
• Analytics – The Usability Lab of the decade
  10 to 15 years ago the usability laboratory was the must-have for vetting and testing your design ideas. But more nimble development processes and new tools seem to have superseded the usability lab.
• Overlays in web forms
  Not all people require all the input fields within a Web form at all times. Instead, forms can provide additional input fields to the people that need them without getting in the way of people that don’t. A common way to display these additional options is to use an overlay: a set of additional input fields that sits on top of a form like a dialog window on your computer’s desktop.
• Words that Zing
• Northern Lights | A Nature Phenomena
  These breathtaking images were taken by photographer Aurora Borilis.

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!!

• 10×10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris
  10×10 is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.
• Making Users Buy Online – The Importance of Building …
  With online sales rising to 9.8% of the total retail sales in the UK in 2008* and 12.6% of businesses selling online (Office of National Statistics), the role of company websites is still enhancing often becoming a central part of the offered customer experience.
• Design the stakeholder experience | Front to back
  To get the stakeholders on track for a successful UX project, use your skills and design the stakeholder experience.
• Video: The right way to wireframe
• Improve conversions by connecting with your audience
  Lots of people design sites based on what they would like to see. However, what makes sense to a designer may not make sense to their target audience. If designers seek to create a conversion-friendly web experience we’re going to have to learn about our audience and what makes them tick.

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!!

Here is a selection of bookmarks for May 12th:

• The TED Commandments – rules every speaker needs to know
  I discovered one of the reasons the speeches are so good… TED’s organisers send upcoming speakers a stone tablet, engraved with the ‘TED Commandments”. Amy Tan in her TED Talk described the arrival of the TED Commandments as “something that creates a near-death experience; but near-death is good for creativity…”.
• The History of Eating Utensils
  The Department of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences houses the Rietz Collection of Food Technology. Containing nearly 1,400 items, this collection was assembled by Carl Austin Rietz, an inventor and businessman in the food industry. His interest in the industry led him on travels around the world to collect objects used in the production, processing, storage, presentation, preparation, and serving of food.
• 10 Transition Effects: The art of Showing/Hiding Content | DevSnippets
• Nick’s Top User Experience Books | Blog | Nick Finck | UX/IA Pro, Speaker, and Community Cultivator.
  So today there have been a few mentions of the The UX Book Club‘s Top UX Books list (Most notably: Louis Rosenfeld and Paul Seys). I believe this list suppose to be based on the recommendations from all of the UX Book Clubs around the world… tho the Seattle UX Book Club was never informed of this list, or at least it’s members weren’t. A good list none the less.
• Analysis, Plus Synthesis: Turning Data into Insights :: UXmatters
  Conducting primary user research such as in-depth interviews or field studies can be fairly straightforward, when compared with what you face upon returning to the office with piles of notes, sketches, user journals, and audio and video recordings. You may ask, What should I do with all this data? and How do I turn it into something meaningful?
• Putting people first » Bringing the everyday life of people into design
  Products play a role in our everyday lives. Insight into the experiences of people in their everyday lives is of great use for designing products. For example, the contexts in which products are used (physical, social, culture etc.) and the state (excited, tired, concentrated etc.) of the users influence how they experience using products. However, in design practice using this type of diverse, subjective and multi-layered information, as inspirational input for the design process, is a recent development.

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