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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!!

• Video: The amazing John Cleese shares his wisdom… – (37signals)
  The amazing John Cleese shares his wisdom on writing, creativity, getting in the zone, and interruptions. It’s great to see advice that we hear all the time reaffirmed from outside the tech industry.
• Free Wireframing Kits, UI Design Kits, PDFs and Resources – Smashing Magazine
  To mock-up the user interface of a website, software or any other product, you’ll need some basic UI elements. And this is where wireframing kits and UI design kits come in handy. When you want to create a low-fidelity prototype for your projects, you can use these kits to give your idea a certain shape, keeping it abstract and not losing yourself in details.
• How to Make the Most of a Small Workspace
• The Top 5 Qualities of Productive Creatives (And How to Identify Them!) :: Tips :: The 99 Percent
  A recent BusinessWeek article reported that, “According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM's Institute for Business Value, CEOs identify ‘creativity’ as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.” While the study’s results will come as no surprise to hard-working creative professionals, they do raise an important question: How do we identify – and hire for – the qualities that add up to creativity? 
• Evom – Convert and Download Videos to iTunes

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

I love Seth Godin – if you don’t already, I recommend that you take a look at his (short and inspirational) Seth’s Blog. Here’s a talk he gave at TED on marketing that sums up why Seth is so great!

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!!

• How to be Insanely Productive and Still Keep Smiling | zen habits
  Do you want to be more productive? Maybe you do, but I’m sure you don’t want to feel stressed, overwhelmed, or unhappy – which happens to many super-productive people. But there is good news:
• UXMARKZ – Hand picked UX related resources
  UXMARKZ is a collection of hand picked UX related resources, updated daily. You will find interesting sites, articles, videos, images and slideshows from the field of interaction design, usability, information achitecture, user interface design and other. In order to prevent spam and keep the quality of listed resources, all submitions are moderated.
• Predicate, LLC | Editorial + Content Strategy | Predicate, LLC | Editorial + Content Strategy
  It’s 2010 and smart folks get it: the case for content strategy has been made. “Kill the ‘content phase,’” Margot Bloomstein tells us, “and help the web grow up!” But the question of approach, of *how* to do content strategy, remains fuzzy. Where does a content strategy begin and end? What’s optional and what’s required? Is there such a thing as everyday content strategy?
• Content Strategy – a knol by Jeffrey MacIntyre
  What is content strategy? Good question! We're working here to provide a basic definition of the field of interactive content strategy, its body of knowledge, and its practitioners.
• Complete Beginner’s Guide to Content Strategy | UX Booth
  A common occurrence: you or someone you know wants to create content and have it published online. A slightly less common occurrence? Having that same someone articulate high aspirations for their content. For those select few, instead of creating content destined for some digital landfill, their content is special; it’s going places and it’s taking them, their brand, and their experience with it.
• The Cooper Journal: Combating availability bias
  If you’re involved in the design of products, you run into this problem all the time. Stakeholders use their own most easily-retrieved examples to compare against, whether it’s the CEO who is influenced by the pundit he read that morning, or the product manager who knows that one guy who is just like your target market, or the designer who is really designing for himself — the self being the extreme “available example.”
• Creative Review – What Interns Really Want
  A recent CR blog post requested advice for new graduates and interns about how to navigate the world of work. But what about advice for employers in return? As part of their final project at LCC, graduates Paul Cooke & Jemma Mackle created Mind The Gap, which includes ten pieces of advice for employers from interns…

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)!