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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!!

• 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!!

• Designing for Service: Creating an Experience Advantage
  We are surrounded by things that have been designed—from the utensils we eat with, to the vehicles that transport us, to the machines we interact with. We use and experience designed artifacts everyday. Yet most people think of designers as only having applied the surface treatment to a thing conceived by someone else.
• OpenHallway: Unmoderated remote usability testing with screen recording
  Inspired by the 5 second test, a lot web-based services have cropped up to support remote usability testing. In the past few years, I've been experimenting with some of these to conduct super small, unmoderated remote usability testing sessions. I've used Morae extensively in the past, but for most of my needs, that's like using a sledgehammer on a pushpin.
• Prototyping with Omnigraffle: show/hide annotations " Fuzzy Thoughts
  We use Omnigraffle Pro to generate prototypes and wireframes from one source document. It allows us to link elements (buttons, page regions, etc.) to different pages within the same document, or to run scripts. We can then export a PDF or HTML version of our static wireframes into a clickable prototype easily
• Calls to Action
  Causing action through persuasion: Attention; Interest; Desire; Action.
• "What are you suggesting?" Using images to influence:
  Here’s a little trick from psychology. Let’s say we’re having a conversation and I want to nudge the conversation in a certain direction; I want to influence what comes to mind for you. To do this, I might try using associative priming. Basically, I’ll tell a few stories or inject specific language into our conversation that your brain will pick up on, bringing associated mental objects into short term memory. A few minutes later, I might ask you a certain question. If I’ve done a good job at priming, there’s a good chance I can predict how you might respond (I suspect this is one way magicians are able to predict what someone is thinking!).

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!!

• 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!!

• 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!!

• 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)!