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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!!

• 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)!

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!!

• Navigating disagreement: How to keep your eye on the evidence
  Heeding others' impressions often increases accuracy. But "agreement" and "majoritarianism" are not magic; in a given circumstance, agreement is or isn't useful for *intelligible* reasons.
• Content Strategy for Everybody (Even You)
  Web content is the meat in the sandwich, not the icing on the cake. Too often, organizations build websites and then neglect the content, letting it languish, unread and unloved. Even during website redesigns, the editorial process gets short shrift in favor of building shiny new features and creating fancy new designs. Thinking about the content is always left until the last minute, always thought to be “somebody else’s problem.”
• Eight Short Studies On Excuses
• Designing for Social Interaction – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind …
  It took both the telephone and the mobile phone 15 years to amass 100 million users, but Facebook did it in 9 months. We see more and more people becoming connected on online social networks, and it seems our networks are growing exponentially. But the reality is, social networks rarely add to our number of connections. We’ve already met almost all the people we’re connected to on social networks. We’re already connected to these people offline. Social networks simply make the connections visible. For example, we often connect with old school friends, and catch up over a couple of wall posts. But rarely do we continue the conversation once we’ve connected, and over time we forget that the connections exist. In fact, Facebook users often have no interactions with up to 50% of their connections.1 When we study how people are interacting on social networks, we see that most interactions are with a very small subset of the people we’re connected to.
• Case study of agile and UCD working together – Boxes and Arrows: The …
  Large scale websites require groups of specialists to design and develop a product that will be a commercial success. To develop a completely new site requires several teams to collaborate and this can be difficult. Particularly as different teams may be working with different methods.<br />
  <br />
  This case study shows how the ComputerWeekly user experience team integrated with an agile development group. It’s important to note the methods we used do not guarantee getting the job done. People make or break any project. Finding and retaining good people is the most important ingredient for success.

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!!

• Iceland’s disruptive volcano
  Today, British civil aviation authorities ordered the country's airspace closed as of noon, due to a cloud of ash drifting from the erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. The volcano has erupted for the second time in less than a month, melting ice, shooting smoke and steam into the air and forcing hundreds of people to flee rising floodwaters. The volcanic ash has forced the cancellation of many flights and disrupted air traffic across northern Europe, stranding thousands of passengers. Collected here are photos of the most recent eruption, and of last month's eruptions, which were from the same volcano, just several miles further east. (17 photos total)
• Top 10 YouTube Videos About Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs
• Designing for Interaction: Design Research
  If only a small bit of the typical time, money, and resources used to make and market a product or service were put towards design research—observing, talking to, and maybe even making artifacts with customers and users—the products and services we use would be greatly improved. Dan Saffer explains.
• The Secret to Designing an Intuitive UX
  Imagine that you’ve never seen an iPad, but I’ve just handed one to you and told you that you can read books on it. Before you turn on the iPad, before you use it, you have a model in your head of what reading a book on the iPad will be like. You have assumptions about what the book will look like on the screen, what things you will be able to do, and how you will do them—things like turning a page, or using a bookmark. You have a “mental model” of reading a book on the iPad, even if you’ve never done it before.
• Watch Air Traffic – LIVE!
• Why You Need A Content Strategist?
  Are you investing in your content? Do you have a strategy? If not then help is at hand. You need a content strategist, but who are they and what do they do?

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!!

• Overcoming egocentrism – where to next for the UX research industry?
  Egocentrism is something that we largely grow out of in childhood. There’s a famous test in developmental psychology called Piaget’s 3 mountains task (shown below). When you give it to 2-6 year old children, most of them fail. As soon as kids reach 6 years old, they start passing the test in much greater numbers.
• UK retail mega menu navigation review
  Web navigation is a key area for usability and new navigation methods are introduced frequently as web programming languages evolve. The last twelve months has seen several large retail sites using 'mega menus' as their primary navigation structure. In this article we have reviewed five popular retails sites in the UK with regards to the usability of the mega menus in the site, and we have developed our own check list and criteria to test against.
• Gathering variables for AB split testing
  A/B split testing is no longer an enigmatic term amongst web professionals; countless articles and books cover the basics. What more, access to tools such as Visual Website Optimizer (disclaimer: this is my startup)—which simplify the setup and maintenance of A/B tests have—have made the testing process itself as straightforward as possible. Despite this, though, A/B split testing isn’t part and parcel for UX designers and internet marketers. The question then becomes: why not?
• 25 OUTSTANDING ILLUSTRATIONS FOR INSPIRATION
  We are all aware of the hard work and time it required to come up with a unique and beautiful Illustration and well aware of the importance of Inspiration. Today, We have compiled illustrations based on human characters and cartoons. I decided not to come up with a large showcase and tried to focus on quality and uniqueness. One can find Inspirational character illustration in digital art, in traditional art, vector illustrations, pencil sketches and other in the showcase. Feel free to share your opinion about what you see.
• Agile Personas
  One of the most consistent patterns I see among those integrating UX and Agile is a business-as-usual approach to Personas, i.e. continuing to create them largely in the same way as in a traditional waterfall practice. Doing so, in my opinion, is a mistake, and reflects a lack of understanding both of the purpose behind Personas and the thinking underlying an Agile practice.
• From Here to Experience
  At the IA Summit in Phoenix, AZ Jared Spool outlined the role of an experience vision in keeping design teams focused and innovating. Here's my notes from his presentation From Here to Experience:

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!!

• 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 />
  <br />
  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)!