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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!!

• Get Mental Notes
  In the midst of a busy project it's all too easy to forget the nuances that distinguish great products. Mental Notes brings together 50 insights from psychology into an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to the design of Web sites, Web apps, and software applications.
• Concerning Fidelity in Design
  People swear by their design processes. Rachel Glaves insists on sketching by hand; Dan Brown urges extensive wireframing; while Ryan Singer goes straight to HTML. Heated debates arise at conferences as advocates staunchly defend their favorite techniques.
• Interface – the ultimate mockup & prototyping tool for iPhone & iPad …
  A nice mockup & prototyping tool that runs right on your iPhone.
• Conversion Room: 7 ways to improve your call to action
  If you only had 5 seconds to sell your product, what would you do? Your landing pages have, on average, about 5 seconds before visitors decide to stay or bounce.
• Cooper Journal: Reconciling Market Segments and Personas
  Market segmentation and personas are two different techniques that are often perceived as conflicting methods, but they are actually complementary tools that organizations can use to design and sell successful products.
• A List Apart: Articles: Sign Up Forms Must Die
  I’ll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die. In the introduction to this book I described the process of stumbling upon or being recommended to a web service. You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form.

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!!

• Mobile First Helps with Big Issues
  During part of our conversation on the Big Web Show yesterday, Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Benjamin, and I discussed some of the ways designing for mobile first can help mitigate some of the thorny issues that have plagued designers for years.
• Interdisciplinarity vs Cross-Disciplinarity
  Interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinarity have been buzzwords for the last few years, especially in education. I teach on the COFA Online Masters of Cross-Disciplinary Art & Design and in my main position at the Hochschule Luzern – Design & Kunst (HSLU), the phrase regularly enters discussions. The terms are used often interchangeably and often without really explaining what they mean. As so often is the case, the idea seems to be that by just talking about disciplines working together magic things will happen.
• So, You Want to Do User Research: Characteristics of Great Researchers
  One of the best things about user research is that anyone can do it. On the other hand, it takes real commitment and a lot of personal development to do user research well. People commonly assume that research is research—and doing any kind of research is better than doing none at all. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Not all user research is created equal. Flawed research can be a significant liability to the success of a product, as well as the company developing it, so it really is important to get it right.
• Designing with Behavioral Economics
  Behavioral economics…has emerged as a discipline, bringing together economics and psychology to understand how social, cognitive, and emotional factors influence how people make decisions, both as individuals and at the market level.
• Personas as User Assistance and Navigation Aids
  To understand how these users would access and use the Body of Knowledge, we decided to create personas that would let us envision what type of structure it should have and communicate our findings….

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 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!!

• Why your conversion rates no longer matter – iMediaConnection.com
  The ultimate measure of a website's success is its conversion rate — the percentage of visits that resulted in a sale or an inquiry. It is supposed to measure the degree to which the site converts visitors into customers. As such, it is deemed to provide the ultimate assessment of whether a site is successful or not. In a single number, it captures the appeal of the design, the ease (or otherwise) of navigation, the effectiveness of the sales pitch, and all the other factors that affect a visitor's willingness to buy from you.
• iPhone UX Reviews » Blog Archive » iPhone App Usability Heuristics
  Heuristic evaluations involve systematically inspecting a user-interface and judging its compliance with a set of heuristics. This method is a fast and effective way to identify usability flaws, however, the widely used heuristics put forth by Jakob Nielsen were originally created for desktop software. As a result the language and examples are not always appropriate for other platforms. Over the years, researchers and practitioners have evolved and expanded the heuristics to meet their needs. While there are many noteworthy efforts, nearly all of them were created before the iPhone was developed. With that in mind, I attempted to adapt Nielsen’s heuristics for the iPhone.
• How do you find usability testing participants? « Product Management Tips by Gopal Shenoy
• Facial Avoidance in Page Design « People & Technology
  The Fidelity studies show that not only were users disinclined to look at facial images of the type shown in Figure 1, but that a significant number of users were unable to find the text immediately adjacent when given a task requiring that information.
• Screening out liars from your user research- 90 Percent of Everything
  The whole point of user research is that you get to observe real members of your target user group interacting with your product. However, the cash incentive that you offer – typically £50 for an hour – is compelling enough to make some people bend the truth, and this is compounded by the chain of people involved in the recruitment. For example, if you outsource a research project to a UX consultancy, they will probably outsource the recruitment to a specialist agency, who in turn will may outsource to a number of independent freelancers. As the client sitting on the receiving end, you have to be confident that it’s being carried out in a rigorous way.

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