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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!!

• interactions magazine | Solving complex problems through design
  What is it about design that makes it so well suited to solving complex problems? Why is design thinking such a promising avenue for business and government tackling seemingly intractable problems?
• Ten Things Your Employees Wish You Knew About Them | Fast Company
  If you think it's tough being a manager these days, try being an employee. Most are in the position of having to go with the flow because of the current economic conditions. But that doesn't necessarily mean they do so with a smile on their face. Here are ten things your employees wish you knew about them:
• Perception and the design of forms – Part 5: Proximity – Formulate Information Design
  This is the fifth article in our series about visual perception and the design of forms. We're focusing on 6 relevant principles of human perception, namely:<br />
  <br />
  Characteristics (things that are an aspect of a single object)<br />
  Shape<br />
  Size<br />
  Colour<br />
  Relationships (things that are about how multiple objects relate)<br />
  Figure/ground<br />
  Proximity<br />
  Similarity
• Why Users Fill Out Forms Faster With Top Aligned Labels | UXMovement.com
  Imag ine a user who is really excited about your prod uct or ser vice. They’re ready to sign up, so they go to your form page and start fill ing out their infor ma tion. The way you align your labels with your form fields can affect how easy it is for users to fill out the form. Do you want to give users a quick, easy and pain less expe ri ence or do you want to give them a has sle? If you want to make their expe­ri ence quick, easy and pain less, con sider using top aligned labels for your form fields.
• Use the 80-20 Rule to Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness
  80-20 rule proponent and analytics wizard Tim Ferriss has a website optimization case study of how an 80-20-optimized website received a 20%+ higher conversion rate.
• Ocado: Delivering on User Experience | UX Booth
  Good user experience design is about ensuring that at each point of engagement with your product, company, or service, you are crafting positive interactions. It is goal-oriented and outcome-focused because at each stage you are ensuring that users can easily achieve their objectives.

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!!

• 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 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!!

• SEOmoz | Lessons Learned from 21 Case Studies in Conversion Rate Optimization
  Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the newest darling of Internet Marketers, after all what good is traffic if it doesn’t convert. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending how you look at it), unlike Pay Per click (PPC) marketing, CRO isn’t a game of how much money you can throw. In fact, this field requires as much creativity, as it requires monetary investment. That’s what makes conversion rate optimization a fair arena. Your well-funded, bigger competitors can of course beat you at generating more traffic but they can’t beat you at the conversion rate game (unless you allow them to).
• How to Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration on Wireframes | Forum One: Internet Strategy, Social Media, User Experience and Web Site Development
• A List Apart: Articles: No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas
  No. One word, a complete sentence. We all learned to say it around our first birthday, so why do we have such a hard time saying it now when it comes to our work?<br />
  <br />
  Guilt. Fear. Pressure. Doubt. As we grow up, we begin to learn that not doing what others expect of us can lead to all sorts of negative consequences. It becomes easier to concede to their demands than to stand up for ourselves and for what is right.
• A List Apart: Articles: Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings
  During project-based work, every freelancer, agency, or internal department has “the kickoff meeting.” In theory, this meeting should have all the energy, excitement, and potential of the opening salvo of the Superbowl. Project team members should be inspired coming out of that meeting, full of ideas, and a desire to begin exploring solutions. Agencies and freelancers should begin to see their clients as friends and collaborators with unique insights that can only come from frank, open discussion of the design challenge at hand. But this rarely happens.
• From the Archive: American Cities Pre-1950 – Plog Photo Blog

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!!

• moritz.stefaner.eu – Elastic lists
  Elastic lists allow to navigate large, multi-dimensional info spaces with just a few clicks, never letting you run into situations with zero results. They enhance traditional UI approaches for facet browsers by visualizing weight proportions, animated transitions, emphasis of characteristic values and sparkline visualizations.
• How Organizations Can Best Support Beginner UX Designers | inspireUX – User Experience quotes and articles to inspire and connect the UX community
  There are many resources available for beginner UX designers to learn about the field on their own. In particular, Whitney Hess’ blog post series “So you wanna be a User Experience Designer” (part 1) (part 2) outlines a fantastic list of books, blogs, events, organizations, lists, workshops, conferences, and education references that can help those new to the field learn the ropes.
• Akamai Reveals 2 Seconds as the New Threshold of Acceptability for eCommerce Web Page Response Times
  The most compelling results reveal that two seconds is the new threshold in terms of an average online shopper’s expectation for a web page to load and 40 percent of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail or travel site. <br />
  <br />
  Additional findings indicate that quick page loading is a key factor in a consumer’s loyalty to an eCommerce site, especially for high spenders. 79 percent of online shoppers who experience a dissatisfying visit are less likely to buy from the same site again while 27 percent are less likely to buy from the same site’s physical store, suggesting that the impact of a bad online experience will reach beyond the web and can result in lost store sales.
• Demystifying Usability : New Study- Gender differences in Web Usability
  Comscore just released a new study last month (June 30 2010) entitled Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet (download here).<br />
  <br />
  The worldwide study adds some key insights into the growing research on gender differences on the Web and in particular around social networking usage. Why is this a big deal?
• The Four Phases of Design Thinking – Warren Berger – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review
  What can people in business learn from studying the ways successful designers solve problems and innovate? On the most basic level, they can learn to question, care, connect, and commit — four of the most important things successful designers do to achieve significant breakthroughs.
• Psychological Study of Web Designs | Abduzeedo | Graphic Design Inspiration and Photoshop Tutorials
  A website is the window to the soul of an Internet business as well as the people behind it. It may have a positive or may be a negative effect on your end result. If you take the time to think about what your visitors want and how they want to get it, then you’re already on the right track to creating a site that will tap into the psychological drives of your target audience.

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!!

• Agile and UX Coaching – Anders Ramsay.com
  Once again, Joe Sokohl comes through with key insights, pointing out something that was obvious in my mind but I did not state explicitly in the post – the idea of a UX Coach is analogous to an Agile Coach. Just like the Agile Coach is not part of a team but helps the team undergo the transformation from a traditional to an Agile approach, so too does a UX Coach help Agile teams undergo a similar transformation, from UX being a vaguely mysterious notion to something that is just another normal part of an Agile project lifecycle.
• Interviewing Users (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  Despite many weaknesses, interviews are a valuable method for exploratory user research.
• Think Vitamin » The 7 Sins of Managing Web Projects
  Managing web projects is both tough and satisfying in equal measures. Every project is a new learning curve and even though I’m educated from every project I work on, new problems are presented to me on a daily basis.
• quplo: HTML Prototyping | Konigi
  The web-based tool allows you to build multiple prototypes using a combination of standard HTML/CSS. If you can do JS, the standard JS libraries are available to include in your pages (or sheets in Quplo lingo).
• Think Vitamin » Big Wins with Quick Changes
  Once you’ve launched a site, the most important thing to do is be ready and poised to completely change it. Reacting very quickly to real-world feedback can turn unseen problem areas into strengths.
• Can UX Be Agile? :: UXmatters
  Software engineers dealing with ill‑defined problems move repeatedly between examining scenarios, clarifying requirements, defining their solution at a high level, and doing low‑level design for difficult elements.

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