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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!!

• Absorb Emulate and Innovate
  There’s something good to be said about mimicry. When artists learned their trade in the way old days (and often today), they were pushed by their teachers to emulate the great masters, to understand their choices, to learn their brush strokes. Sometimes, it would be years of emulation and copying before a student was set free to try her own hand at a creative work. In marketing (and in business innovation overall), I’ve made quite a habit of absorbing other ideas that make sense from other industries or verticals, emulating key elements of their methodology, and then innovating to make them make sense for me.
• 4 Unexpected Situations For Creating Content
  To an already busy small business owner or marketer, you may wonder, how in the world do I make time to create content? To blog once or more a week on top of everything else I already do?
• How to treat new employees
  A person’s first day on a new job is a stressful time even under the best of circumstances. You don’t know anyone there, you don’t know your job, you don’t know the written and unwritten rules of the workplace – and yet you have a burning desire to do well, to show your worth and to excel.
• Start – Treehotel
• Old Spice Sales Double With YouTube Campaign
• Balanced Arguments Are More Persuasive — PsyBlog
  Every argument has at least two sides, even if sometimes, we're not prepared to admit it. But in the heat of battle many people present their own side of the argument as though there's no alternative.

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!!

• Content Strategy: The Old, New Thing | Idea Engineers
  Recently, in the past year, you may have heard a lot of buzz about content strategy, as well as concepts such as ‘content curation,’ portable content and/or semantic web. Perhaps you have heard it said that content strategy is the next big thing in the interactive and digital worlds. Some proffer that ‘content is king,’ and that digital information will double or even triple in the next fear years. Others have asserted that content and content strategy will be the single most important factors in the future of the Web. For a lot of folks, these are quite bold statements that may or may not mean anything.
• What Motivates Us To Do Great Work? :: Articles :: The 99 Percent
  What motivates us to do great work? It’s an age-old question. But the age-old answers – rewards, recognition, money, stability – no longer seem to suffice. As we’ve shifted to a knowledge-based economy, it turns out that what drives us has shifted, too.
• Going Mobile: Designing for Different Screen Sizes | Promoting Your Mobile App :: UXmatters
  In this edition of Ask UXmatters—which is the first in a two-part series focusing on user experience design for mobile devices—our experts discuss<br />
  <br />
  designing for a wide range of devices with different screen sizes<br />
  promoting your mobile application
• » Using numbers to plan content Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive
  Something that’s fascinated me about online metrics since I started working in online (quite a long time ago in internet terms) is their immediacy. In fact, it’s their instancy… this real-time sense you get from actually watching people move in and out of a website or email or mobile platform—that really mesmerises. The numbers create a kind of certainty about the clicks, impressions, traffic volume… and based on those numbers we believe we can know what worked (or didn’t work). On the basis of these metrics we do more or less of the same.
• 10 great user experience blogs–Making Websites Easy To Use

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!!

• ooh.com
  Ooh.com is a free site for listing and booking trips, courses, classes, accommodation and events. We love seeing passionate people listing and selling activities you'd never normally hear about, and on Ooh.com you can book these exciting things to do directly from the people selling them.
• Mobile Usage in Japan, U.S. and Europe, Compared
  Analytics firm comScore has just released a new study on mobile usage and behavior in the Japanese, American and European markets. The report's findings highlighted the "significant differences" between the consumers in these markets, in terms of mobile connectivity, application usage, mobile social networking, media consumption, gender-related behavior and more.
• Are purchase decisions harder when shopping online?–Making Websites Easy To Use
  A lot of ecommerce sites have copied each other assuming that adding product reviews and more information is the way to get more sales. But, if anything, it is possible that the more data available at the time of purchase, the more likely people are to compare data, focus on the detail and start their quest for the perfect product elsewhere on the web.<br />
  <br />
  Perhaps online stores should encourage users to reduce their focus on data (but continue to provide this information) and instead attempt to influence a more emotional purchase decision.
• The Cooper Journal: Slanty (and underhanded) Design
  I’ve been entranced with the notion of Slanty Design ever since I read Russell Beale’s article about it in Communications of the ACM in 2007. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Slanty Design is kind of anti-affordance, a difficulty-of-use employed to achieve certain design decisions. I think even the acknowledgment of such tools mark a maturity of interaction design: it’s not solely about making things easy to use. (Just, perhaps, mostly?) Unfortunately, the use of slanty design isn’t always to encourage better behavior. Sometimes it’s just greed.
• UX Week 2010 | Andrew Crow | In-house Design Teams: The Sole of Your Organization (a Zappos Case Study) on Vimeo
  In-house design teams are our heroes. They design, build and refine the web sites and applications we use on a daily basis. They see projects through to completion and deal with tough decisions along the way.

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!!

• Test Usability By Embracing Other Viewpoints – Smashing Magazine
  As Web technology improves, users expect Web-based widgets to be useful, content to be relevant and interfaces to be snappy. They want to feel confident navigating a website and using its functionality. They crave being able to get things done with little friction and on demand. And demand they do.
• Presentation Zen: Start your presentation with PUNCH
  The primacy effect, when applied to presentations, suggests that we remember more strongly what happens at the beginning of a presentation. In order to establish a connection with an audience, we must grab their attention right from the beginning. A punchy opening that gets the audience's attention is paramount.
• Demystifying Usability : Design and Emotion: Designing for Mood
  'Getting in the mood' is the name of a paper I'll be presenting at Design and Emotion in Chicago 5-7th October 2010. Since I'm getting in the mood for the conference , here are some highlights of my latest thinking on mood, product design and interaction.
• How to recruit a UX leader with the X factor
  We're increasingly asked by organisations for advice on building a user experience competency. Our advice is to start at the top and get the right person for that first critical leadership role. User experience leaders demonstrate 3 core competencies: they understand research; they follow user experience methods and standards; and they are great communicators.
• How to Make Your Web Statistics Actionable: Search « kylejlarson.com
  If you were ill and your doctor handed you a chart including your weight, heart rate, and blood pressure and promptly sent you on your way with no analysis or feedback, he wouldn’t be your doctor for long. Without actionable analysis of the data it has very little usefulness. Website statistics are often discussed in a similarly meaningless way. I’ve suffered through many meetings where people throw around numbers with nothing more to say about them than this number has increased and that one has decreased. Most sites have some statistics available and maybe they are even reviewed occasionally, but to get real value from your statistics they must be a catalyst for action. Analyzing your on-site search and search engine keywords is a great place to get started.
• Alphabetical Sorting Must (Mostly) Die (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  Ordinal sequences, logical structuring, time lines, or prioritization by importance or frequency are usually better than A–Z listings for presenting options to users.

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!!

• 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)!