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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!!

• Designing Objectively | UX Magazine
  It’s a common misconception that art and design are one and the same. But although design can be artful, the process behind it is quite different.<br />
  Artists engage in the manipulation of a particular medium to produce an aesthetic and personal response. Art is valued for its originality and ability to express an idea. Some people get it, some don’t, and that’s okay. Design, on the other hand, must solve a specific problem relative to a particular user or task, and is evaluated simply by how effective it is at solving that problem. If it doesn’t work, then it failed—period.
• The Creativity Trigger / FINCH
  Our creative thinking is quite dependent on technology and our connection to others. Take a moment to consider to what extent we are connected: Twitter, Facebook, Dribbble, Forrst, blah blah blah… I don’t have to go on. That connection to the community is something we tap into everyday. We rely on it for knowledge and inspiration.
• Best Practice on Basket Abandonment Emails « RedEye International
  At RedEye we are soon to launch a Benchmarking Report on Behavioural Email Marketing, but one of the standout statistics strikes me as important. According to RedEye’s own research, less than 10% of the top 100 UK e-commerce sites (as defined by Hitwise) currently do basket abandonment email (the research is reassuring, however, because half of those that do are RedEye clients!).
• Download the cards – Design with Intent Toolkit
  101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design
• The Influence of Fleeting Attraction — PsyBlog
  Compliance to a simple request can be doubled by the most innocent manipulation.
• Afghanistan, October, 2010 – The Big Picture – Boston.com

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!!

• YouTube – Broadcast Yourself.
  CS 547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design) is a Stanford University course that features weekly speakers on topics related to human-computer interaction design. The seminar is organized by the Stanford HCI Group, which works across disciplines to understand the intersection between humans and computers. This playlist consists of seminar speakers recorded during the 2008-2009 academic year.
• Why We Sketch
  It seemed the conference room got brighter, as if, for the team staring at the whiteboard, light bulbs just went on. There was a collective sense of "Ohhh, I get it now."<br />
  <br />
  It was the culmination of a very confusing discussion, where everyone thought they knew what they were talking about, but, as it turns out, nobody was on the same page. In a moment of frustration, one junior team member—a designer—stepped up to the whiteboard and declared, "This is what I think we're talking about."<br />
  <br />
  Turns out the junior designer got it wrong. Yet his design spurred the idea's progenitor to rush to the board, grab the pen, and quickly correct the mistakes.<br />
  <br />
  That's when the group sighed their collective "ohhh" and the room lit up. The shift had happened. Up until now, they were talking about WHAT they were trying to do. Now, they could talk about HOW they would do it.
• Playing Hard to Get: Using scarcity to influence behavior | UX Magazine
  Microsoft recently announced an upcoming price increase for the XBox Live Gold membership fee. When this news broke, a few retailers such as NewEgg responded by pushing their existing stock of gift cards (selling the membership at the older, lower price). It was fascinating to watch people scramble to get their hands on the remaining gift cards. Even people who hadn’t yet tried XBox Live purchased some of the gift cards, explaining, “they won’t be around for long—now’s the last chance to buy a year membership at the current price.”
• Mobile Usability (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  In user testing, website use on mobile devices got very low scores, especially when users accessed "full" sites that weren't designed for mobile.
• Animals in the news – The Big Picture – Boston.com

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!!

• Facebook: 7 Highly Effective Habits — PsyBlog
  Love it or loathe it, Facebook is everywhere, and will continue to be everywhere as the film describing its genesis—The Social Network—is released worldwide over coming months.<br />
  <br />
  To help you cope, here are 7 research-based tips for total Facebook domination. If you don't use it, these should at least help you pepper Facebook-related conversations with compelling observations from the psychological research.
• Don’t stand still while your users evolve–Making Websites Easy To Use
  As new technology arrives in users hands, their expectations are raised. When technology evolves, they get used to new functionality and use their new found learning to form expectations. When using a new website, or one they haven’t used for a while, they bring with them their learning and expectations from other sites and expect the new site to behave in the same way. In usability testing, we regularly hear users saying that they expected the search function to make suggestions while typing, just like Google does. Or, that they expect to be able to quickly filter the products shown on a page just like they can on Asos.com.
• Don’t stand still while your users evolve–Making Websites Easy To Use
  Using our sat nav on the way to see a client the other day, we wondered why the touchscreen seemed less responsive than normal. After some thought, we realised that it wasn’t the sat nav that had changed, instead we had become accustomed to the fast and highly responsive iPhone touch screen interface and have now come to expect everything to work like that.
• UsabilityPost – A Motive For Bad Design
  Browse around some content sites on the web—magazines, blogs, news sites—and you’ll quickly notice a lot of bad design. Bad design in the sense that the page isn’t working on making things easy to read for you as the visitor, but instead seems to be pushing ads and links in your face, making for a cluttered and confusing experience.
• What Websites Can Learn From Mobile | UX Booth
  Mobile applications and websites are hugely popular right now. Limitations of the mobile hardware has meant that certain design conventions need to be used to make them a success. Could some of these mobile conventions be used to improve your website design?
• A List Apart: Articles: Testing Accordion Forms
  “Three point five pages.” It’s my usual answer when someone asks me “how long should my web form be?” And believe it or not, many people ask. It may be the most common web form design question I get asked. So I’m not exactly ecstatic that my tongue–in–cheek answer mostly draws blank stares and very few laughs. You see, it turns out this is a topic that many people take quite seriously.
• Oktoberfest 2010 – The Big Picture – Boston.com

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!!

• Think Vitamin » Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps
  In February 2010 Fred Wilson, a New York based tech investor, spoke at the annual Future of Web Apps Miami conference. His talk, clocking in at just under 30 minutes, looks at his top 10 principles for creating a successful web app. A full transcript is available below.
• Memory Inception: Three Keys To Creating A Great User Experience For Your Product
  Ever read a great book? What do you remember about it? Maybe a few dramatic moments, some wild story twists, and most definitely the ending. Your product is just like a book. You’re telling a story to your customers and they’ll remember only a select few moments from what you tell them. What are these moments? Can you use these moments to plant a memory in a customer’s mind?
• Russia in color, a century ago – The Big Picture – Boston.com
• Now that the oil well is capped… – The Big Picture – Boston.com
• How the top ten airlines in the world use Facebook | Tnooz
  US-based Delta Airlines secured nothing if only bragging rights last week when it unveiled the world’s first airline booking engine within Facebook.<br />
  Obvious questions came over its effectiveness as a marketing tool, value to the consumer, impact on its existing booking channels and integration (or not) with existing social media features on Facebook.<br />
  The answers to all of these take nothing away from the fact that Delta is taking Facebook seriously and its move is likely to trigger a wave of similar applications being launched by other airlines.<br />
  But what of the other leading airlines around the world?
• disambiguity » Adaptability – Essential Soft Skills for User Experience Practitioners
  As User Experience practitioners, we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the skills we don’t have or have enough of and trying to acquire 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!!

• 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)!