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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!!

• A List Apart: Articles: The Discipline of Content Strategy
  We, the people who make websites, have been talking for fifteen years about user experience, information architecture, content management systems, coding, metadata, visual design, user research, and all the other disciplines that facilitate our users’ abilities to find and consume content.
• adaptive path » blog » Kim Cullen » “Um…hello? Is this thing on?” Personal Voice in UX Design.
  I recently finished a 6 month project here at AP and after the final presentation one of my teammates asked, “So how would you describe your design style? I don’t know anything about it.” It seemed an odd question given that we had been working together for the last several months and I had just presented extensive visual design deliverables. But when it came down to it those deliverables did not, in fact, reflect anything about my personal design style.
• Thoughts on Interaction Design – Welie.com » Blog Archive » Developing a Strategy and Vision (part 1)
  In my previous post on Strategy and Vision I discussed what they are and what the differences are. But of course what is far more interesting is how to develop a good vision and strategy. If you already have a vision you are in a luxury position and you ‘only’ need to find the best strategy. If you don’t have a vision yet, you have a lot of work ahead of you. However, it is not as bad as it seems because even if you have a vision there is still a lot to do. Let’s assume for now that you already have a vision.
• Larry Constantine on Agile Experience Design | Agile UX
  In part 1, Larry insists on deep philosophical differences and variance in practices… As a UX practitioner and Agile Coach, involved in various agile projects, I unfortunately have to confirm some of his observations:
• YouTube – WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson
  One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on-in exhilarating style-one of our key questions: Where do good ideas come from?

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!!

• Top ten simple design tips for online travel startups | Tnooz
  The commercial internet is not even 20 years old but the opportunities, especially in the travel sector, have never been greater. But unless the design is at your core, even the best business plan and the smartest team will fail.
• Quality Assurance as Applied to User Experience Design | inspireUX – User Experience quotes and articles to inspire and connect the UX community
  Quality Assurance (QA) is a critical part of any web or application development project.  QA helps to verify that a project has met the project’s requirements and technical specifications without bugs or other defects.  The aim is to identify issues prior to product launch.  Most QA initiatives focus on following predefined test cases, which meticulously outline required functionality by stating an input and expected response.  In order for QA to be successful, requirements must be clearly articulated and changes must be communicated effectively.
• A List Apart: Articles: Strategic Content Management
  Trying to fix an organization’s content problems by installing a content management system (CMS) is like trying to save a marriage by booking a holiday. We know that a successful web project needs a content strategy—but when it comes to the CMS, we stop thinking strategically. Despite all the talk about user-centered design, we rarely consider the user experience of the editorial team—the people who implement the content strategy. We don’t design a CMS, we install it.
• benji | ben martineau | art & design
  Below are a handful of design projects I have worked on over the recent years from both client and personal workings. Unfortunately the extent of my works cannot be displayed publicly though I believe those below are indicative of me as a designer. I strive to create simple, minimalistic, grid-based design solutions across all media with the majority being digtal.
• What Makes Them Click » Blog Archive » 100 Things You Should Know About People: #42 — We’ll spend more money if you don’t mention money – Applying Psychology to Understand How People Think, Work, and Relate
  Cassie Mogilner and Jennifer Aaker from the Stanford Graduate School of Business conducted a series of experiments to see whether references to time or references to money would affect whether people stop to buy, how much people are willing to pay, and how satisfied people are with the products they buy. They conducted 5 experiments. The first one was the lemonade stand described above:

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!!

• Information Gathering: A Roundup of UX Applications | UX Booth
  The number of applications available for User Experience professionals is ever-expanding much of this growth happening over the last year! As a consequence, experts are increasingly turning to novel tools in order to collect data and generate reports regards their websites. While some UX designers suggest that local testing is the best way to gather data, we decided to round up these up-and-coming applications and see just what makes them tick.
• Sketching Fundamentals | UX Booth
• Gestalt Principles Applied in Design
  Web designers, like other artists and craftsmen, impose structure on the environment. We enforce order and beauty on the formless void that is our blank computer screen.
• Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control? | Blog | design mind
  Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since Henry Chesbrough’s seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003. However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good time to reframe “Open” from a design point of view.
• The Six Elements Of An Experience « Customer Experience Matters
  SLICE-B breaks an experience down into six distinct components:<br />
  Start. The extent to which the customer is drawn into the experience.<br />
  Locate. The ease in which the customer can find what she needs.<br />
  Interact. The ease in which the customer can understand and control the experience.<br />
  Complete. The confidence that the customer has that her goal was accomplished.<br />
  End. The transition into next steps.<br />
  Brand Coherence. The reinforcement of a company’s brand.
• Shortboredsurfer – 11 Principles of Interaction Design explained
  This post isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of interaction design principles, its merely an introduction to the subject. And I’m definitely not going to attempt to enter the lions den of defining what ‘interaction design’ is, that’s for another day!

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!!

• The 4 questions to ask in a cognitive walkthrough
  Although the cognitive walkthrough gets less coverage than Nielsen’s heuristic evaluation, it’s just as effective at uncovering interaction problems. It’s also an ideal way to identify problems that users will have when they first use an interface, without training
• Considering Prototypes | UX Booth
  Although prototypes have been used in other domains for quite a while, their value to the design & development of websites has only recently taken shape, so to speak. Modern websites take a lot of work. Whether the ramifications of their creation are uncovered at the outset—typically with design and development considerations—or in the longterm—how is archived content going to be accessed? is this the best way we could have designed this?—building a prototype allows us to explore natural omissions made during the design process in an efficient, cost–effective way.
• The importance of sketching and why you should be doing it :: 10,000 Words :: where journalism and technology meet
  Sketching allows you to share your vision of a project with others early in the design process before you begin working with time-consuming tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Flash. For example, in my role as a multimedia producer for California Watch, I sketched my vision for multimedia components during or before talking with the reporter or editors. The sketches — sometimes made on the fly using giant Post-It notes — allowed my colleagues to see exactly what I had in mind and make suggestions and amendments before too much time was sunk into the project.
• Updating Our Understanding of Perception and Cognition: Part II :: UXmatters
  Many college-educated people have read about “the magical number seven, plus or minus two,” psychologist George Miller proposed as the number of items humans can retain in their short-term memory (Miller, 1956). Later research has found that, in the experiments Miller reviewed, some items that were presented for people to remember could be chunked—that is, considered related—making it appear that people’s short-term memory held more items than it actually did. When the experiments were revised to disallow chunking, they showed that the capacity of short-term memory is more like four, plus or minus one—that is, short-term memory can hold only three to five items (Broadbent, 1975).
• Creative Ways to Use Unmoderated User Research :: UXmatters
  Over the past year or two, unmoderated usability testing has become a popular option to help guide product design. It is especially popular for Web sites, providing startups the opportunity to get relatively quick-and-easy user feedback on design iterations. From a user research perspective, the improper use of unmoderated research services presents a certain amount of danger. However, there are a number of ways you can use unmoderated user research tools that can provide a great deal of value. This month, we’ll discuss some of the more interesting ways in which you can derive value from unmoderated research tools.
• Why Agile UX is Meaningless without an Agile Attitude – Anders Ramsay.com
  Imagine yourself walking down a fictional hall in a fictional office building and passing two different offices.  In the first office sits a UX designer, busily plugging away at a deck of wireframes, preparing to review them with the rest of the team.  In the second office sits another UX designer, also busily plugging away at a deck of wireframes, preparing to review them with the rest of the team. At the surface level, these practitioners appear identical.  And yet, they are worlds apart.
• 500 Internal Server Error
  500 Internal Server Error

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!!

• Reductionism in Web Design
  It’s important to define what reductionism is in the context of web design. While ideas towards reductionism vary depending on who you ask, a simple definition is that reductionist methods boil down complex things to simpler things, which might include modularizing the system into more digestible components; all of this while avoiding losses in value (fidelity) and usefulness.
• The Web Strategy Pyramid: A Well-balanced Web Strategy
  To deliver a site that gives users the experience they are looking for, we need to set it upon a solid foundation of content, usable navigation, and strong SEO practices.
• Beyond the Web Experience | Blog | Nick Finck | UX/IA Pro, Speaker, and Community Cultivator.
  I find it interesting that whenever I talk about experience design people assume I am talking about web based experiences only.  An experience is the holistic perspective, everything from experiencing interfaces, websites, physical interfaces, the environment, even the smells and tastes.  Within a single day I came across three seemingly un-related topics that were all tied into user experience.. or perhaps more accurately, the human experience. 
• Designing with Paper Prototyping | UX Booth
  Prototyping is key to any successful design. Paper prototyping is usually the first step, but does it fit into a world where mobile devices are king? Yes, but not using the conventional method. Combine the physicality of the device and the power of paper prototyping and you have a solution that’s fit for the new era of computing.
• Defining Design – Surface vs. Substance | Front to back
  What is design? Most people will answer that question by pointing to a designed object – the iPhone, for example. Now that’s good design! The Mini Cooper. London’s famous map of the Tube. Anything ever built by Norman Foster. That’s design, right?
• A List Apart: Articles: Flexible Fuel: Educating the Client on IA
  Information architecture (IA) means so much to our projects, from setting requirements to establishing the baseline layout for our design and development teams. But what does it mean to your clients? Do they see the value in IA? What happens when they change their minds? Can IA help manage the change control process? More than ever, we must ensure that our clients find value in and embrace IA—and it’s is our job to educate them.
• Links : Quantitative Research Methods and Statistics – Methodspace – home of the Research Methods community

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