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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!!

• 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!!

• 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!!

• 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!!

• 7 Ways to Increase User Participation
  Running a site doesn't only require Web development skills. Any site where the users can add content and communicate with each other requires a great deal of care and attention if it's going to be a success.
• Presentation Zen: Presentation: A few minutes with John Cleese on creativity
  Below is an excellent 10-min video clip from a presentation by John Cleese expressing a few of his ideas on creativity. One of the main problems for many of use today is that we are always in a hurry and our minds are a bit scattered juggling many balls in the air.
• The 5 habits of highly effective field researchers
  You may not get many chances to visit and observe your customers at their place of work, so you want to make the most of the opportunity. But what’s the best way to run a site visit? Highly effective field researchers show 5 specific behaviours. They create a focus question, audio record the sessions, take photographs of the environment, take notes and write up a short summary of the observation immediately
• Three Reasons Why Persuasive Design Isn’t Enough to Influence Change :: UXmatters
  Persuasive design is designing to change people’s behavior, or actions. This design movement fascinates me, and I’m jump-up-and-down thrilled to see it get more attention lately. Forbes recently ran an article about Jon Kolko, creative frontman at Frog Design, and his perspective on persuasive design. Kolko noted:
• Faceted Navigation: SEO and Facets « Experiencing Information
  Faceted navigation, when done well, can help customers find what they are looking for quicker and in a more satisfying way. This is good for business and for the bottom line. After all, customers can’t buy what they can’t find.
• Why mobile is vital for in-destination bookings | Tnooz
  We have always known that activities tend to be the last thing that people book when they go on holidays.<br />
  For the most part this is due to two important factors:<br />
  <br />
  For online travel agency sites that provide airport transfers and activities, these offerings are treated as an add-on at the end of the booking after flight, hotel and car. This makes it very easy to skip during the booking process.<br />
  <br />
  The majority of in-destination offerings are not available online. The ones that are provided are generally consolidated through multiple aggregators, such as a local destination marketing company and then the OTA.

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