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.
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 />
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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 />
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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)!
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!!
Recruiting Better Research Participants Recruiting the right participants is the foundation of effective user research, because your research results are only as good as the participants involved.
50 Sketching Resources for User Experience Designers | inspireUX – User … Sketching is a critical part of the User Experience Design process. Sketching allows us to explore ideas and iterate on concepts quickly and easily before creating detailed mockups. Below is a roundup of many different sketching articles, tools, templates, presentations, videos, books, and examples to help User Experience Designers learn more about sketching and how it benefits UX design.
The Scent of Search The implications of Information Foraging Theory on designing user-centered websites have not gone unnoticed. Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool, among others, have put forth considered recommendations on how to enhance information scent on the web. Most of their guidelines, however, tend to assume that the designer has direct control over the explicit words used in the interface. While this is certainly the case for browse-based websites dependent on site-wide navigation and hyperlinks, it breaks down for search interfaces where both content and navigation are completely dynamic.
Working your tone of voice online Applying a distinctive and consistent tone of voice to your online communications has many benefits – so long as you make sure that voice doesn't get in the way of web-writing essentials such as usability, accessibility and seo. Sticky Content's Dan Fielder, who developed our new advanced web writing training course, looks at how to work a tone of voice online.
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!!
Design Better And Faster With Rapid Prototyping – Smashing Magazine The old adage, “a picture speaks a thousand words” captures what user interface prototyping is all about: using visuals to describe thousands of words’ worth of design and development specifications that detail how a system should behave and look. In an iterative approach to user interface design, rapid prototyping is the process of quickly mocking up the future state of a system, be it a website or application, and validating it with a broader team of users, stakeholders, developers and designers. Doing this rapidly and iteratively generates feedback early and often in the process, improving the final design and reducing the need for changes during development.
A Link Labeled "Products" (or "Solutions" or "Clients") is a Bad Idea … got this idea about links like “Products”, which we see on a lot of corporate sites. Vanessa was talking about these words from an SEO perspective, explaining that, when we use them as the headings and main navigation on the site, the search engines don’t know what to do.
Graphic Design Theory: 50 Resources and Articles – Noupe But spending some time on the theory behind the graphic design principles we use every day can expand our design horizons. It can open up new avenues of creativity and experimentation that can lead our designs from just good, to fantastic. On that note, below are 50 excellent resources and articles that discuss graphic design theory, including layout, color theory, and typography. Feel free to share additional resources and articles in the comments.
Website Response Times (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) Slow page rendering today is typically caused by server delays or overly fancy page widgets, not by big images. Users still hate slow sites and don't hesitate telling us.
Using Stories for Design Ideas When we say that the design must “tell a story,” we are not just talking about games or interactive fiction, or even about turning a work application into an adventure (“Conquer the benefits allocation maze…”). Instead, we mean the kind of stories that help you create new designs. These stories are used to make you think of new possibilities, give you the tools to encourage a self-reflective kind of thinking—design thinking—or so you can imagine designs that will improve the lives of other people. Stories explore ideas from user research.
Faceted Navigation: Layout and Display of Facets " Experiencing Information Overall, my interest in faceted navigation stems from the development and organization of workshop material on the subject. The intent is to address the primary questions designers face and identify possible solutions and directions. Where known, I’ve attempted to cite relevant literature, which is proving to be thin and/or indirect.
How To Engage Customers In Your E-Commerce Website One of the most influential factors in our buying decisions is the opinions of our friends and relatives. Likewise, a large majority of online shoppers now trust what other customers say about the products they buy more than the e-tailers themselves. The reason is that we trust people who are “on our side,” even if we do not know them personally.
Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!
Welcome to BlobFisk.com, the online home of Alex Horstmann. I'm a User Experience Manager (currently General Manager, User Experience and Design at TUI Travel plc) passionate about usability, user experience and accessibility.
I blog mainly about all things UX, Usability and IA; when I'm too busy to blog I will share some of the interesting bookmarks that I save.
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, here are some highlights of my latest thinking on mood, product design and interaction.