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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!!

• Newest Questions – UX Exchange – Q&A site for user experience professionals
  UX Exchange is a User Experience (UX) Q & A site. You can register if you want to collect reputation points and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it's just free to post and answer questions.
• Great UX quote
• A List Apart: Articles: Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients
  The new business meeting was going swimmingly—that is, until the client started asking questions about our design process. Then we unleashed our lexicon of specialized user experience (UX) research terminology.
• Social Software: The Other ‘Design for Social Impact,’ by Gentry Underwood – Core77
  “Human-centered approaches to industrial and interaction design have long focused on studying human behavior to create informed and appropriate designs. A social interaction designer must consider not only people, environment, and existing tools, but also the unseen elements of the system such as social relationships, power dynamics, and cultural rules.”

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

Seth Godin (you can see his excellent blog here) was recently asked if social networking was important to business, and if so why. His answer is great, I especially liked what he says about networking (and I paraphrase somewhat):

Networking is only important when it’s real; it’s a useless distraction when it’s fake

I am really enjoying IA TV, a blog I subscribe to and visit regularly. This blog posts regular videos of speeches, presentations and interviews from leading people in the fields of Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Seach/SEO, User Centered Design/Human Factors, Usability and User Experience. Some are very short 3 or 4 minute videos, some are longer – all of the ones I’ve watched so far have been enjoyable.

I’ve embedded (with appropriate link backs!) a couple already – but I really enjoyed this one by Bill Moggridge on design as a collaborative process:

I recently carried out some user testing on the Channel 4 news site, looking at the site in general, but also the new blog  area – where Jon Snow (one of the lead news presenters) is blogging. We wanted to find out how people reacted to blogs and the plugins that you can get for them.Here are some of my main takeaways.

Try to avoid using Blog standard labels

The people we tested were daily web users, who were super fans of news and news sites. However, when we asked them what “Blogroll” was, they didn’t know or understand the concept. The label was too far into the real of industry jargon. I know what it means, as do all blog owners and regular blog users. However, people who only read blog posts from a link they clicked don’t understand it.

We’re now looking at ways to re-label our blogroll – “Recommended Blogs” or “Recommended Sites” are the current favourites, with “Blogs we like” still hanging on.

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These are my bookmarked pages from January 28th to February 2nd:

• Product Vision – Joel on Software
• The Ultimate User Experience – Netimperative Presentation on Vimeo
• Making Wireframes Look Sketchy | Design Commission
• Agile development is more culture than process and why thinking of agile as culture and not just process explains resistance and difficulty in teaching and learning the approach
• What is Interaction? Are There Different Types?
• An Evolving Map of Design Practice and Design Research
• Annotation Droplets › Wireframes Magazine
• Functioning Form – Visually Communicating Selection Dependent Inputs
• Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive » Social Interaction Design Primer II: 1. Introduction
• Generic Work Process – v1.0
• User Centered Design Work Process Toolkit | Konigi
• OmniGraffle Sketch Style Screencast | Konigi Interesting screencast on sketch type wireframes in Omnigraffle – something I've been struggling with.
• UIEtips: Previous and Next Actions in Web Forms » UIE Brain Sparks
• The Social Organization: It’s 2009 – Do You Know Where Your Customers Are?
• A List Apart: Articles: How to Succeed With URLs