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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!!

• How Limitations Improve Design | Webdesigner Depot
  We often complain about the multitude of limitations which we’re faced with every day as designers.<br />
  From browsers, to screen resolutions, to user interactions, we seem to constantly be struggling to find some way of thinking outside the tiny little box of “best practice” which we’re constrained by.<br />
  Limitations are abundant but are they really such a bad thing? Is it possible, even, that they actually produce far better results than if we did not have them?
• The Art and Tradition of Typography – fontblog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs
  or over 25 years Microsoft has been very focused on the development of type and type technologies. In order to fully understand the technical foundations of typography in Windows, a brief overview of some of the highlights of “typographic engineering” from the past 500 years can add some useful insight.
• Creating Passionate Users: An Interview with Josh Porter, Part 1 | Perfetti Media
  Social web sites and applications are everywhere: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, Craigslist, and Digg are just a few of the web sites taking advantage of the power of the Social Web. Web sites and applications that incorporate social features are the fastest growing properties on the web for good reason: they connect people, motivate, and engage them.  As a result, they grow very quickly and successfully.
• Improve Your E-Commerce Design With Brilliant Product Photos – Smashing Magazine
  Product photography could well be the single most important design aspect of any e-commerce website. Without the ability to touch, hold, smell, taste or otherwise handle the products they are interested in, potential customers have only images to interact with. Ultimately, the softer, tastier, flashier and more attractive your products look to shoppers, the more confident they’ll feel about purchasing from you and the better your conversion rate will be.
• How Choice Impairs Your Visitors | UX Booth
  Many sites provide an array of methods to interact with their offerings, but excesses in decision-making pressure can render less empowered visitors into a cyclone of stress from the barrage of questions being asked. As an industry, we place a great deal of emphasis on getting visitors to make decisions, but are we turning a straightforward path into a labyrinth with our need to know?
• Emotional Design with A.C.T. – Part 1 – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
  As UX professionals, we strive to design engaging experiences. These experiences help to forge relationships between the products we create and the people who use them. Whether you’re designing a website or a physical product, the formation of a relationship depends on how useful, usable and pleasurable the experience is. Ultimately, we form relationships with products and services for the same reasons we form relationships with people:

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!!

• An epistemological critique of Grounded Theory | mixing social science and software design
  ‘Because emer gence is the foun da tion of our approach to the ory build ing, a researcher can not enter an inves ti ga tion with a list of pre con ceived con cepts, a guid ing the o ret i cal frame work, or a well though out design’ (Strauss and Corbin, 1998, p. 34).
• Shortboredsurfer – 11 Principles of Interaction Design
  The following short presentation was put together for our fortnightly ux meetups at Redweb. It covers 11 principles of Interaction Design. It’s not intended as an exhaustive list, simply an introduction to the subject.
• 3 Universal Goals to Influence People — PsyBlog
  The art and science of persuasion is often discussed as though changing people's minds is about using the right arguments, the right tone of voice or the right negotiation tactic. But effective influence and persuasion isn't just about patter, body language or other techniques, it's also about understanding people's motivations.
• Top 10 Reasons for Slow Velocity
  I work with quite a few product teams, and after a while you start to see patterns.  Many organizations are frustrated because they believe that it takes far too long to move from concept to delivery.  They often just blame the skills of their developers, which is rarely the root cause in my experience.
• Agile and UCD: Building the Right Thing, the Right Way
  When integrated, Agile software development and User-Centered Design (UCD) allow development teams to extract the right information from their users, to verify assumptions, and to validate design decisions.
• Ident Engine
  Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We've filled in profiles, uploaded photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks. The Ident Engine uses semantic web API’s to bring together these web footprints.

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!!

• Supporting User Experience Throughout the Product Development Process :: UXmatters
  Frequently, problems arise when capturing requirements. Some product people feel more comfortable describing requirements in terms of the user experience.
• Using Eye Tracking & Mouse Movements to Analyze Search Behavior | Eye Tracking Update
  For those in the business, it must be a pretty nice thing to see usability studies come of age. We’ve touched on recent debates regarding the relationship between what a user is looking at versus what they’re thinking about (Is it the same thing or is it something entirely different?), and it’s exciting to see further research into the details of eye tracking and usability. Data is easy to come by if you have the right equipment, but making sense of that data, analyzing it for usable information and gaining insight into the process is a much more difficult task.
• LukeW | Social Engagement Checklist
  Having recently heard several overviews of what fundamentally motivates people to engage with others, I decided to try turning these principles into a high-level checklist for social Web applications. These questions attempt to answer the most vexing social design question: "why would people participate in a new service/product?"
• Faceted Navigation: Typical Structures for Values « Experiencing Information
  Facets are categories that describe the properties of an object or collection of objects. Facet categories then have values. In faceted navigation schemes, the values are the things you click on to navigate to a set of items or to filter a list. The type of structure that those values have, however, can vary depending on the type of facet you are dealing with.
• Keep users in the flow by prompting for continuation
  A new trend on content-based websites seems is to animate a small box popping up at the bottom or top of the page, guiding users’ next move as they reach the end of an article. This technique is smart as it waits for just the right moment to break users’ attention.
• Skills to transition to content strategy | Intentional Design Inc.
  You may say that all this is fine and good to position content strategists as the management consultants of the content world, but what does an aspiring content strategist do with that information? What concrete steps can you take to make the move to content strategy?

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!!

• Social Engagement Checklist
  Having recently heard several overviews of what fundamentally motivates people to engage with others, I decided to try turning these principles into a high-level checklist for social Web applications. These questions attempt to answer the most vexing social design question: "why would people participate in a new service/product?
• Playful User Experiences
  As user experience designers, we tend to focus on getting users to the end of the journeys we’ve designed for them as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
• The Psychologist’s View of UX Design
  I'm a psychologist by training and education. So the part of the elephant I experience applies what we know about people and how we apply that to UX design. I take research and knowledge about the brain, the visual system, memory, and motivation and extrapolate UX design principles from that.
• Content strategy
  With the mass of online content available, merely repurposing offline material for the web won’t satifsy the expectations of today’s consumers. A more adventurous strategy is required
• Archetypes and Their Use in Mobile UX
  Have you ever needed a user manual to sit on a good chair? Probably not. When we see a good chair, we almost always know exactly what to do, how to use it and what not to do with it. And yet, chairs are made by the thousands, and several challenge these base assumptions to become classics in their own right. The chair is one of the most universally recognized archetypes known to us. In light of recent events in the mobile realm, I believe that the stage is set to probe notions of archetypes in the mobile space.

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