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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!!

• VisualDNA™ – We transform unknown users into known users
  Users profile themselves by taking one of our highly viral image quizzes – Our API sends the user's personality, interests, and purchase intent to your site – Your site is then able to provide more relevant content to the user
• Selling UX to small business
  It’s 2010 and everyone loves usability, right? It may may look that way from our comfortable perches atop the blogosphere, but if you’ve tried to sell usability services to small businesses, you know that it can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience.
• Designers, meet Agile
  As an interaction designer working in an Agile environment, I’ve recently been asked by several colleagues in non-Agile arenas – folks in agency settings, consultancies, or in-house software companies – what it’s really like in terms of design workflow and output. Their questions have touched on everything from the day-to-day differences to the quality of the designs coming out of the process, and their perspectives have ranged from casual-and-curious, to scared-and-skeptical (e.g., “Oh, it’s just a fad” and “There’s that vast Agile agenda again.”)
• Why User Competency Matters in Social Design
  In designing for social participation, we can consider user goals and needs — even interests, features, functionality, adoption and scaling issues. Best practices and popular ways of using social media guide us in our decisions. But there’s a basic concern we seem to often overlook: “What is the user good at?”
• interactions magazine | Technology First, Needs Last: The Research-Product Gulf
  I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: Design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories, but essentially useless when it comes to breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examining of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had a huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane, small, continual improvements. Call one a conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn’t happen.
• The Virtues of a UX Professional
  UX professionals can be an egotistical lot. We like to think that only certain people with certain qualities can do what we do. Not everybody has the right stuff to fly to the moon or storm the beaches at Normandy. And in a similar way (sort of) not everybody has what it takes to create great user experiences.

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!!

• 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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