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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!!

• 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)!

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!!

• What’s Up With Social Objects?
  The concept of social objects is pretty widely used in social interaction design, but we’re missing a solid definition of what social objects are. Or, whether they really even exist.<br />
  <br />
  The most common use of the term “social object” refers to shared online resources around which interactions develop and coalesce. Examples could include gifts on Facebook, videos, or what have you. The object sort of serves as a shared object, a focus of attention, an actual digital object, and so on. And the object plays a role in governing or informing interactions; we know what objects mean and what to do with them (give them, comment on them, play them, etc.)<br />
  <br />
  But the definition of social object is a bit too fuzzy for me, and for a couple reasons.
• Doing User Research Faster and Cheaper
  Companies that haven’t already cut user research from their project plans altogether are asking researchers to achieve the same results for less money, in less time—or just to do less.
• Findability and Exploration: the future of search
  We need ambient findability. We need smart ways of guiding people towards the content they’d like to see — with categorization and search playing complementary goals. And we need smart ways to keep readers on our site, especially if they’re just following a link from Google or Facebook, by prickling their sense of exploration.
• How to Spot an Untrustworthy Smile | PsyBlog
  Humans produce about 50 distinct types of smiles but there's one distinction that really matters: between real and fake.
• In The Zone: 10 Characteristics of the Flow State
  Have you ever been in a flow state? You are engrossed in some activity; maybe it is something physical like rock climbing or skiing; maybe it is something artistic or creative, like playing the piano or painting, or maybe it is an everyday activity, like working on a powerpoint presentation or teaching a class… whatever the activity you become totally engrossed, totally in the moment. Everything else falls away, your sense of time changes, and you almost forget who you are and where you are. You are in the flow state.

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!!

• Navigating disagreement: How to keep your eye on the evidence
  Heeding others' impressions often increases accuracy. But "agreement" and "majoritarianism" are not magic; in a given circumstance, agreement is or isn't useful for *intelligible* reasons.
• Content Strategy for Everybody (Even You)
  Web content is the meat in the sandwich, not the icing on the cake. Too often, organizations build websites and then neglect the content, letting it languish, unread and unloved. Even during website redesigns, the editorial process gets short shrift in favor of building shiny new features and creating fancy new designs. Thinking about the content is always left until the last minute, always thought to be “somebody else’s problem.”
• Eight Short Studies On Excuses
• Designing for Social Interaction – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind …
  It took both the telephone and the mobile phone 15 years to amass 100 million users, but Facebook did it in 9 months. We see more and more people becoming connected on online social networks, and it seems our networks are growing exponentially. But the reality is, social networks rarely add to our number of connections. We’ve already met almost all the people we’re connected to on social networks. We’re already connected to these people offline. Social networks simply make the connections visible. For example, we often connect with old school friends, and catch up over a couple of wall posts. But rarely do we continue the conversation once we’ve connected, and over time we forget that the connections exist. In fact, Facebook users often have no interactions with up to 50% of their connections.1 When we study how people are interacting on social networks, we see that most interactions are with a very small subset of the people we’re connected to.
• Case study of agile and UCD working together – Boxes and Arrows: The …
  Large scale websites require groups of specialists to design and develop a product that will be a commercial success. To develop a completely new site requires several teams to collaborate and this can be difficult. Particularly as different teams may be working with different methods.<br />
  <br />
  This case study shows how the ComputerWeekly user experience team integrated with an agile development group. It’s important to note the methods we used do not guarantee getting the job done. People make or break any project. Finding and retaining good people is the most important ingredient for success.

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