• Absorb Emulate and Innovate
  There’s something good to be said about mimicry. When artists learned their trade in the way old days (and often today), they were pushed by their teachers to emulate the great masters, to understand their choices, to learn their brush strokes. Sometimes, it would be years of emulation and copying before a student was set free to try her own hand at a creative work. In marketing (and in business innovation overall), I’ve made quite a habit of absorbing other ideas that make sense from other industries or verticals, emulating key elements of their methodology, and then innovating to make them make sense for me.
• 4 Unexpected Situations For Creating Content
  To an already busy small business owner or marketer, you may wonder, how in the world do I make time to create content? To blog once or more a week on top of everything else I already do?
• How to treat new employees
  A person’s first day on a new job is a stressful time even under the best of circumstances. You don’t know anyone there, you don’t know your job, you don’t know the written and unwritten rules of the workplace – and yet you have a burning desire to do well, to show your worth and to excel.
• Start - Treehotel
  
• Old Spice Sales Double With YouTube Campaign
  
• Balanced Arguments Are More Persuasive — PsyBlog
  Every argument has at least two sides, even if sometimes, we're not prepared to admit it. But in the heat of battle many people present their own side of the argument as though there's no alternative.

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• 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.

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• 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?

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• How Companies Can Use Sentiment Analysis to Improve Their Business
  Automated sentiment analysis has recently been the focus of an intense debate in the blogosphere. How accurate is it? What is the methodology? In what context is it useful for a business or a brand?<br /> <br /> Sentiment analysis can be very useful for business if employed correctly. In this article, I will attempt to demystify the process, provide context, and offer some concrete examples of how businesses can utilize it.
• More from Eyjafjallajokull - The Big Picture - Boston.com
  
• Stopping shopping cart abandonment
  A good checkout process allows customers to quickly and easily make their purchases online without feeling overwhelmed or confused. However, it’s not uncommon for online retailers to face shopping cart abandonment rates of well over 50%. Implementing a single-page checkout is a natural first step for retailers looking to reduce their abandonment rate, but there are other factors that drive customers away from the checkout process.
• Design Patterns: Faceted Navigation
  
• Ubiquitous Service Design
  The difference between products and services is more than semantic. Products are tangible objects that exist in both time and space; services consist solely of acts or process(es), and exist in time only. The basic distinction between "things" and "processes" is the starting point for a focused investigation of services. Services are rendered; products are possessed. Services cannot be possessed; they can only be experienced, created or participated in. Though they are different, services and products are intimately and symbiotically linked.

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• Visualising Usability Test Results
  How can users quickly create a timed transcript of any video on the web? That’s Mozilla’s latest design challenge, in collaboration with the Participatory Culture Foundation, challenges teams to design an intuitive interface for creating and improving subtitles for any video on the web. In this article I’ll share some ideas on how to interpret usability testing results like those presented by the Mozilla Labs team.
• User-Generated Content: Embracing Social Networking to Deliver More Engaging Technical Documentation
  
• Growing the UX Management Community
  As User Experience matures as a discipline and grows in influence in the business community, UX leaders need to support one another by sharing their insights with their counterparts in other organizations…
• Planning your UX Strategy
  A strategy is a set of coordinated, orchestrated, planned actions, or tactics, which will take you along a journey to reach a desired future state, over an established period of time. Design objectives are conditions or outcomes that a project must meet, often of tactical nature. User experience (UX) strategy shouldn’t therefore be confused with design objectives. This article is about how to plan and coordinate actions to organisationally achieve good UX.
• Strong, Weak, & Temporary Ties
  Paul Adams, UX researcher at Google, is studying what sorts of relationships people have online. His latest piece, Designing for Social Interaction: Strong, Weak, & Temporary Ties shows how people mostly use social networks to map their life, not create a whole new online one:
• Perception of Fonts: Perceived Personality Traits and Uses
  This study sought to determine if certain personalities and uses are associated with various fonts. Using an online survey, participants rated the personality of 20 fonts using 15 adjective pairs. In addition, participants viewed the same 20 fonts and selected which uses were most appropriate. Results suggested that personality traits are indeed attributed to fonts based on their design family (Serif, Sans-Serif, Modern, Monospace, Script/Funny) and are associated with appropriate uses. Implications of these results to the design of online materials and websites are discussed.
• The Holistic Web " Taxonomy vs Folksonomy
  A folksonomy makes a heap of sense on the internet where there is no central governing body, and even if there was, it would probably be widely ignored. However, internally to a company, it’s a different story. Does a folksonomy make sense, or is a taxonomy a better way to go?

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• 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.

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• Designing Superior Shopping Experiences | UX Magazine
  Imagine shopping in a store where the displays never change. Customers select items by browsing through monolithic aisles of products. Store displays are minimal and uninteresting. Items in the displays are hard to find or even unavailable. This doesn't seem like a great shopping experience, does it? Yet this is what online shoppers experience (and accept as standard) on many large e-commerce sites.
• Usability Marathon. Tim Bosenick. Measure User Experience
  Qualitative studies allow receiving quick and valid feedback that is needed during the development process of an interface. Another reason is that qualitative tests are usually cheaper than tests with a larger sample size. But this larger sample size is needed when it comes to really «measure» user experience.
• Juicy Studio: Developing sites for users with Cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties
  When people think about accessibility of web content, there's a tendency to concentrate on people with visual impairments. People with cognitive impairments and learning difficulties are often overlooked. This article by Roger Hudson, Russ Weakley, and Peter Firminger, examines the types of problems visitors may encounter when using the web, with insightful and practical suggestions on how to develop websites that are inclusive for people with cognitive impairments and learning difficulties.
• Study: Males vs. females in social networks | Royal Pingdom
  Have you ever wondered how many of Twitter’s users are women? Or men? What about Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, and other sites in the social media sphere?
• Accessible Colour Schemes
  Choosing a colour scheme for a website can be a challenge, but what about choosing an accessible colour scheme? By this we mean a colour scheme that provides sufficient contrast between the foreground and background colours to ensure that the text is legible. The aim of this website is to suggest some colour combinations that meet accessibility guidelines and demonstrate that website colour schemes don't have to be boring to make them accessible.

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