Quote of the Week: “Being a geek is all about your own personal level of enthusiasm, not how your level of enthusiasm measures up to others. If you like something so much that a casual mention of it makes your whole being light up like a halogen lamp, if hearing a stranger fondly mention your favorite book or game is instant grounds for friendship, if you have ever found yourself bouncing out of your chair because something you learned blew your mind so hard that you physically could not contain yourself — you are a geek”
Google AdWords: Website Optimizer Help This handy calculator helps you estimate the potential duration of your experiment. Try out various numbers of combinations and see how they affect the length of the experiment. For pages with very high traffic, the differences may be negligible.
The Battle Between Thoughts and Emotions in Persuasion — PsyBlog Nowadays people tend to use 'I think' and 'I feel' interchangeably. For some this is a linguistic faux pas, but what about psychologically? Does it make any difference whether what you say is couched in 'thinking' or 'feeling' terms?
Mobile User Experience Trends on the Horizon | UX Magazine The majority of the world's digital experiences now happen through mobile devices linked by wireless networks. It is this untethered medium that is defining future trends in user behavior, sweeping away the legacy of interaction methods established for fixed computing scenarios.
Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode are broken and need to be fixed | cxpartners Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode are broken. At cxpartners we’ve watched hundred of users on e-commerce websites and seen some serious trust and usability issues that are hurting e-commerce. Our clients have seen conversion rates drop because of it. E-consultancy published an article over a year ago with specific examples of 3D secure harming sales.
Failure by Design / FINCH Losses feel worse than gains feel good. Rationally we should treat losses and gains the same. But that isn’t the way we are built. Consider how people make decisions when buying and selling stocks. Most people will sell stocks that go up in value, but they will tend to hold onto stocks long term that are going down in value. Selling the losing stock will make the loss tangible and the feeling of that is much worse to deal with. No one wants to lose. It’s painful.1
Introduction | The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style is on many a designer’s bookshelf and is considered to be a classic in the field. Indeed the renowned typographer Hermann Zapf proclaims the book to be a must for everybody in the graphic arts, and especially for our new friends entering the field.
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!!
YouTube Blog: Should quality matter in web video? Since I started working in web video, the most common misconception I face is, web video equals low quality video. This week we asked “What do you think the differences are between making videos for the web versus other venues like film festivals or TV?” on YouTube's Facebook fan page. Though there were a lot of positive voices talking about the immediacy, democracy and audience engagement of web video, some of the comments unsurprisingly echoed this idea.
Ideal line length for content I’d like to design a site that uses optimal line lengths. I also want the line length to stay within the optimal range no matter what default font size the user has set in their browser. Is it possible?
UXMovement: Applying the Golden Ratio to Web Layouts and Objects | Usability Counts | User Experience, Social Media 1.618 is a number all serious designers should know. It’s known as the golden ratio found through out nature, art and architecture. Seashells, the Mona Lisa and the Parthenon all show the golden ratio. Our faces and bodies are also proportional to the golden ratio. It’s so omnipresent that it’s even found in sounds and intervals of time. If there ever was a mathematical way to explain and express natural beauty, the golden ratio is it.
4 lessons The Apprentice candidates should learn about focus groups–Making Websites Easy To Use Every year I watch The Apprentice I grumble to my partner about the appalling way the candidates grill focus group participants. Their approach is to either present them with an idea and ask if they like it, or they tell them about the concept, ask for thoughts and then argue the participants into submission. When this doesn’t work and the focus group clearly dislikes the concept they just ignore it and carry on regardless.
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!!
Test Usability By Embracing Other Viewpoints – Smashing Magazine As Web technology improves, users expect Web-based widgets to be useful, content to be relevant and interfaces to be snappy. They want to feel confident navigating a website and using its functionality. They crave being able to get things done with little friction and on demand. And demand they do.
Presentation Zen: Start your presentation with PUNCH The primacy effect, when applied to presentations, suggests that we remember more strongly what happens at the beginning of a presentation. In order to establish a connection with an audience, we must grab their attention right from the beginning. A punchy opening that gets the audience's attention is paramount.
Demystifying Usability : Design and Emotion: Designing for Mood 'Getting in the mood' is the name of a paper I'll be presenting at Design and Emotion in Chicago 5-7th October 2010. Since I'm getting in the mood for the conference , here are some highlights of my latest thinking on mood, product design and interaction.
How to recruit a UX leader with the X factor We're increasingly asked by organisations for advice on building a user experience competency. Our advice is to start at the top and get the right person for that first critical leadership role. User experience leaders demonstrate 3 core competencies: they understand research; they follow user experience methods and standards; and they are great communicators.
How to Make Your Web Statistics Actionable: Search « kylejlarson.com If you were ill and your doctor handed you a chart including your weight, heart rate, and blood pressure and promptly sent you on your way with no analysis or feedback, he wouldn’t be your doctor for long. Without actionable analysis of the data it has very little usefulness. Website statistics are often discussed in a similarly meaningless way. I’ve suffered through many meetings where people throw around numbers with nothing more to say about them than this number has increased and that one has decreased. Most sites have some statistics available and maybe they are even reviewed occasionally, but to get real value from your statistics they must be a catalyst for action. Analyzing your on-site search and search engine keywords is a great place to get started.
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!!
Influencing the customer journey by gravity | buckminster Whenever a customer buys something, he will go through a process from need to purchase. In this process a customer will get in touch with different brands on different media and at different times. Every occasion where a customer gets in touch with a brand, we call a “touch point”. And the path along all touch points, we call the “customer journey”.
A/B Testing: Why you shouldn’t jump to conclusions One of the first things you’ll find when you start doing A/B testing is that some tests show surprising results very quickly. One of the tests we ran recently showed one design clearly outperforming another within the first day by over 300%.
The Increasing Momentum of Content Strategy | I’d Rather Be Writing Content strategy is a topic more and more technical communicators are talking about. It’s one of the dominant conversations in the field right now. David Farbey recently presented on Content Strategy for Everyone at Tech Comm UK. Rahel Bailie talked about Creating a Content Strategy at the Lavacon conference. Scott Abel continually talks about content strategy — see this video series on content strategy he did with MindTouch.
Welcome to BlobFisk.com, the online home of Alex Horstmann. I'm a User Experience Manager (currently General Manager, User Experience and Design at TUI Travel plc) passionate about usability, user experience and accessibility.
I blog mainly about all things UX, Usability and IA; when I'm too busy to blog I will share some of the interesting bookmarks that I save.
, here are some highlights of my latest thinking on mood, product design and interaction.