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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 To Use Typography Effectively in Web Design – Noupe Design Blog
  Typography is everywhere across the Web, so many different applications and missions all relying on their chosen fonts to cleanly and legibly convey the bulk of our web-based projects over to our readers. However, from time to time, we notice a wrench thrown into the works, gumming things up and interfering with our message transfers. This is something that as designers and developers for the web, that we have undoubtedly experienced, and something that today, we are here with some tips to hopefully prevent from happening again.
• Dancing with the Cards: Quick-and-Dirty Analysis of Card-Sorting Data :: UXmatters
  User researchers frequently use card sorting to understand how users perceive the structure of a Web site and the ideal way for them to navigate through the site. Usually card sorting starts with doing an inventory of a Web site’s content, then creating a card for each stand-alone piece of content. Researchers recruit participants for a card sort from a Web site’s target audience, then ask them to group the cards into categories that make sense to them.
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• Information Architects – Can Experience be Designed?
  Do experience designers shape how users feel or do they shape with respect to how users feel? A small but important nuance. Did you catch it? No? Then let me ask you this way: Do architects design houses or do they design “inhabitant experiences?” The bullshit answer is “They design inhabitant experiences.” The pragmatic answer is: “They design houses.” The cautious answer is: Architects design houses that lead to a spectrum of experiences, some foreseen, some not. But they do not design all possible experiences one can have in a house.
• Surviving and thriving as a UX professional in an Agile development organization

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!!

• Patternry | User Interface Design Patterns for Ideas and Inspiration
  We recently completely revamped our site, and at the same time changed its name. For a while our new user interface design pattern resource was called Pattern App until we re-re-named it to Patternry. Patternry will be something more than just a collection of design patterns or a design gallery.
• 5 Leading Airline Booking Forms Tested for Usability | UX Booth
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• Another Useful Blog: What You Always Wanted to Know About Eye Tracking – Part 1: Fixation Detection
  Since the topic of eye tracking keeps drawing people’s attention – it’s a silver bullet for some whereas others see it as a complete waste of resources – I thought a series of posts that focus on the methodological aspects of eye tracking research would be in order. As such, the posts will not focus on particular (usability) studies that have been conducted with eye tracking but rather shed some light on implicit and explicit assumptions, caveats etc. of the method itself. Ideally, readers will find some information to make up their own minds regarding the appropriateness of the eye tracking method for the examination of diverse questions.
• Top 11 E-Commerce Usability & Optimization Resources – Baymard Institute
  All these resources have "made a vital contribution to the e-commerce usability and optimization community" and continue to do so.
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  500 Internal Server Error

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!!

• User Experience Books for Beginners | UX Booth
  Through @uxbooks, my twitter feed for all things UX book related, I regularly get asked to recommend books to people, and more often than not its to suggest entry level publications. Normally, when I’m feeling particularly lazy, my default response is to point them in the direction of the seminal book ‘Don’t make me think‘ by Steve Krug.
• Dark Patterns: Black Hat, Anti-Usability Design Patterns
  This pattern library is dedicated to Dark Patterns: user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done.
• SLICE-B Experience Evaluation « Temkin Group
  Temkin Group has created an expert review methodology that can be used to evaluate experiences within and across any channel (Web, IVR, phone, store, etc.). It consistes of 12 criteria across these areas of an interaction:
• jQuery Mobile | jQuery Mobile
  A unified user interface system across all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation. Its lightweight code is built with progressive enhancement, and has a flexible, easily themeable design. Project strategy
• Ignore UX at your peril

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!!

• Information Gathering: A Roundup of UX Applications | UX Booth
  The number of applications available for User Experience professionals is ever-expanding much of this growth happening over the last year! As a consequence, experts are increasingly turning to novel tools in order to collect data and generate reports regards their websites. While some UX designers suggest that local testing is the best way to gather data, we decided to round up these up-and-coming applications and see just what makes them tick.
• Sketching Fundamentals | UX Booth
• Gestalt Principles Applied in Design
  Web designers, like other artists and craftsmen, impose structure on the environment. We enforce order and beauty on the formless void that is our blank computer screen.
• Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control? | Blog | design mind
  Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since Henry Chesbrough’s seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003. However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good time to reframe “Open” from a design point of view.
• The Six Elements Of An Experience « Customer Experience Matters
  SLICE-B breaks an experience down into six distinct components:<br />
  Start. The extent to which the customer is drawn into the experience.<br />
  Locate. The ease in which the customer can find what she needs.<br />
  Interact. The ease in which the customer can understand and control the experience.<br />
  Complete. The confidence that the customer has that her goal was accomplished.<br />
  End. The transition into next steps.<br />
  Brand Coherence. The reinforcement of a company’s brand.
• Shortboredsurfer – 11 Principles of Interaction Design explained
  This post isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of interaction design principles, its merely an introduction to the subject. And I’m definitely not going to attempt to enter the lions den of defining what ‘interaction design’ is, that’s for another day!

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!!

• The 4 questions to ask in a cognitive walkthrough
  Although the cognitive walkthrough gets less coverage than Nielsen’s heuristic evaluation, it’s just as effective at uncovering interaction problems. It’s also an ideal way to identify problems that users will have when they first use an interface, without training
• Considering Prototypes | UX Booth
  Although prototypes have been used in other domains for quite a while, their value to the design & development of websites has only recently taken shape, so to speak. Modern websites take a lot of work. Whether the ramifications of their creation are uncovered at the outset—typically with design and development considerations—or in the longterm—how is archived content going to be accessed? is this the best way we could have designed this?—building a prototype allows us to explore natural omissions made during the design process in an efficient, cost–effective way.
• The importance of sketching and why you should be doing it :: 10,000 Words :: where journalism and technology meet
  Sketching allows you to share your vision of a project with others early in the design process before you begin working with time-consuming tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, or Flash. For example, in my role as a multimedia producer for California Watch, I sketched my vision for multimedia components during or before talking with the reporter or editors. The sketches — sometimes made on the fly using giant Post-It notes — allowed my colleagues to see exactly what I had in mind and make suggestions and amendments before too much time was sunk into the project.
• Updating Our Understanding of Perception and Cognition: Part II :: UXmatters
  Many college-educated people have read about “the magical number seven, plus or minus two,” psychologist George Miller proposed as the number of items humans can retain in their short-term memory (Miller, 1956). Later research has found that, in the experiments Miller reviewed, some items that were presented for people to remember could be chunked—that is, considered related—making it appear that people’s short-term memory held more items than it actually did. When the experiments were revised to disallow chunking, they showed that the capacity of short-term memory is more like four, plus or minus one—that is, short-term memory can hold only three to five items (Broadbent, 1975).
• Creative Ways to Use Unmoderated User Research :: UXmatters
  Over the past year or two, unmoderated usability testing has become a popular option to help guide product design. It is especially popular for Web sites, providing startups the opportunity to get relatively quick-and-easy user feedback on design iterations. From a user research perspective, the improper use of unmoderated research services presents a certain amount of danger. However, there are a number of ways you can use unmoderated user research tools that can provide a great deal of value. This month, we’ll discuss some of the more interesting ways in which you can derive value from unmoderated research tools.
• Why Agile UX is Meaningless without an Agile Attitude – Anders Ramsay.com
  Imagine yourself walking down a fictional hall in a fictional office building and passing two different offices.  In the first office sits a UX designer, busily plugging away at a deck of wireframes, preparing to review them with the rest of the team.  In the second office sits another UX designer, also busily plugging away at a deck of wireframes, preparing to review them with the rest of the team. At the surface level, these practitioners appear identical.  And yet, they are worlds apart.
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Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!