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Alex Horstmann’s user experience, usability, design, eCommerce and design bookmarks for November 23rd.

• James-Lange theory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  The James-Lange theory refers to a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion, developed independently by two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange.
• Web Content That Persuades and Motivates :: UXmatters
  There are several key elements that are missing from a large number of Web sites, and these missing elements often lead to bad user experiences and the total ineffectiveness of those sites.
• » Design Jam London 1 Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive
  Design Jams are one or two day design sessions, during which people team up to solve engaging UX challenges. While conferences and talks are very popular in the UX community, we don’t have many events for actual collaboration, like the ‘hackdays’ enjoyed by the development community. Only a few UX designers participate in hackdays or open-source design initiatives –  how can we change this and get UX designers more involved? How can we introduce them to open collaboration formats? The idea of an event to get designers together to learn from each other while working on actual problems was born. Design Jams champion open-source thinking & sharing and are non-profit, run by local volunteers. The London team are Desigan Chinniah, Johanna Kolllmann, Joe Lanman and Franco Papeschi.
• E-commerce (A-Z of user experience design resources)
• Bounce Rate Demystified
• Agile UX in Practice | Agile UX
  Agile development and user experience can work brillantly together… well, but how?<br />
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  Even if the effort related to Agile User Experience (Agile UX) continues throughout the project (with “just in time” designing and user testing) the User Experience foundations must be initiated at the very beginning of the project, during the first sprints.
• Stressed Out About Holiday Shopping? Your Customers Are! | experience matters
  Regardless of their budget though, consumers told us that holiday shopping is stressful. Of course there are obvious reasons like crowded malls, outrageously chaotic traffic conditions and increased family obligations, but consumers face other speed bumps that companies can help with.

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

Alex Horstmann’s user experience, usability, design, eCommerce and design bookmarks for November 19th.

• How To Use the “Seven Deadly Sins” to Turn Visitors into Customers
  Since the beginning of time, people have exploited the human desire to sin so that they could achieve their goals. Finding out what causes people to sin helps us understand the triggers which prompt people to take an action. The Web has made it even easier to exploit these tendencies to sin, in order to build user engagement and excitement about your service or product. In this article we’ll show examples of how successful companies exploit the tendency to conduct all the famous Seven Deadly Sins, and in turn generate momentum with their website visitors. Ready? Let’s roll.
• Expedia Acquires FlightTrack App Developer Mobiata
  Expedia has just announced that it has acquired developer Mobiata, the creator of popular mobile travel application FlightTrack. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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

Alex Horstmann’s user experience, usability, design, eCommerce and design bookmarks for November 18th.

• Weary of online booking, clients return to travel agents – USATODAY.com
  Vacationers who hire Suzanne Burr book their travel the old-fashioned way. They tell Burr where they want to go and what they need when they arrive, and leave it to her to make it happen.
• 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!!

• Now Google is supposedly interested in Opodo | Tnooz
  Many a jaw dropping on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean today following a report in the Wall Street Journal speculating that Google is interested in buying Opodo.
• Fear, loathing and content strategy « Mapped.
  There is a prevailing and ongoing confusion around the relatively new title of content strategist, and the field called content strategy. I find these arguments simultaneously boring and frustrating, and while I hardly think one post from me is going to silence the issue, I wanted to see if I could tease out some of the arguments here.
• » Producing quality content with multiple contributors Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive
  You’ve probably heard the saying “too many cooks spoil the broth.”  It implies that having lots of people involved in the production of any one outcome isn’t a good thing. The same can be said for managing large websites. In fact, “too many authors spoil the content” is a much more pertinent issue in today’s digital world. Unfortunately it’s one that’s hard to escape.
• Is HTML 5 ready for production yet? W3C don’t think so! | Made by Many
  Apparently the crux of the issue is getting HTML 5 to behave the same in different browsers and using different video devices. Now forgive me if I’m wrong but hasn’t that always been the case with HTML?! He goes on to say that the HTML 5 specification may not "feature-complete" until mid 2011.
• Part One of Four: 101 ways to use mobile messages in travel | Tnooz
  The competition to earn customers in the travel, tourism and hospitality industries is intense. The operations of hotels, restaurants, cruise operators, airlines, car rental agencies, and even tourist boards may be diverse, but the desire and need to be unique in the eyes of the customer – to differentiate from competitors on more than just price – remains constant.

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!!

• ooh.com
  Ooh.com is a free site for listing and booking trips, courses, classes, accommodation and events. We love seeing passionate people listing and selling activities you'd never normally hear about, and on Ooh.com you can book these exciting things to do directly from the people selling them.
• Mobile Usage in Japan, U.S. and Europe, Compared
  Analytics firm comScore has just released a new study on mobile usage and behavior in the Japanese, American and European markets. The report's findings highlighted the "significant differences" between the consumers in these markets, in terms of mobile connectivity, application usage, mobile social networking, media consumption, gender-related behavior and more.
• Are purchase decisions harder when shopping online?–Making Websites Easy To Use
  A lot of ecommerce sites have copied each other assuming that adding product reviews and more information is the way to get more sales. But, if anything, it is possible that the more data available at the time of purchase, the more likely people are to compare data, focus on the detail and start their quest for the perfect product elsewhere on the web.<br />
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  Perhaps online stores should encourage users to reduce their focus on data (but continue to provide this information) and instead attempt to influence a more emotional purchase decision.
• The Cooper Journal: Slanty (and underhanded) Design
  I’ve been entranced with the notion of Slanty Design ever since I read Russell Beale’s article about it in Communications of the ACM in 2007. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Slanty Design is kind of anti-affordance, a difficulty-of-use employed to achieve certain design decisions. I think even the acknowledgment of such tools mark a maturity of interaction design: it’s not solely about making things easy to use. (Just, perhaps, mostly?) Unfortunately, the use of slanty design isn’t always to encourage better behavior. Sometimes it’s just greed.
• UX Week 2010 | Andrew Crow | In-house Design Teams: The Sole of Your Organization (a Zappos Case Study) on Vimeo
  In-house design teams are our heroes. They design, build and refine the web sites and applications we use on a daily basis. They see projects through to completion and deal with tough decisions along the way.

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