BlobFisk.com

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!!

• Part 1: Five challenges on the journey to mastering travel inspiration
  Travel search is changing and understanding traveler inspiration is becoming increasingly important.<br />
  Either get closer to potential customers before they have made up their mind, or let someone else do it and watch the leisure traveler of tomorrow bypass completely the transactional websites that dominate travel today.
• Faceted Navigation: Showing More Values
  My workshop on faceted Navigation Design in Cologne at the IA Konferenz 2010 was a success, from my perspective. It really got me thinking about the details of design solutions and ways to structure discussion around very specific aspects of faceted navigation. I’m also now on the look-out for different examples and techniques. This post is about how to handle the display of values, in particular how to show additional values.
• 18 Great Examples of Sketched UI Wireframes and Mockups
  Whether you’re designing a user interface for a website or an iPhone app, it’s always a good idea to start with a wireframe. It can be a big time saver if you’re able to nail down the placement of major layout elements early on in a project.
• Why You Should Adopt An ‘Accessible Content Strategy’
  Before diving too deeply into this discussion about the need for an accessible content strategy, I have a confession to make. I have never worked on a project in which content accessibility was included in the requirements. You may think that makes me a little bit like those characters played by Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara in the movie “Waiting for Guffman”; that owned a travel agency, but had never left the town in which they were born.
• Involving Stakeholders in User Testing
  Besides usability specialists, all design team members should observe usability. It's also good to invite executives. Although biased conclusions are possible, they're far outweighed by the benefits of increased buy-in and empathy.
• Encouraging negative feedback during user testing
  Have you ever sat in a user testing session, watching a user really struggle with the task at hand only to have them tell you at the end everything was easy and straight forward? How do you encourage these participants to be negative? I’ve discovered a few techniques that might be able to help.

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)!