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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!!

• Designing Mobile Search: Turning Limitations into Opportunities …
  Designing a mobile finding experience requires thinking in terms of turning limitations into opportunities.
• Organized Approach to Emotional Response Testing
  The Product Reaction Cards are part of the Desirability Toolkit that suggests facilitators ask users to choose the cards that "best describe the product or how using the product made them feel" and then ask them to narrow their selection to just five cards. The cards selection process is then followed by an interview where the participant explains why they selected those five cards.
• Where Do Heuristics Come From?
  What I learned in the process of developing style guidelines for voting system documentation (which, astonishingly, took about a year) is that most heuristics—accepted principles—used in evaluating user interfaces come from three sources: lore or folk wisdom, specialist experience, and research.
• The User Centered Design Conundrum
  When I mention design research to clients unfamiliar with user–centered design, I am often confronted with a blank stare. At first, I thought that I simply might be doing it wrong: selecting the wrong kinds of clients with which to work, or associating myself with the wrong kind of companies—but after attending events and meet-ups frequented by UX professionals, I’ve learned that I’m not alone. The problem—willful ignorance to the benefits of design research— is a pervasive one.
• Web Design Criticism: A How-To
  Web design is a relatively young field. It’s youthful, growing and made up of people from all kinds of backgrounds, many of whom lack formal design training. We have learned, and still are learning, as we go. It was there, as part of that training, that I learned about critiquing, both giving and receiving, through regular design reviews.

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!!

• LukeW | User Experience Diagrams
• Card Games for Information Architects
  This article reviews 6 simple but powerful research techniques you can use to improve the information architecture of your product or web site. None of these activities require a computer. You simply need a bunch of cards, a participant and a desk.
• 10 ways you can use photos to influence the user experience | cxpartners
  As a photographer I understand how to take photos that will result in a certain reaction from the viewer. We have all seen photos that have influenced our thoughts, our feelings and ultimately our own behaviour.

  The classic image placeholder

  So why as UX designers do we ignore photos when they can be so powerful? The classic wireframes image placeholder represents nothing but a missed opportunity.

  In this article I will identify just how important choosing the right photographs can be, as well as proposing a new method for denoting photos in our wireframes.

• Better User Experience With Storytelling
  Stories have defined our world. They have been with us since the dawn of communication, from cave walls to the tall tales recounted around fires. They have continued to evolve with their purpose remaining the same; To entertain, to share common experiences, to teach, and to pass on traditions.
• Forum Nokia – User Experience Programme
• Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment
  In of itself, Agile does a good job of flexing to the winds of change. But one has to ask whether it was devised to treat a symptom of the larger cause: the business doesn’t know what it wants. While Agile enables the development team to better cope with this, it doesn’t solve the problem and in most cases creates new problems.
• A/B Test Case Study: Single Page vs. Multi-Step Checkoutc
  o when we started re-working the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store, we challenged ourselves to take it to the next level — and we cut the checkout process down to just single page.

  Structurally, the new single-page checkout looks very much like the two-page checkout, with shipping information first, followed by billing and confirmation.

  With A/B split testing, 50% of traffic was redirected to the original checkout, while the other 50% was served the new single-page checkout. After only 300 transactions, the winner was clear and we stopped the experiment after 606 transactions. Google Website Optimizer concluded that the single-page checkout outperformed the out-of-the-box checkout by a whopping 21.8%. But what does that 21.8% really mean?

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!!

• Unmoderated, Remote Usability Testing: Good or Evil?
  Recently, there has been a surge in the number of tools that are available for conducting unmoderated, remote usability testing—and this surge is changing the usability industry.
• Embedding User Experience in the Product Development Lifecycle
  All UX professionals, not just user assistance developers, face the problem of integrating their work into the product development lifecycle.
• Label Alignment in Long Forms | Paper Prototyping for Engineers
• Measuring Usability: The Basics
  Usability is not a luxury. If your website drives revenue, no matter how big or small, you have a vested interest in turning motivated users into buyers, and that requires understanding the needs and expectations of those users. Fortunately, you don't need a big budget or a team of men in white coats wielding eye-tracking lasers to get a handle on your website's usability.
• Questions about personas, research sharing, remote usability :: IxDA Discussion
• Solve Existing Problems – 52 Weeks of UX
  In our attempt to create amazing user experiences, we often want to push the envelope, to create something new, to show people a bright new future. But too often we fall into the novelty trap. The novelty trap is when, in an attempt to dazzle our clients and our users, we focus too much on the new and not enough on the now.

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!!

• Enhancing User Interaction With First Person User Interface « Smashing Magazine
  Though many computer applications and operating systems make use of real-world metaphors like the desktop, most software interface design has little to do with how we actually experience the real world. In lots of cases, there are great reasons not to directly mimic reality. Not doing so allows us to create interfaces that enable people to be more productive, communicate in new ways, or manage an increasing amount of information. In other words, to do things we can’t otherwise do in real life.
• We are Colorblind » Patterns for the Color Blind
  About 8% of the male population has some sort of color blindness. The color blind have the inability to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues. Because of this, the color blind have trouble with a lot of websites.
• Agile Card Wall – the process itself made UX design a more inclusive activity – Agile Experience Design
  Here is a list of reasons why it think this simple method of placing cards on a wall is so essential to team collaboration, trust, personal empowerment and ownership. The process itself made design a more inclusive activity.
• UX in the Boardroom: A Solid Case for Investing in UX :: UXmatters
  “I discovered what really matters to executives, learned how finances and budgets work, and realized the true value of user experience lies not in cost savings at all, but in intangibles.”
• Audience Segmentation Models :: UXmatters
  “Understanding the people who will ultimately engage with a product or service provides the foundation for user experience design.”

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!!

Here is a selection of bookmarks for May 12th:

• The TED Commandments – rules every speaker needs to know
  I discovered one of the reasons the speeches are so good… TED’s organisers send upcoming speakers a stone tablet, engraved with the ‘TED Commandments”. Amy Tan in her TED Talk described the arrival of the TED Commandments as “something that creates a near-death experience; but near-death is good for creativity…”.
• The History of Eating Utensils
  The Department of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences houses the Rietz Collection of Food Technology. Containing nearly 1,400 items, this collection was assembled by Carl Austin Rietz, an inventor and businessman in the food industry. His interest in the industry led him on travels around the world to collect objects used in the production, processing, storage, presentation, preparation, and serving of food.
• 10 Transition Effects: The art of Showing/Hiding Content | DevSnippets
• Nick’s Top User Experience Books | Blog | Nick Finck | UX/IA Pro, Speaker, and Community Cultivator.
  So today there have been a few mentions of the The UX Book Club‘s Top UX Books list (Most notably: Louis Rosenfeld and Paul Seys). I believe this list suppose to be based on the recommendations from all of the UX Book Clubs around the world… tho the Seattle UX Book Club was never informed of this list, or at least it’s members weren’t. A good list none the less.
• Analysis, Plus Synthesis: Turning Data into Insights :: UXmatters
  Conducting primary user research such as in-depth interviews or field studies can be fairly straightforward, when compared with what you face upon returning to the office with piles of notes, sketches, user journals, and audio and video recordings. You may ask, What should I do with all this data? and How do I turn it into something meaningful?
• Putting people first » Bringing the everyday life of people into design
  Products play a role in our everyday lives. Insight into the experiences of people in their everyday lives is of great use for designing products. For example, the contexts in which products are used (physical, social, culture etc.) and the state (excited, tired, concentrated etc.) of the users influence how they experience using products. However, in design practice using this type of diverse, subjective and multi-layered information, as inspirational input for the design process, is a recent development.

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