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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!!

• Design Better And Faster With Rapid Prototyping – Smashing Magazine
  The old adage, “a picture speaks a thousand words” captures what user interface prototyping is all about: using visuals to describe thousands of words’ worth of design and development specifications that detail how a system should behave and look. In an iterative approach to user interface design, rapid prototyping is the process of quickly mocking up the future state of a system, be it a website or application, and validating it with a broader team of users, stakeholders, developers and designers. Doing this rapidly and iteratively generates feedback early and often in the process, improving the final design and reducing the need for changes during development.
• A Link Labeled "Products" (or "Solutions" or "Clients") is a Bad Idea …
  got this idea about links like “Products”, which we see on a lot of corporate sites. Vanessa was talking about these words from an SEO perspective, explaining that, when we use them as the headings and main navigation on the site, the search engines don’t know what to do.
• Graphic Design Theory: 50 Resources and Articles – Noupe
  But spending some time on the theory behind the graphic design principles we use every day can expand our design horizons. It can open up new avenues of creativity and experimentation that can lead our designs from just good, to fantastic. On that note, below are 50 excellent resources and articles that discuss graphic design theory, including layout, color theory, and typography. Feel free to share additional resources and articles in the comments.
• Website Response Times (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  Slow page rendering today is typically caused by server delays or overly fancy page widgets, not by big images. Users still hate slow sites and don't hesitate telling us.
• Using Stories for Design Ideas
  When we say that the design must “tell a story,” we are not just talking about games or interactive fiction, or even about turning a work application into an adventure (“Conquer the benefits allocation maze…”). Instead, we mean the kind of stories that help you create new designs. These stories are used to make you think of new possibilities, give you the tools to encourage a self-reflective kind of thinking—design thinking—or so you can imagine designs that will improve the lives of other people. Stories explore ideas from user research.
• Faceted Navigation: Layout and Display of Facets " Experiencing Information
  Overall, my interest in faceted navigation stems from the development and organization of workshop material on the subject. The intent is to address the primary questions designers face and identify possible solutions and directions. Where known, I’ve attempted to cite relevant literature, which is proving to be thin and/or indirect.
• How To Engage Customers In Your E-Commerce Website
  One of the most influential factors in our buying decisions is the opinions of our friends and relatives. Likewise, a large majority of online shoppers now trust what other customers say about the products they buy more than the e-tailers themselves. The reason is that we trust people who are “on our side,” even if we do not know them personally.

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!!

• Mobile First Helps with Big Issues
  During part of our conversation on the Big Web Show yesterday, Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Benjamin, and I discussed some of the ways designing for mobile first can help mitigate some of the thorny issues that have plagued designers for years.
• Interdisciplinarity vs Cross-Disciplinarity
  Interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinarity have been buzzwords for the last few years, especially in education. I teach on the COFA Online Masters of Cross-Disciplinary Art & Design and in my main position at the Hochschule Luzern – Design & Kunst (HSLU), the phrase regularly enters discussions. The terms are used often interchangeably and often without really explaining what they mean. As so often is the case, the idea seems to be that by just talking about disciplines working together magic things will happen.
• So, You Want to Do User Research: Characteristics of Great Researchers
  One of the best things about user research is that anyone can do it. On the other hand, it takes real commitment and a lot of personal development to do user research well. People commonly assume that research is research—and doing any kind of research is better than doing none at all. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Not all user research is created equal. Flawed research can be a significant liability to the success of a product, as well as the company developing it, so it really is important to get it right.
• Designing with Behavioral Economics
  Behavioral economics…has emerged as a discipline, bringing together economics and psychology to understand how social, cognitive, and emotional factors influence how people make decisions, both as individuals and at the market level.
• Personas as User Assistance and Navigation Aids
  To understand how these users would access and use the Body of Knowledge, we decided to create personas that would let us envision what type of structure it should have and communicate our findings….

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!!

• First of the last Space Shuttle launches – The Big Picture – Boston.com
• Mount St. Helens, 30 years ago – The Big Picture – Boston.com
• WATCH THE STARTUPS
  If you want to find the most innovative UX practitioners, watch the startups. Startups are startup companies, newly-formed businesses made up of small teams moving extremely quickly to take advantage of an opportunity they see in the market.
• A Common Sense Content Strategy – Articles – MIX Online
  Lately, everyone on the web is talking about content. Content strategy has made its way into our collective consciousness and web writing is coming into its own.
• Mission impossible shrinking the UX process
  AnyClip wanted to bring both user research and interaction design to their development cycle; it was up to us to modify their process. We naturally began with discovery—collecting user and business perspectives as well as analyzing the competition—but what should we do next? In this post, we’ll trace our footsteps. As you’ll soon see, some of our methods worked, some didn’t; overall, however, it was a rewarding experience for everyone involved.

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!!

• Navigating disagreement: How to keep your eye on the evidence
  Heeding others' impressions often increases accuracy. But "agreement" and "majoritarianism" are not magic; in a given circumstance, agreement is or isn't useful for *intelligible* reasons.
• Content Strategy for Everybody (Even You)
  Web content is the meat in the sandwich, not the icing on the cake. Too often, organizations build websites and then neglect the content, letting it languish, unread and unloved. Even during website redesigns, the editorial process gets short shrift in favor of building shiny new features and creating fancy new designs. Thinking about the content is always left until the last minute, always thought to be “somebody else’s problem.”
• Eight Short Studies On Excuses
• Designing for Social Interaction – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind …
  It took both the telephone and the mobile phone 15 years to amass 100 million users, but Facebook did it in 9 months. We see more and more people becoming connected on online social networks, and it seems our networks are growing exponentially. But the reality is, social networks rarely add to our number of connections. We’ve already met almost all the people we’re connected to on social networks. We’re already connected to these people offline. Social networks simply make the connections visible. For example, we often connect with old school friends, and catch up over a couple of wall posts. But rarely do we continue the conversation once we’ve connected, and over time we forget that the connections exist. In fact, Facebook users often have no interactions with up to 50% of their connections.1 When we study how people are interacting on social networks, we see that most interactions are with a very small subset of the people we’re connected to.
• Case study of agile and UCD working together – Boxes and Arrows: The …
  Large scale websites require groups of specialists to design and develop a product that will be a commercial success. To develop a completely new site requires several teams to collaborate and this can be difficult. Particularly as different teams may be working with different methods.<br />
  <br />
  This case study shows how the ComputerWeekly user experience team integrated with an agile development group. It’s important to note the methods we used do not guarantee getting the job done. People make or break any project. Finding and retaining good people is the most important ingredient for success.

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!!

• 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design
  Officially titled Design with Intent: 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design, it’s in the form of 101 simple cards, each illustrating a particular ‘gambit‘ for influencing people’s interactions with products, services, environments, and each other, via the design of systems. They’re loosely grouped according to eight ‘lenses‘ bringing different disciplinary perspectives on behaviour change.<br />
  <br />
  The intention is that the cards (download them here) are useful at the idea generation stage of the design process, helping designers, clients and – perhaps most importantly – potential users themselves explore behaviour change concepts from a number of disciplines, and think about how they might relate to the problem at hand. Judging by the impact of earlier iterations, the cards could also be useful in stakeholder workshops, and design / technology / computer science education.
• Are You Designing or Inspecting?
  Guidelines and heuristics are not interchangeable, but many UXers treat them that way. It’s common to hear someone saying that they’re doing a heuristic evaluation against X guidelines. But it doesn’t quite work like that.
• Coloring Outside the Wireframe: 3 Tips to Integrating Visual Design in the UX Field
  Having come from a start up where everyone did everything (from research to coding) I was worried about getting slotted into a specific phase of the design process, essentially “skinning” other designers’ work. I was assured that would not be the case. In my first 2 months I did, in fact, discover a sincere desire to redefine the role of visual design in the interaction process. However, up to this point visual design was typically tacked on at the end of projects.
• Developing a user experience strategy
  The term “user experience strategy” gets thrown around an awful lot in design circles, but few people have offered an explanation as to what it means or how to achieve it. Here’s a look at the Miskeeto approach.
• The Strange Connection between Entitlement, Social Innovation, and Interaction Design
  Students would contact me and describe how miserable they were with their jobs, asking for advice on new career paths or even entirely new professions. It wasn’t that their bosses were mean, or that their working hours were awful; it wasn’t even the larger issues we’ve all dealt with in the business context, like the misappropriation of designer as stylists, or the prioritization of technologists over designers. Instead, I began to hear how the benefits of ‘flow’ and ‘being creative’ and ‘solving really hard problems’ were being grossly outweighed by feelings of insignificance and irrelevance. My alumni were at the forefront of design, working at major consultancies and the heart of the Fortune 500 – and they didn’t feel like their work was meaningful.
• Mental Models and Usability
  Mental models have been studied by cognitive scientists as part of efforts to understand how humans know, perceive, make decisions, and construct behavior in a variety of environments. The relatively new field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has adopted and adapted these concepts to further the study in its main area of concern (usability). This document will describe mental models and usability. It will then discuss the applications and limitations of mental models as they help improve software usability. The concluding section will describe a study developed and conducted by the authors. This study suggests some potential areas for further research that could help both cognitive scientists and HCI practitioners make progress in understanding mental models.

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