Quote of the Week: “Being a geek is all about your own personal level of enthusiasm, not how your level of enthusiasm measures up to others. If you like something so much that a casual mention of it makes your whole being light up like a halogen lamp, if hearing a stranger fondly mention your favorite book or game is instant grounds for friendship, if you have ever found yourself bouncing out of your chair because something you learned blew your mind so hard that you physically could not contain yourself — you are a geek”
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.
Agile UX in Practice | Agile UX Agile development and user experience can work brillantly together… well, but how?<br />
<br />
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)!
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!!
Communicating errors Ideally, you'll design your system to prevent errors from occurring in the first place. But no matter how simple your system, someone, somewhere, will make an error when using it. The difference between a great user experience and an awful one is what your system does next.
Content strategy for dummies Information architects need to understand content. Content strategists need to understand context. In terms of traditional sitemaps, the boxes have no value without the interconnecting arrows. And the arrows have no meaning if there are no boxes to which to point. And that’s why there is so much gray area in the definition – and why the pedants will spend years fighting over definitions in the years to come
Management 3.0: Being an Agile Manager | Agile UX During an agile transition program, do not let your managers by the roadside! Rather help them to become Agile managers and to control the evolution of their profession.
Next generation of consumers – smart but not predictable | Tnooz I am fascinated by the buying behavior of different sections of society and different nationalities/tribes and what makes the consumer tick.<br />
<br />
Recently I have been thinking about the Millenials – those who are the next generation after the Gen-Y.<br />
eMarketer has done two pieces on Millenials and its buying behavior. In the first, Millennials Show Off Brand Relationships, looked at how Millenials interact with and view brands.
Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!
Welcome to BlobFisk.com, the online home of Alex Horstmann. I'm a User Experience Manager (currently General Manager, User Experience and Design at TUI Travel plc) passionate about usability, user experience and accessibility.
I blog mainly about all things UX, Usability and IA; when I'm too busy to blog I will share some of the interesting bookmarks that I save.
RSS