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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!!

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• » Johnny proudly presents: Content Strategy Week Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive
  We love content strategy. Why? Because content strategy solves problems. Lots of problems. And during this week five leading content strategists from four countries will tackle a different set of challenges, just for you.<br />
  <br />
  So what type of articles can you expect? Let’s check out what each day will bring:
• » 4 Web project problems content strategy can solve Johnny Holland – It’s all about interaction » Blog Archive
  I get this question a lot: How do content strategists work with IAs/designers/writers? Truthfully, they often don’t. But, they can and they should.<br />
  <br />
  Not only should they work together, they should do away with the typical web project process that leaves content until last, resulting in a mad scramble. People don’t muck up web projects. Bad processes do.
• iPhone App Designs Reviewed: Critique Board and Lessons Learned – Smashing Magazine
  Some time ago I started a mobile app design review section on our company’s website. The idea behind this “Crit Board” was simple: if mobile developers want to create apps that people want to buy, they’ll need help with design and usability. But most of the time they can’t afford it. On our Crit Board, developers can send us their mobile apps (iPhone apps, Android apps, Blackberry apps) along with questions and problems, and we (free of charge) will pick apart key usability issues, illustrate our design recommendations and post our findings.
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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!!

• Test Usability By Embracing Other Viewpoints – Smashing Magazine
  As Web technology improves, users expect Web-based widgets to be useful, content to be relevant and interfaces to be snappy. They want to feel confident navigating a website and using its functionality. They crave being able to get things done with little friction and on demand. And demand they do.
• Presentation Zen: Start your presentation with PUNCH
  The primacy effect, when applied to presentations, suggests that we remember more strongly what happens at the beginning of a presentation. In order to establish a connection with an audience, we must grab their attention right from the beginning. A punchy opening that gets the audience's attention is paramount.
• Demystifying Usability : Design and Emotion: Designing for Mood
  'Getting in the mood' is the name of a paper I'll be presenting at Design and Emotion in Chicago 5-7th October 2010. Since I'm getting in the mood for the conference , here are some highlights of my latest thinking on mood, product design and interaction.
• How to recruit a UX leader with the X factor
  We're increasingly asked by organisations for advice on building a user experience competency. Our advice is to start at the top and get the right person for that first critical leadership role. User experience leaders demonstrate 3 core competencies: they understand research; they follow user experience methods and standards; and they are great communicators.
• How to Make Your Web Statistics Actionable: Search « kylejlarson.com
  If you were ill and your doctor handed you a chart including your weight, heart rate, and blood pressure and promptly sent you on your way with no analysis or feedback, he wouldn’t be your doctor for long. Without actionable analysis of the data it has very little usefulness. Website statistics are often discussed in a similarly meaningless way. I’ve suffered through many meetings where people throw around numbers with nothing more to say about them than this number has increased and that one has decreased. Most sites have some statistics available and maybe they are even reviewed occasionally, but to get real value from your statistics they must be a catalyst for action. Analyzing your on-site search and search engine keywords is a great place to get started.
• Alphabetical Sorting Must (Mostly) Die (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  Ordinal sequences, logical structuring, time lines, or prioritization by importance or frequency are usually better than A–Z listings for presenting options to users.

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!!

• Influencing the customer journey by gravity | buckminster
  Whenever a customer buys something, he will go through a process from need to purchase. In this process a customer will get in touch with different brands on different media and at different times. Every occasion where a customer gets in touch with a brand, we call a “touch point”. And the path along all touch points, we call the “customer journey”.
• A/B Testing: Why you shouldn’t jump to conclusions
  One of the first things you’ll find when you start doing A/B testing is that some tests show surprising results very quickly. One of the tests we ran recently showed one design clearly outperforming another within the first day by over 300%.
• The Increasing Momentum of Content Strategy | I’d Rather Be Writing
  Content strategy is a topic more and more technical communicators are talking about. It’s one of the dominant conversations in the field right now. David Farbey recently presented on Content Strategy for Everyone at Tech Comm UK. Rahel Bailie talked about Creating a Content Strategy at the Lavacon conference. Scott Abel continually talks about content strategy — see this video series on content strategy he did with MindTouch.
• Bare-Faced Messiah
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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!!

• YouTube – Broadcast Yourself.
  CS 547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design) is a Stanford University course that features weekly speakers on topics related to human-computer interaction design. The seminar is organized by the Stanford HCI Group, which works across disciplines to understand the intersection between humans and computers. This playlist consists of seminar speakers recorded during the 2008-2009 academic year.
• Why We Sketch
  It seemed the conference room got brighter, as if, for the team staring at the whiteboard, light bulbs just went on. There was a collective sense of "Ohhh, I get it now."<br />
  <br />
  It was the culmination of a very confusing discussion, where everyone thought they knew what they were talking about, but, as it turns out, nobody was on the same page. In a moment of frustration, one junior team member—a designer—stepped up to the whiteboard and declared, "This is what I think we're talking about."<br />
  <br />
  Turns out the junior designer got it wrong. Yet his design spurred the idea's progenitor to rush to the board, grab the pen, and quickly correct the mistakes.<br />
  <br />
  That's when the group sighed their collective "ohhh" and the room lit up. The shift had happened. Up until now, they were talking about WHAT they were trying to do. Now, they could talk about HOW they would do it.
• Playing Hard to Get: Using scarcity to influence behavior | UX Magazine
  Microsoft recently announced an upcoming price increase for the XBox Live Gold membership fee. When this news broke, a few retailers such as NewEgg responded by pushing their existing stock of gift cards (selling the membership at the older, lower price). It was fascinating to watch people scramble to get their hands on the remaining gift cards. Even people who hadn’t yet tried XBox Live purchased some of the gift cards, explaining, “they won’t be around for long—now’s the last chance to buy a year membership at the current price.”
• Mobile Usability (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
  In user testing, website use on mobile devices got very low scores, especially when users accessed "full" sites that weren't designed for mobile.
• Animals in the news – The Big Picture – Boston.com

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!!

• Facebook: 7 Highly Effective Habits — PsyBlog
  Love it or loathe it, Facebook is everywhere, and will continue to be everywhere as the film describing its genesis—The Social Network—is released worldwide over coming months.<br />
  <br />
  To help you cope, here are 7 research-based tips for total Facebook domination. If you don't use it, these should at least help you pepper Facebook-related conversations with compelling observations from the psychological research.
• Don’t stand still while your users evolve–Making Websites Easy To Use
  As new technology arrives in users hands, their expectations are raised. When technology evolves, they get used to new functionality and use their new found learning to form expectations. When using a new website, or one they haven’t used for a while, they bring with them their learning and expectations from other sites and expect the new site to behave in the same way. In usability testing, we regularly hear users saying that they expected the search function to make suggestions while typing, just like Google does. Or, that they expect to be able to quickly filter the products shown on a page just like they can on Asos.com.
• Don’t stand still while your users evolve–Making Websites Easy To Use
  Using our sat nav on the way to see a client the other day, we wondered why the touchscreen seemed less responsive than normal. After some thought, we realised that it wasn’t the sat nav that had changed, instead we had become accustomed to the fast and highly responsive iPhone touch screen interface and have now come to expect everything to work like that.
• UsabilityPost – A Motive For Bad Design
  Browse around some content sites on the web—magazines, blogs, news sites—and you’ll quickly notice a lot of bad design. Bad design in the sense that the page isn’t working on making things easy to read for you as the visitor, but instead seems to be pushing ads and links in your face, making for a cluttered and confusing experience.
• What Websites Can Learn From Mobile | UX Booth
  Mobile applications and websites are hugely popular right now. Limitations of the mobile hardware has meant that certain design conventions need to be used to make them a success. Could some of these mobile conventions be used to improve your website design?
• A List Apart: Articles: Testing Accordion Forms
  “Three point five pages.” It’s my usual answer when someone asks me “how long should my web form be?” And believe it or not, many people ask. It may be the most common web form design question I get asked. So I’m not exactly ecstatic that my tongue–in–cheek answer mostly draws blank stares and very few laughs. You see, it turns out this is a topic that many people take quite seriously.
• Oktoberfest 2010 – The Big Picture – Boston.com

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