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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!!

• VisualDNA™ – We transform unknown users into known users
  Users profile themselves by taking one of our highly viral image quizzes – Our API sends the user's personality, interests, and purchase intent to your site – Your site is then able to provide more relevant content to the user
• Selling UX to small business
  It’s 2010 and everyone loves usability, right? It may may look that way from our comfortable perches atop the blogosphere, but if you’ve tried to sell usability services to small businesses, you know that it can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience.
• Designers, meet Agile
  As an interaction designer working in an Agile environment, I’ve recently been asked by several colleagues in non-Agile arenas – folks in agency settings, consultancies, or in-house software companies – what it’s really like in terms of design workflow and output. Their questions have touched on everything from the day-to-day differences to the quality of the designs coming out of the process, and their perspectives have ranged from casual-and-curious, to scared-and-skeptical (e.g., “Oh, it’s just a fad” and “There’s that vast Agile agenda again.”)
• Why User Competency Matters in Social Design
  In designing for social participation, we can consider user goals and needs — even interests, features, functionality, adoption and scaling issues. Best practices and popular ways of using social media guide us in our decisions. But there’s a basic concern we seem to often overlook: “What is the user good at?”
• interactions magazine | Technology First, Needs Last: The Research-Product Gulf
  I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: Design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories, but essentially useless when it comes to breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examining of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had a huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane, small, continual improvements. Call one a conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn’t happen.
• The Virtues of a UX Professional
  UX professionals can be an egotistical lot. We like to think that only certain people with certain qualities can do what we do. Not everybody has the right stuff to fly to the moon or storm the beaches at Normandy. And in a similar way (sort of) not everybody has what it takes to create great user experiences.

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!!

• Designing for Service: Creating an Experience Advantage
  We are surrounded by things that have been designed—from the utensils we eat with, to the vehicles that transport us, to the machines we interact with. We use and experience designed artifacts everyday. Yet most people think of designers as only having applied the surface treatment to a thing conceived by someone else.
• OpenHallway: Unmoderated remote usability testing with screen recording
  Inspired by the 5 second test, a lot web-based services have cropped up to support remote usability testing. In the past few years, I've been experimenting with some of these to conduct super small, unmoderated remote usability testing sessions. I've used Morae extensively in the past, but for most of my needs, that's like using a sledgehammer on a pushpin.
• Prototyping with Omnigraffle: show/hide annotations " Fuzzy Thoughts
  We use Omnigraffle Pro to generate prototypes and wireframes from one source document. It allows us to link elements (buttons, page regions, etc.) to different pages within the same document, or to run scripts. We can then export a PDF or HTML version of our static wireframes into a clickable prototype easily
• Calls to Action
  Causing action through persuasion: Attention; Interest; Desire; Action.
• "What are you suggesting?" Using images to influence:
  Here’s a little trick from psychology. Let’s say we’re having a conversation and I want to nudge the conversation in a certain direction; I want to influence what comes to mind for you. To do this, I might try using associative priming. Basically, I’ll tell a few stories or inject specific language into our conversation that your brain will pick up on, bringing associated mental objects into short term memory. A few minutes later, I might ask you a certain question. If I’ve done a good job at priming, there’s a good chance I can predict how you might respond (I suspect this is one way magicians are able to predict what someone is thinking!).

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!!

• Try the "Lightening Quick" Mental Model Method
  When I was making a lot of mental models in the get-it-to-market-yesterday dot com boom of the late 1990's, I used a technique that resulted in a mental model plus gap analysis brainstorm in the course of one day. Now that it's the not-in-this-economy post economic slump, I think it's time to put this technique to use again. Today, in fact, I got together with a group of nine talented design agency folks and we spent 2.75 hours putting together a set of towers based on 24 individual stories, and then spent rest of the day brainstorming ideas to support those towers. Here's how we did it.
• Playing Well with Others: Design Principles for Social Augmented …
  Technical barriers to delivering augmented reality (AR) experiences on a broad scale are falling rapidly
• The Craft of Interaction Design
  The following text is a transcript of a talk by Gillian Crampton-Smith at Innovation Forum Interaction Design, Potsdam, March 2007. The aim of the two-day conference was to focus on all aspects of interface and interaction design: mobile telephone and media interfaces, problem solutions and product visions, web pages and virtual worlds, art and commerce, business and science. Using both concrete projects and visionary concepts, current developments in interaction design were presented and discussed by regional and international experts from the design, research and business worlds.
• The Panic Status Board
  …The idea quickly grew beyond “Project Status”, and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information. What you’re actually looking at is an internal-only webpage that updates frequently using AJAX which shows:
• Do’s and Don’ts of Usability Testing
  Usability testing is one of the least glamorous, but most important aspects of user experience research. Over the years, it has also been one of the forms of user research we have performed most frequently. In doing so, we’ve learned quite a few best practices and encountered some potential pitfalls. We think it’s important that we share what we’ve learned with the many stakeholders, designers, and engineers who might find this information helpful.
• Autocomplete design pattern
  Problem summary: The user needs to enter information into a text box which is prone to be mis-typed, hard to remember, or ambiguous.

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!!

• 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!!

• Search is the Web’s fun and wicked problem
  Search is the Web's most powerful and frustrating tool. It's the conduit to unfathomable amounts of information, yet it requires a fair degree of user education to reach its full potential. It's odd that something so important is so hard to harness.
• Get on the same page with personas
  Personas are a vital tool in designing a product or interface that connects with its users. When you don’t have clear personas as your designing guide, other factors get in the way. Ultimately the interaction fails: it gets made for ease of the coder rather than ease of the user, features get added that don’t present a strong benefit to the user, without a single vision everyone ends up compromising and nothing gets accomplished thoroughly. Below are a few key nuggets I took from the sources at the end of this post.
• Conversion Room: Improve your web-forms and increase conversions
  As a follow up to our previous post "Is your website easy to buy from?", we're now going to take a deeper look at web-forms. Web-forms are often the only communication point your website visitors have with your business, yet unfortunately they are often a neglected after thought for many websites.
• LukeW | An Event Apart: 10 Secrets from a UX Design Strategist’s Toolbox
  Sarah Nelson's 10 Secrets from a UX Design Strategist’s Toolbox talk at An Event Apart San Francisco detailed a number of ways to manage collaborative design sessions.
• Winning Content: Thoughts on influence and content strategy
  Blog on content and editorial.

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