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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!!

• interactions magazine | Solving complex problems through design
  What is it about design that makes it so well suited to solving complex problems? Why is design thinking such a promising avenue for business and government tackling seemingly intractable problems?
• Ten Things Your Employees Wish You Knew About Them | Fast Company
  If you think it's tough being a manager these days, try being an employee. Most are in the position of having to go with the flow because of the current economic conditions. But that doesn't necessarily mean they do so with a smile on their face. Here are ten things your employees wish you knew about them:
• Perception and the design of forms – Part 5: Proximity – Formulate Information Design
  This is the fifth article in our series about visual perception and the design of forms. We're focusing on 6 relevant principles of human perception, namely:<br />
  <br />
  Characteristics (things that are an aspect of a single object)<br />
  Shape<br />
  Size<br />
  Colour<br />
  Relationships (things that are about how multiple objects relate)<br />
  Figure/ground<br />
  Proximity<br />
  Similarity
• Why Users Fill Out Forms Faster With Top Aligned Labels | UXMovement.com
  Imag ine a user who is really excited about your prod uct or ser vice. They’re ready to sign up, so they go to your form page and start fill ing out their infor ma tion. The way you align your labels with your form fields can affect how easy it is for users to fill out the form. Do you want to give users a quick, easy and pain less expe ri ence or do you want to give them a has sle? If you want to make their expe­ri ence quick, easy and pain less, con sider using top aligned labels for your form fields.
• Use the 80-20 Rule to Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness
  80-20 rule proponent and analytics wizard Tim Ferriss has a website optimization case study of how an 80-20-optimized website received a 20%+ higher conversion rate.
• Ocado: Delivering on User Experience | UX Booth
  Good user experience design is about ensuring that at each point of engagement with your product, company, or service, you are crafting positive interactions. It is goal-oriented and outcome-focused because at each stage you are ensuring that users can easily achieve their objectives.

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!!

• How Limitations Improve Design | Webdesigner Depot
  We often complain about the multitude of limitations which we’re faced with every day as designers.<br />
  From browsers, to screen resolutions, to user interactions, we seem to constantly be struggling to find some way of thinking outside the tiny little box of “best practice” which we’re constrained by.<br />
  Limitations are abundant but are they really such a bad thing? Is it possible, even, that they actually produce far better results than if we did not have them?
• The Art and Tradition of Typography – fontblog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs
  or over 25 years Microsoft has been very focused on the development of type and type technologies. In order to fully understand the technical foundations of typography in Windows, a brief overview of some of the highlights of “typographic engineering” from the past 500 years can add some useful insight.
• Creating Passionate Users: An Interview with Josh Porter, Part 1 | Perfetti Media
  Social web sites and applications are everywhere: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, Craigslist, and Digg are just a few of the web sites taking advantage of the power of the Social Web. Web sites and applications that incorporate social features are the fastest growing properties on the web for good reason: they connect people, motivate, and engage them.  As a result, they grow very quickly and successfully.
• Improve Your E-Commerce Design With Brilliant Product Photos – Smashing Magazine
  Product photography could well be the single most important design aspect of any e-commerce website. Without the ability to touch, hold, smell, taste or otherwise handle the products they are interested in, potential customers have only images to interact with. Ultimately, the softer, tastier, flashier and more attractive your products look to shoppers, the more confident they’ll feel about purchasing from you and the better your conversion rate will be.
• How Choice Impairs Your Visitors | UX Booth
  Many sites provide an array of methods to interact with their offerings, but excesses in decision-making pressure can render less empowered visitors into a cyclone of stress from the barrage of questions being asked. As an industry, we place a great deal of emphasis on getting visitors to make decisions, but are we turning a straightforward path into a labyrinth with our need to know?
• Emotional Design with A.C.T. – Part 1 – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
  As UX professionals, we strive to design engaging experiences. These experiences help to forge relationships between the products we create and the people who use them. Whether you’re designing a website or a physical product, the formation of a relationship depends on how useful, usable and pleasurable the experience is. Ultimately, we form relationships with products and services for the same reasons we form relationships with people:

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!!

• Think Vitamin » Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps
  In February 2010 Fred Wilson, a New York based tech investor, spoke at the annual Future of Web Apps Miami conference. His talk, clocking in at just under 30 minutes, looks at his top 10 principles for creating a successful web app. A full transcript is available below.
• Memory Inception: Three Keys To Creating A Great User Experience For Your Product
  Ever read a great book? What do you remember about it? Maybe a few dramatic moments, some wild story twists, and most definitely the ending. Your product is just like a book. You’re telling a story to your customers and they’ll remember only a select few moments from what you tell them. What are these moments? Can you use these moments to plant a memory in a customer’s mind?
• Russia in color, a century ago – The Big Picture – Boston.com
• Now that the oil well is capped… – The Big Picture – Boston.com
• How the top ten airlines in the world use Facebook | Tnooz
  US-based Delta Airlines secured nothing if only bragging rights last week when it unveiled the world’s first airline booking engine within Facebook.<br />
  Obvious questions came over its effectiveness as a marketing tool, value to the consumer, impact on its existing booking channels and integration (or not) with existing social media features on Facebook.<br />
  The answers to all of these take nothing away from the fact that Delta is taking Facebook seriously and its move is likely to trigger a wave of similar applications being launched by other airlines.<br />
  But what of the other leading airlines around the world?
• disambiguity » Adaptability – Essential Soft Skills for User Experience Practitioners
  As User Experience practitioners, we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the skills we don’t have or have enough of and trying to acquire them.

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!!

• User Experience Books for Beginners | UX Booth
  Through @uxbooks, my twitter feed for all things UX book related, I regularly get asked to recommend books to people, and more often than not its to suggest entry level publications. Normally, when I’m feeling particularly lazy, my default response is to point them in the direction of the seminal book ‘Don’t make me think‘ by Steve Krug.
• Dark Patterns: Black Hat, Anti-Usability Design Patterns
  This pattern library is dedicated to Dark Patterns: user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done.
• SLICE-B Experience Evaluation « Temkin Group
  Temkin Group has created an expert review methodology that can be used to evaluate experiences within and across any channel (Web, IVR, phone, store, etc.). It consistes of 12 criteria across these areas of an interaction:
• jQuery Mobile | jQuery Mobile
  A unified user interface system across all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation. Its lightweight code is built with progressive enhancement, and has a flexible, easily themeable design. Project strategy
• Ignore UX at your peril

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!!

• Information Gathering: A Roundup of UX Applications | UX Booth
  The number of applications available for User Experience professionals is ever-expanding much of this growth happening over the last year! As a consequence, experts are increasingly turning to novel tools in order to collect data and generate reports regards their websites. While some UX designers suggest that local testing is the best way to gather data, we decided to round up these up-and-coming applications and see just what makes them tick.
• Sketching Fundamentals | UX Booth
• Gestalt Principles Applied in Design
  Web designers, like other artists and craftsmen, impose structure on the environment. We enforce order and beauty on the formless void that is our blank computer screen.
• Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control? | Blog | design mind
  Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since Henry Chesbrough’s seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003. However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good time to reframe “Open” from a design point of view.
• The Six Elements Of An Experience « Customer Experience Matters
  SLICE-B breaks an experience down into six distinct components:<br />
  Start. The extent to which the customer is drawn into the experience.<br />
  Locate. The ease in which the customer can find what she needs.<br />
  Interact. The ease in which the customer can understand and control the experience.<br />
  Complete. The confidence that the customer has that her goal was accomplished.<br />
  End. The transition into next steps.<br />
  Brand Coherence. The reinforcement of a company’s brand.
• Shortboredsurfer – 11 Principles of Interaction Design explained
  This post isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of interaction design principles, its merely an introduction to the subject. And I’m definitely not going to attempt to enter the lions den of defining what ‘interaction design’ is, that’s for another day!

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