Write for Reuse
“Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned. While you can’t predict all such goals, you can plan for multiple uses of your text.” – (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Marissa Mayer Gives Us An Insight Into How Google Works
“Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience at Google recently delivered a fascinating Keynote at the Google I/O Developers Conference. She shares a heap of interesting nuggets, from the reason why they chose 10 search results as default, and why they chose a yellow background behind their ads as opposed to the industry favored blue.” – (TheNextWeb)
Industry trends in prototyping
“In the world of designing interactive products and services, prototype is generally defined as some representation of a design idea. In the world of physical products, the term tends to connote something quite similar to the finished manufactured form. Indeed, industrial designers use the term model to describe what interaction designers think of as a prototype.” – (Dave Cronin – Adobe Dev Connection) courtesy of janjursa
Tips for Usability Professionals in a Down Economy
“The usability profession is experiencing the current economic downturn just like everyone else. This article offers ten tips for usability professionals trying to weather this economic storm.” – (Tom Tullis – Journal of Usability Studies 4.2) courtesy of uxtweets
Exploring a Deep Web That Google Can’t Grasp
“Now a new breed of technologies is taking shape that will extend the reach of search engines into the Web’s hidden corners. When that happens, it will do more than just improve the quality of search results — it may ultimately reshape the way many companies do business online.” – (Alex Wright – NYTimes) registration required
Establishing a Service Design Methodology
“Okay, there it is; there is no design process!” – (David Nichols – itSM Solutions)
Reviewing User Interfaces
“Has your boss or a client ever asked you to review a user interface for a Web or desktop application? Perhaps the request went something like this: Can you just look over these new screens for us? Oh, and can you check the error messages, too? It won’t take long! And, by the way, we ship next month.” – (Rhonda Bracey – UXmatters)
Usable Accessibility: Making Web Sites Work Well for People with Disabilities
“When people talk about both usability and accessibility, it is often to point out how they differ. Accessibility often gets pigeon-holed as simply making sure there are no barriers to access for screen readers or other assistive technology, without regard to usability, while usability usually targets everyone who uses a site or product, without considering people who have disabilities. In fact, the concept of usability often seems to exclude people with disabilities, as though just access is all they are entitled to. What about creating a good user experience for people with disabilities—going beyond making a Web site merely accessible to make it truly usable for them?” – (Whitney Quesenbery – UXmatters)
Patterns in UX Research
“One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, influencing user behavior.” – (Steve Baty – UXmatters)
Improving website design to grow sales
“Design and usability matters a lot when creating a company website and getting it right could be the difference between business success and business failure.” – (Chris Barling – BusinessZone) courtesy of usabilitynews
Beyond prototype fidelity: environmental and social fidelity
“(…) environmental fidelity, social fidelity, and prototype fidelity need to be employed and manipulated throughout the design process to bring to our projects the generative ideas, validation, ability to see, play and iterate something that previously was only imagined, and the concrete conversation starters that let us talk and think with our teams and stakeholders.” – (Paula Wellings – Adaptive Path blog)
Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design
“Web application design teams that have a shared understanding of a project’s context and objectives produce better results. Joseph Selbie explains, and gives us tips on how to promote shared, holistic understanding in our own teams.” – (Joseph Selbie – Boxes and Arrows)
Visual Interface Design: The Photography Example
“When developing user interfaces, designers increasingly use custom graphical elements. As the web browser becomes basic technology for software interfaces, more and more elements derived from graphic and web design replace the traditional desktop approaches to the concrete design of human-computer interfaces.” – (Milan Guenther – Boxes and Arrows)
Six ways to make Web 2.0 work
“Technologies known collectively as Web 2.0 have spread widely among consumers over the past five years. Social-networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, now attract more than 100 million visitors a month. As the popularity of Web 2.0 has grown, companies have noted the intense consumer engagement and creativity surrounding these technologies. Many organizations, keen to harness Web 2.0 internally, are experimenting with the tools or deploying them on a trial basis.” – (Michael Chui, Andy Miller, and Roger P. Roberts – The McKinsey Quaterly) – courtesy of shuggie
User (experience) research, design research, usability research, market research
“(…) a much more significant change was made at Yahoo! more recently: a merger of the user experience research group and the market research group, yielding an organization named, Customer Insights.” – (Richard Anderson – Riander)
Tim Berners-Lee speaks on Linked Data
“This slide set was presented at the TED 2009 conference, ‘The Great Unveiling’ in Long Beach, CA. USA, 4, Feb 2009.” – (W3C)
In Defense of Readers
“Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking. We measure how frequently they click but not how long they stay on the page. We concern ourselves with their travel and participation – how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Readers flourish when they have space – some distance from the hubbub of the crowds – and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.” – (Mandy Brown – A List Apart)
Bad service disguised as good service
“In a world where products are becoming more and more alike, service is often the only differentiating factor. So don’t let someone con you into thinking that you are receiving good service when the opposite is actually the case – well-intentioned or not. If we don’t demand better service, we will never receive it.” – (Eric Reiss – FatDUX blog)
It’s Not Who Your Customers Are, It’s How They Behave
“No department has a complete view of the customer, however, and so in place of true understanding are models and frameworks that attempt to describe the customer. Many companies don’t go beyond demographics and market segmentation.” – (Peter Merholz – Harvard Business)
IA Summit 2009 Full Schedule
“The Information Architecture Summit is the premier gathering place for information architects and other user experience professionals. It’s grown from a special interest group’s efforts to define an emerging field, to a rich and expanding community of practice shaping and informing multiple disciplines.” – (IA Summit ’09)