Partial Recall

Links for 2011-12-14

The Messy Art Of UX Sketching [Smashing UX Design - Dec 13, 2011] – Many articles discuss the power of sketching and why you should do it, but they don’t go into the how or the methods involved. Sketching seems straightforward, but there are certain ways to do it effectively. In this article, we’ll cover a collection of tools and techniques that I (and many other UX and design folks) use every day.
A Cane For The Blind Improves Social Interactions, Sunday Strolls [Co.Exist] – As scientists make slow and steady progress on sensors to help the blind see and move, this cane helps them say hi to friends.
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design [Worry Dream - Nov 08, 2011] – This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you’re a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, I really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact.

Links for 2011-12-01

The Anatomy of an Experience Map [Adaptive Path - Nov 30, 2011] – Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It’s becoming increasingly useful to gain insight in order to orchestrate service touchpoints over time and space.
Using Storyboards and Sentiment Charts to Quantify Customer Experience [UXmatters - Nov 07, 2011] – In the fields of user experience and service design, we use storyboards to illustrate our solutions, so clients can walk in the shoes of their customers, staff, or community and see our solutions as we see them. Storyboards are appealing at an aesthetic level, but are trickier to use in persuading clients who are more used to cold, hard numbers, charts, and tables. Offering more tangible measures of customer sentiment helps clients make connections between the experiences we depict and the sorts of technology, financial, and resource decisions that are necessary to make those experiences happen.
Team WhiteBoarding with Twiddla – Painless Team Collaboration for the Web – Mark up websites, graphics, and photos, or start brainstorming on a blank canvas. Browse the web with your friends or make that conference call more productive than ever. No plug-ins, downloads, or firewall voodoo – it’s all here, ready to go when you are. Browser-agnostic, user-friendly.

Links for 2011-11-03

How our social circles influence what we do, where we go, and how we decide (Video) [Adaptive Path UX Week 2011 - Aug 25, 2011] – In this talk, you will hear stories that illustrate the social patterns in our lives, and how businesses can use that knowledge to build new products, market themselves in more relevant ways, and create experiences that people value. Paul will share stories about how people we are close to, and people we’ve never met, may or may not influence us, and explain how norms learned from people’s local culture impact how much they can be influenced. His goal is for you to walk away with concrete ideas about building great products built around social behavior.
UX, It’s Time to Define CXO [UX Magazine - Oct 28, 2011] – But now that the CXO title has been around for a few years, I ask you: what does the CXO really do and how have things changed for us? How have we, as a profession, taken ownership of this role? What are you doing differently now that you have a CXO in your organization, and does that CXO even have a UX background? Furthermore, how do we ensure the CXO seat is filled by UX, and what skills does someone need to fill it?
An Event Apart: Design Principles [Functioning Form - Oct 24, 2011] – In his Design Principles presentation at An Event Apart in Washington DC 2011 Jeremy Keith outlined the design principles behind the World Wide Web and how they continue to shape its future. Here are my notes from his talk:

Links for 2011-10-20

Getting the first click right [Measuring Usability - Oct 19, 2011] – Few things affect task success more than the navigation of website. If users can’t find what they’re looking for, not much else matters. If it were easy to get the navigation right, there wouldn’t be books and a profession dedicated to it.
First impressions matter in life and that’s also the case with website navigation. Research has shown that when users first click is down the right path, 87% eventually succeed. When they click down an incorrect path, only 46% eventually succeed.
The 10 principles of interaction design [.Net - Oct 19, 2011] – I got my start as an interaction designer during the first internet bubble. Since then I’ve worked on interactive marketing and products for everything including finance, automotive, electronics, packaged consumer goods, pharmaceuticals and healthcare. In that time and experience I have come to know that there are a few key things that make good interaction designs and designers. Here are 10 of them.
Storyboarding & UX – part 2: creating your own [Johnny Holland - Oct 17, 2011] – When thinking about storyboarding, most people fixate on their ability – or perceived inability — to draw. What is far more important is working out the point you wish to make with your storyboard, and the actual story that will carry that point from your storyboard across the room and into the hearts and minds of your audience. In this article explores the value of establishing a reason for the storyboard first, and then how you can create a storyboard using the thinking you’re already using and the skills you already have.

Links for 2011-10-06

Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite! [TED - Mar, 2011] – Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension — and our creative thinking. So why do we still feel embarrassed when we’re caught doodling in a meeting? Sunni Brown says: Doodlers, unite! She makes the case for unlocking your brain via pad and pen.
Conversation Techniques For Designers [Smashing UX Design - Sep 29, 2011] – In this article, we’ll examine the role of conversation in the design process, and how the words we use shape the products we ship. We’ll outline nine ways by which designers can maintain a consistent design conversation during a project, helping to create a better product.
Organize anything, together. | Trello – Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.

Links for 2011-10-04

Shelf Life of Social Media Links Only 3 Hours [Hubspot - Sep 08, 2011] – When it comes to link sharing in social media, it turns out it’s not about where you share it — it’s about what you share. New research from URL shortening service bitly focuses on how long a link is “alive” before people stop engaging with it and whether it matters what kind of content it is or where it was shared. Winners are using direct links (instead of shorteners) and Youtube.
Design Research: Why You Need it [Cooper Journal - Mar 03, 2003] – A design research phase consists of three main activities: stakeholder interviews, domain research, and user interviews. Some combination of all three makes for a successful phase. The length of each activity depends on the complexity of the product. More is always better, but effective design research can be gathered in a relatively short amount of time. Typically, one to three weeks is sufficient for most business and domain products, while complex enterprise systems with multiple interfaces require a longer research period.
How Good Designers Think [Harvard Business Review - Apr 26, 2011] – Firstly, good designers don’t tend to think about consumers; they think about people and what they want and need. Secondly, good designers like observing — really looking at what people do rather than simply relying on what they say they do. Thirdly, they bring expertise in other categories and industries to bear on problems in others. Fourthly, good designers look at what might all change in the short, medium and long-term, by engaging with the best trends and forecasting intelligence. And lastly, good designers pressure test their conclusions by consulting with other cultural interpreters from a broad range of other disciplines.

Links for 2011-08-19

Social Design [Facebook Developers] – Social Design is a way of thinking about product design that puts social experiences at the core. Create these social experiences with the features available on Facebook Platform.
Google Web Fonts – Hundreds of free, open-source fonts optimized for the web.

Links for 2011-08-05

Observing Customers Drives Innovation [ZURB - Aug 02, 2011] – Innovation comes from observing customers. That’s all. You’ll find tons of product opportunities to capitalize on by observing how people are accomplishing everyday tasks. OXO comes to mind as a company that drives innovation from observing their customers.
The Eight Pillars of Innovation [Think Quarterly by Google - Q3, 2011] – Our growing Google workforce comes to us from all over the world, bringing with them vastly different experiences and backgrounds. A set of strong common principles for a company makes it possible for all its employees to work as one and move forward together. We just need to continue to say “yes”and resist a culture of “no”, accept the inevitability of failures, and continue iterating until we get things right.
An Empirical Evaluation of the System Usability Scale [International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (Volume 24, Issue 6) - Jul 30, 2008] – This article presents nearly 10 year’s worth of System Usability Scale (SUS) data collected on numerous products in all phases of the development lifecycle. The SUS, developed by Brooke (1996), reflected a strong need in the usability community for a tool that could quickly and easily collect a user’s subjective rating of a product’s usability. The data in this study indicate that the SUS fulfills that need. Results from the analysis of this large number of SUS scores show that the SUS is a highly robust and versatile tool for usability professionals. The article presents these results and discusses their implications, describes nontraditional uses of the SUS, explains a proposed modification to the SUS to provide an adjective rating that correlates with a given score, and provides details of what constitutes an acceptable SUS score.
A CRAP way to improve usability [Userfocus - Aug 01, 2011] – Visual design is often dismissed as eye candy. In fact, we can use four key principles of visual design to create more usable interfaces. These principles are Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity.

Links for 2011-06-22

Usability Testing with 5 Users [Alertbox - Mar 19, 2000] – Some people think that usability is very costly and complex and that user tests should be reserved for the rare web design project with a huge budget and a lavish time schedule. Not true. Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.

Links for 2011-06-09

What Do You Have to Do to Get Your Way? [UX Magazine - May 19, 2011] – UX Magazine attended the 2011 IA Summit in Denver this year to interview conference speakers and attendees. In this video, interviewees respond to the question:When you’re working on a project, what do you have to do to get your way?
The Fight for Better Experiences: Are you winning or losing? [UX Magazine - Jun 11, 2011] – UX Magazine attended the 2011 IA Summit in Denver this year to interview conference speakers and attendees. In this video, interviewees respond to the question:In the fight for better experiences, are you winning or losing?

Links for 2011-05-26

Our Interview With Dieter Rams, The Greatest Designer Alive [Video] [Co.Design - May 26, 2011] – A rare opportunity to sit down with the man who defined what Apple could be — decades before Jony Ive ever turned on a computer.

Links for 2011-05-25

Designing for decision making – not the same as workflow [GroupVisual.io] – Visualization actually requires a whole different set of skills than UI and web design. Fundamentally, visualization is about decision making – understanding the information and its context better so that you can ask better questions, get better answers, and make better choices. UI design is workflow – like a data entry form, a website shopping cart, or trying to figure out how to reset the bullet formatting in Powerpoint.
Doodle: easy scheduling – Doodle eliminates the chaos that comes from scheduling and saves you a lot of time and energy when you’re trying to find a time to bring a number of people together. Instead of using just one option, you can propose several dates and times and the participants can indicate their availability online. With one look, you’ll be able to see what the best time is for the meeting, and this works with any calendar system that is being used.

Links for 2011-05-20

Awsum Shoes: Is it ethical to fix grammatical and spelling errors in reviews? [Slate Magazine - May 10, 2011] – According to Panos Ipeirotis, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business who studies consumer reviews on the Internet, the first review will lure more travelers. In a recent blog post, Ipeirotis discussed his research showing that well-written reviews help sell products, even when the write-ups are negative. Atrocious wireless connectivity? Who cares, so long as Wi-Fi is properly capitalized.
Perfecting Your Personas [User Interface Engineering - Jan 13, 2005] – A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype — whose goals and behavior patterns you understand very well — you can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype.
Greplin – Greplin is a personal search engine that allows you to search all your online data in one easy place. Greplin indexes the information you create on different websites (like Gmail, Twitter and Facebook) and provides lightning fast search of all your information.
Twapper Keeper – “We save tweets” – Archive Tweets
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Index Calculator – Flesch-Kincaid readability index calculator
100 Things You Should Know About People: #54 — The Average Reading Level In the USA Is Grade 8 [What Makes Them Click - Jan 23, 2011] – The Flesch-Kincaid Reading Score — The most common formula for calculating the readability of a particular passage of text is the Flesch-Kincaid method. The method gives you a Reading Ease formula and also a reading grade level score.
What is Interaction? Are There Different Types? [Dubberly - Jan 01, 2009] – When we discuss computer-human interaction and design for interaction, do we agree on the meaning of the term “interaction” Has the subject been fully explored? Is the definition settled?
Sketching in Mockups [Balsamiq UX Blog - Apr 28, 2011] – This is where thumbnail sketching steps in. I hardly ever start full scale on a wireframe. Before I have the chance to even think about the details I work with thumbnail sketches. It’s like zooming 20 feet away from the thing you’re designing, blurring your eyes, and just seeing the major elements of the page. The idea with thumbnail sketching is to draw a smallish representation of your design, roughing out boxes and greeking lines of text to get an idea of what your interface will look like. You actually don’t even need text to sketch the interface, just scribbled lines. You can use text captions to describe what’s happening in the story.
The Usability of Passwords [Baekdal - Aug 11, 2007] – Security companies and IT people constantly tells us that we should use complex and difficult passwords. This is bad advice, because you can actually make usable, easy to remember and highly secure passwords. In fact, usable passwords are often far better than complex ones.
User Research Is Unnatural (But That’s Okay), Part I [UX Matters - Apr 05, 2011] – From the perspective of a participant, user research is not very natural. We ask participants to try to act naturally in the artificial environment of a lab, or we impose ourselves on their environment and hope our presence doesn’t affect their behavior. We often forget how unnatural user research can be and what effect it can have on participants.
The Ultimate Guide To A/B Testing [Smashing Magazine - Ju 24, 2010] – At its core, A/B testing is exactly what it sounds like: you have two versions of an element (A and B) and a metric that defines success. To determine which version is better, you subject both versions to experimentation simultaneously. In the end, you measure which version was more successful and select that version for real-world use.
Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development [UX Magazine - Apr 14, 2011] – So whether you are at a small start up or a large organization, whether you are a founder, executive, technologist, designer, manager, or marketer, ask yourself this: do you know your product’s story? And perhaps more importantly, who creates your product story?
NounProject – icon set
Poll Everywhere – Poll Everywhere replaces expensive proprietary audience response hardware with standard web technology. It’s the easiest way to gather live responses in any venue: conferences, presentations, classrooms, radio, tv, print — anywhere. It can help you to raise money by letting people pledge via text messaging. And because it works internationally with texting, web, or Twitter, its simplicity and flexibility are earning rave reviews.
Free UX Goodies: Persona Template [Orange Bus - Apr 03, 2011] – Personas are a crucial step in our process to keep decisions grounded and centred around the audience. They help to provoke questions which will challenge decisions, helping the whole team understand the audience being designed for and shaping the design of the site.
Creating Great Design Principles: 6 Counter-intuitive Tests [User Interface Engineering - Mar 01, 2011] – Great design principles help designers learn more about their design and make critical decisions about what they’re building.

Links for 2011-03-01

Interaction ’11 Conference Keynotes [IxDA - Feb 2011] – Keynote videos from the Interaction ’11 conference in Boulder, CO.
The Corporate Pursuit of Happiness [Fast Company - Feb 28, 2011] – Offering a happiness class to future masters of the universe at one of the country’s leading business schools does sound a bit touchy-feely. Yet, last fall, 80 of these type-A students signed up for Aaker’s graduate-level course called “Designing Happiness” — with another 100 clamoring to get in. But Aaker’s work is gaining attention not just in academia but also in corporate America: She has worked with AOL, Adobe, and Facebook, among other companies, helping them figure out how to use happiness to increase employees’ productivity and woo customers. If her hypotheses are correct, marketing happiness could be one of the few ways businesses can still appeal to people in a manner that feels authentic.
Study Finds the Internet Makes Youth More Engaged Citizens [ReadWriteWeb - Feb 24, 2011] – Arguably, the upheaval, activism, and revolutions in of the last two months may serve to counter what has been a longstanding stereotype: youth are largely apolitical. Moreover, those that do participate in politics and activism online do so in shallow ways, the so-called “slacktivism.” But recent findings from a longitudinal study of high school age students challenge these notions, suggesting that youth who pursue their Interests online are more likely to be engaged in civic issues.

Links for 2011-02-22

Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale: User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications [Proceedings of CHI 2010] – More and more products and services are being deployed on the web, and this presents new challenges and opportunities for measurement of user experience on a large scale. There is a strong need for user-centered metrics for web applications, which can be used to measure progress towards key goals, and drive product decisions. In this note, we describe the HEART framework for user-centered metrics, as well as a process for mapping product goals to metrics. We include practical examples of how HEART metrics have helped product teams make decisions that are both data-driven and user-centered. The framework and process have generalized to enough of our company’s own products that we are confident that teams in other organizations will be able to reuse or adapt them. We also hope to encourage more research into metrics based on large-scale behavioral data.
A huge list of Style Guides and UI Guidelines [The UX Bookmark] – If you are a graphic designer or an interaction designer and have ever been tasked with creating a style guide or UI guidelines document (both are different and I’ve had the pleasure to work on both of them creating templates and the actual documents for brands and products), this list should help you out as a consolidated list of references. This list is going to be constantly updated (and will ultimately be a monster list, it’s quite modest for now) of publicly accessible style guides and UI guideline documents on the web.
Why Don’t Usability Problems Get Fixed? [UX Matters - Feb 07, 2011] – Why don’t usability problems get fixed? If we point out obvious usability problems and provide reasonable solutions for them, why doesn’t someone fix them? In this column, I’ll explore these questions and provide some tips to help ensure your recommendations get implemented.

Links for 2011-02-08

User Experience White Paper [All About UX - Feb 04, 2011] – User Experience White Paper is a result from a Dagstuhl seminar on Demarcating User Experience, where 30 experts from academia and industry worked together to bring some clarity to the concept of user experience. We see the white paper as an important step towards a common understanding on user experience.
NoteSlate – NoteSlate is low cost tablet device with true one colour display, real paper look design, long life battery (180h !), together with very handy usage and very simple and helpful interface for pen and paper. This easy, compact and portable gadget is used anywhere you want to make any notes, drafts, sketches, any ideas for future reference. Paper for everyone! Write a note and check it later, save it, or delete it. Maybe send it after. Just one colour is enough to express the basics. Keep your life simple.
Sketchnotes 2009 – 2010 [Eva-Lotta Lamm - 2010] – 101 pages full of notes from lots and lots of UX and design events with talks from over 100 speakers and panelists.

Links for 2011-02-03

UX Ideas in the Cards [UX Magazine - Feb 03, 2011] – Like many practitioners, my day-to-day to work involves facing situations in which I am unsure of what to do next. Clients and teams look to me for solutions, ideas, and methods that can help create great ideas and experiences. Every now and then I, like anyone else, struggle to remain fresh and creative. When I catch myself falling into a rut or back to approaches that I’m comfortable with, I try to challenge myself to do something different. As a good friend of mine says, “If you’re stuck, try to figure out how to get unstuck.” Often I return to my library of UX books and tools, but in particular, I like to return to my collection of UX card sets.
The Art and Science of ‘Stratecution’ [TalentZoo - Feb 01, 2011] – The truth is that strategy and execution need to go hand-in-hand. You need the insight-driven, business-focused, brand-inspired thinking of top-down strategy. You also must work bottom-up, recognizing the everyday realities and real-world complexities you’ll face, while also being nimble, improvisatory, and open to evolution along the way. It’s equal parts strategy and execution, or what I call “stratecution.”;
What You Really Get From a Heuristic Evaluation [UX Magazine - Feb 19, 2010] – When applying what I call “checklist usability” in a heuristic evaluation to learn what the flaws and frustrations of a design might be, the outcome is a determination of whether the UI complies with the heuristics. It is an inspection, not an evaluation. It is not about the user experience. It’s not even about task performance, which is what the underlying question was in the team’s conflict: Will users do better with this flow versus that flow? If we interrupt them, will they still complete a purchase? Any inspection method that claims to answer those kinds of questions is just guessing.

Links for 2011-01-24

The Rise Of The Chief Customer Officer [Forrester Blogs - Jan 24, 2011] – Over the past five years, Forrester has observed an increase in the number of companies that have a single executive leading customer experience efforts across a business unit or an entire company. Whether firms call these individuals a chief customer officer (CCO) or give them some other label, these leaders sit at high levels of power at companies as diverse as Allstate, Dunkin’ Brands, Oracle, and USAA.
The Psychologist’s View of UX Design [UX Magazine - May 19, 2010] – I’m a psychologist by training and education. So the part of the elephant I experience applies what we know about people and how we apply that to UX design. I take research and knowledge about the brain, the visual system, memory, and motivation and extrapolate UX design principles from that.
Design Thinking | Employing Design Principles | Defining Ease of Use [UX Matters - Jan 17, 2011] – In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss the following topics: 1) the core elements of design thinking, 2) employing design principles in our work, and 3) defining the ultimate, theoretical target for ease of use.
Well-designed error messages [Formulate Information Design - Jan 11, 2011] – 1) tell the form-filler that an error has occurred, 2) be clear about exactly what and where that error is, and 3) provide the form-filler with the information and tools they need to be able to correct the error, or otherwise get out of the situation.

Links for 2010-12-22

User Interface Design Libraries for Keynote and Powerpoint [Keynotopia] – Keynotopia is a collection of tutorials, samples, and user interface libraries to create clickable prototypes for web and mobile apps, using Apple Keynote or Microsoft Powerpoint.
Introducing Wirify: The web as wireframes [Volkside - Dec 20, 2010] – Wirify is a bookmarklet that lets you turn any web page into a wireframe in one click. It’s lightweight and works in many modern browsers. To use Wirify drag the link below to your Bookmarks toolbar.
Why You Should Stop Using the Go Button for Search [UX Movement - Sep 20, 2010] – Websites that use the Go button for search create an ugly and noisy mess that does users more harm than good. Luckily, there is a simple and clean way to do search that will make using the search function faster and easier.

Links for 2010-12-03

Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience [Harvard Business Review - Nov 15, 2010] – A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. The more touchpoints you have, the more complicated – but necessary – such a map becomes.
Understanding Customer Experience [Harvard Business Review - Oct 28, 2010] – “Customer experience” has become a very commonly used phrase in recent years, but like “innovation” and “design” it is actually difficult to find a clear, commonly-held definition, even though many businesses see improving their customer experience as a competitive differentiator. How we can really improve something if we can’t even define it? This is the first in a series of posts looking at customer experience – what it encompasses, how to structure it, how to approach and improve it.
Touchpoints Bring the Customer Experience to Life [Harvard Business Review - Dec 02, 2010] – In this installment we’ll look at a framework for understanding how your organization supports the customer throughout that journey. This is accomplished by orchestrating touchpoints – a touchpoint being any interaction point between the customer and your brand.

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