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Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
"From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues. "
UX in the Boardroom: A Solid Case for Investing in UX :: UXmatters
Some think the best way to demonstrate the value of usability in a corporate setting is to emphasize the resulting cost savings. While that may be sage advice in some organizations and industries, following it in the information technology and government arenas would cost you respect and a meeting. For some years, I was guilty of following this tack—before I discovered what really matters to executives, learned how finances and budgets work, and realized the true value of user experience lies not in cost savings at all, but in intangibles.
Paint Me a Picture: Empowering the Consumer » Articles » Montparnas User Experience Design Blog
When people consider buying anything, whether it be clothes, a gadget, or home, they often spend a lot of time comparison shopping and trying to gather information to inform their choice. In fact, a major effort is generally exerted to try to experience the item:
* When shopping for shoes, we will put on one shoe and walk back and forth; then the other shoe, check ourselves out in the mirror and hold on to the item while scanning for other options.
* For hotels and trips, we read reviews, look at pictures, and find out what our friends know about a destination or establishment. We look out for those horror stories and shop around for a balance of quality and price.
* When shopping for a home, we take tours, learn about the previous owners, walk/drive through the neighborhood, look for restaurants and amenities nearby that match our interests and try to picture how we would arrange the rooms and furniture.
What this all leads to is a frame of reference. People try to create and imprint a picture in their minds of the item, not just on its own, but within their lives. It is easy for businesses to lose sight of this fundamental aspect of the decision-making process and leave it to the customer to do all this leg-work with little assistance. But this is a mistake.
UX design, service design and design thinking
presentation on the values of user experience design
A List Apart: Articles: Human-to-Human Design
It’s not new to say that we now live in an age in which survival in business depends on your ability to communicate effectively through the internet.
What is new is the realization that just having any old website isn’t enough. The quality of your site and the nature of its content are paramount and your ability to communicate with your audience is the key.
Ideal UX Team Makeup: Specialists, Generalists, or Compartmentalists
Dr. Steven Margles is a world-renown hand and wrist orthopedic surgeon at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, MA. People come from all over the world to see him. Manufacturers of surgical products seek out his advice. He's one of the best hands and wrists guys in the world. Dr. Margles is a specialist.
Eleven miles to the west is Emerson Hospital, in Concord, MA. There we find an orthopedic staff of 6 doctors, all of whom are very capable. But none of them specialize in hands or wrists. They work on whatever body parts you bring to them. They are just as good as Dr. Margles and the other specialists at the Lahey Clinic, they just have different experience.
Specialists Versus Generalists: A False Dichotomy? :: UXmatters
In his recent blog post on UIE Brain Sparks, “Ideal UX Team Makeup: Specialists, Generalists, or Compartmentalists,” Jared Spool has revived his discussion of the merits of specialists versus generalists. He defines specialists and generalists as follows:
User Experience Deliverables
It's an exhilarating time for the user experience community. Rising awareness of our value plus emerging technologies and transmedia trends have created conditions for a step change in our practice.
As an information architect, I'm enjoying the new challenges immensely, even as they sweep me outside my comfort zone. I've designed social software and rich user interfaces. I've sketched scenarios for the future of mobile search. I've mapped the user experience across channels and applications. And, I've increasingly found myself striving to clarify ideas for folks in the executive suite.
adaptive path » blog » Brandon Schauer » Business Empathy: 6 questions to connect experience with strategy
It’s sad to say, but even the most usable, sexy, or innovative design work won’t succeed if it doesn’t fit within the greater business strategy of the organization. But just how do you know what that greater business strategy is?
It’s difficult to quickly get smart about an organization’s overall business strategy when there’s usually no simple Powerpoint deck to spell it out. Below are 6 questions I use to quickly sense the business strategy:
Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
Not that familiar with “content strategy?” That’s ok. It’s in my job title, and I struggle every time I’m asked what I do for a living. Many people have no idea what it means, but even more people bring their own (wrong) assumptions to the conversation. Usually they think it has something to do with writing copy. That’s not entirely false, but it’s kind of misleading.
The analogy I’ve been using recently is that content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design. I find this analogy to be especially encouraging because six years ago, as the crest of the first wave of the web was about to break, people had no idea what “information architecture” meant either.
A List Apart: Articles: The Discipline of Content Strategy
We, the people who make websites, have been talking for fifteen years about user experience, information architecture, content management systems, coding, metadata, visual design, user research, and all the other disciplines that facilitate our users’ abilities to find and consume content.
Weirdly, though, we haven’t been talking about the meat of the matter. We haven’t been talking about the content itself.
WHEN TECHNOLOGY FAILS
48% of technology users need help from others with new devices and many tech users
encounter problems with their internet connections, home computers or cell phones
As gadgets become more important to people, their patience wears thin when things break
Turn Usable Content into Winning Content :: UXmatters
Findable. Scannable. Readable. Concise. Layered. We know much these days about how to make Web content usable—thanks to experts such as Robert Horn, Jakob Nielsen, Ginny Redish, and Gerry McGovern. What we don’t understand as well, however, is how to make content win users over to take the actions we want them to take or have the perceptions we want them to have. We don’t understand how to make Web content both usable and persuasive. I, by no means, intend to imply that we should sacrifice the usability of content to make it more persuasive. Truly winning content must be both.
International Address Fields in Web Forms :: UXmatters
As enablers of online conversations between businesses and customers, Web forms are often responsible for gathering critical information—email addresses for continued communications, mailing addresses for product shipments, and billing information for payment processing to name just a few. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that one of the most common questions I get asked about Web form design is: “How do I deal with international addresses?”
Digital Web Magazine - User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing
Just as it is important to choose the proper knife when slicing-n-dicing vegetables, it is critical to prescribe a suitable user interface to support faceted filtering. Faceted filtering allows you to narrow down a large list of objects to a manageable size by applying flexible combinations of attribute filters in any order. Rather than forcing you down fixed paths within a website’s information architecture, faceted filtering allows you to multi-dimensionally slice-n-dice the information in a manner that best accommodates your specific needs. A user interface that optimally supports faceted filtering must expose its robust functionality in a way that expresses affordances, controls complexity, and follows existing standards that have been pre-established across the web.
CONTENT PAGE DESIGN Luke Wroblewski (pdf)
Slideshow on best practices for content page design
Flights Online - usabilty study - webcredible
extended usability study about online travel booking systems
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