Wendy Norris's List: User interface

"As designers, we often recycle the same fundamental elements when wireframing or mocking up a design. However, by utilizing a library of reusable web UI elements, we can make the design process on each project more efficient, and cut down on research and design time.\n\nThis post covers 10 of the best free web UI kits, resources and stencils from around the web to kick-start the early stages of your next project."

We pay a number of participants to view your page and track their gaze with our software. You get heatmaps like the one above, which show how the users interacted with your site.

This report is based on usability studies with real users, reporting how they actually used a broad variety of iPad apps as well as websites accessed on the iPad.

"Imag­ine a user who is really excited about your prod­uct or ser­vice. They're ready to sign up, so they go to your form page and start fill­ing out their infor­ma­tion. 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 pain­less expe­ri­ence or do you want to give them a has­sle? If you want to make their expe­ri­ence quick, easy and pain­less, con­sider using top aligned labels for your form fields."

"Although gender differences in a technological world are receiving significant research attention, much of the research and practice has aimed at how society and education can impact the successes and retention of female computer science professionals. The possibility of gender issues within software, however, has received almost no attention. We hypothesize that factors within software have a strong impact on how well female problem solvers can make use of the software. Evidence from other fields and preliminary investigations of our own have already begun to reveal evidence supporting this hypothesis."

Carnegie Mellon Social Web course readings

"In 2007, the Institute for the Future forecast on lightweight infrastructure introduced a set of characteristics common in the design of emerging technical systems. When we look for lightweight innovation, we are more concerned with the characteristics of organizations and processes of innovation than the physical objects and networks of infrastructure. But many of the key characteristics of lightweight infrastructure are useful in recognizing lightweight innovation."

"In interface development, it is crucial to reflect the users' expectations and mental models. By meeting users' expectations, errors can be prevented and the efficiency of the interaction can be enhanced. Applying these guidelines to website development reveals the need to know where users expect to find the most common web objects like the search field, home button or the navigation."

Wireframes are an indispensable part of the website creation process. They provide a quick and easy means of communicating aspects of the site, ranging from information architecture to page layout, and they allow everyone involved to consider and, hopefully, agree upon all the fundamental aspects of the design.

"Lean Startup(tm) is term coined by Eric Ries to describe a process for building a business. It combines Steve Blank’s ideas about Customer Development with Agile Software development, the free, open-source software movement, and the ideas of lean manufacturing. At its core, Lean Startup is a way to find market opportunities and to create products and services that serve those markets in a sustainable way."

It’s been a long time coming, but a year after v.0.9, the new Design with Intent toolkit, DwI v.1.0, is ready. Officially titled Design with Intent: 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design, it’s in the form of 101 simple cards, each illustrating a particular ‘gambit‘ for influencing people’s interactions with products, services, environments, and each other, via the design of systems. They’re loosely grouped according to eight ‘lenses‘ bringing different disciplinary perspectives on behaviour change.