How To Create An Ecommerce Website That Sells (Bogdan)

We have all had the same experience regarding ecommerce websites. We go online looking for a particular product. We type the keywords for the thing we desire into a search engine. We get a bunch of results, and it seems as though one company has exactly what we’re looking for. So, we click through to the website and we are instantly disheartened by the unprofessional looking landing page of the company. If you are like me, when you see a poorly designed website, you probably leave the site and try another. At least for me, my thinking is that if the company can’t go through the effort to make a professional looking website, then they probably do not put much effort into other things like customer service or timely delivery, etc. (topdesignmag.com)

Design Principles: Visual Perception And The Principles Of Gestalt (Steven Bradley)

In 1910, psychologist Max Wertheimer had an insight when he observed a series of lights flashing on and off at a railroad crossing. It was similar to how the lights encircling a movie theater marquee flash on and off. (smashingmagazine.com)

Why Clients Aren’t Interested in Your Proposals (Stef Gonzaga)

An entire work day. That’s how long it took to create the 8-page project proposal you wrote, edited, and packaged to perfection for a potential client. It’s the third one you’re sending out this month. (sixrevisions.com)

Shortening UX to UI time: a different approach to MVP design (fakecrow)

Design teams that handle user experience and user interface will know; when working on an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), we are often on tight deadlines, have limited resources, and a great need to test and iterate. At Fake Crow, we’ve been seeking a way to cut down the turnaround time between delivering UX elements and UI comps, allowing more time for rapid prototyping and testing. (fakecrow.com)

The First World’s biggest addiction (David Cain)

My people have a ritual, and in fact I performed this ritual as I sat down to write what you’re reading. It goes like this: I take a spoonful of special seeds and grind them down into a powder. I run hot water through the powder, and collect the dark liquid that seeps out. I take the cup of hot liquid and bring it to my desk because I believe drinking it will make for a better working experience. (raptitude.com)

Leveraging Eye Tracking to Create an Engaging User Experience (Frank Guo)

Eye tracking is a very powerful research technique that can help you design engaging experiences by illuminating a pathway for capturing user attention. It’s also a misunderstood technique. Many are lured by the “sexiness” associated with heatmaps and gaze plots but fail to implement the findings properly, and therefore get lots of data but glean little actionable insight. Others avoid eye tracking altogether because of perceived complexity of the technique. (uxmag.com)

Companies struggle to keep up as more customers turn to Twitter for answers (Cynthia Boris)

This past January, Simply Measured monitored 32 dedicated customer service Twitter accounts. They tallying up the number of incoming and outgoing Tweets, calculated response times and posted their results in a brand new report. (marketingpilgrim.com)

The Definition of a Long-Tail Keyword [In Under 100 Words] (Sam Kusinitz)

A long-tail keyword is a keyword phrase that contains at least three words (though some say two or more is considered long-tail). (hubspot.com)

Design research: What Testing Won’t Tell You (Lynsey Thornton)

Just like their real-life counterparts, our relationships with digital products and services have a tendency to change, to mature over time. So when the UX team at Shopify sought to improve the product’s onboarding process—one that normally takes several days or weeks to transpire—we chose to employ a rather unusual approach. (uxbooth.com)

Save 20%: Task Analysis Boot Camp-What You Need To Know Before Design

Save 20% on 2014 Task Analysis Boot Camp!

Course Description: Document the user experience of your website, app, or product BEFORE you design with a task analysis. Price for the week: $39 (Originally $49)

Optimal Techniques for Strategically Displaying Web Forms (Eva McKnight & Lance Padgett)

Incorporating web forms into your website isn’t always the easiest thing to do; they often look very sales-driven, and don’t always flow well with your designs. But we need forms because they are the ultimate way to capture important user-contributed data. (sixrevisions.com)

7 Steps to an Effective Landing Page (James George)

A landing page is an effective way to drive sales for any business. The majority of websites share a similar range of assets — about us pages, contact pages, etc. But a great landing page is something that takes time to produce. Landing page designs will vary, depending on the industry that you’re in. However, most effective landing pages have a few key elements in common that make them successful. (sitepoint.com)

Bing makes a visual splash with new Product Ads for search (Cynthia Boris)

In case you haven’t noticed, visual imagery is in like Flynn. Pinterest, Instagram, expanded photo options on Twitter and Facebook – it’s a byproduct of our lightening fast, mobile world. If we can see it, we’re more likely to choose it and buy it. So Bing is bringing that idea over to the search page with their new Product Ads. (marketingpilgrim.com)

How to Use Visual Hierarchy To Create Clear and Easy-to-Read Web Pages (Pamela Wilson)

Imagine you’ve entered a cave. Your eyes slowly adjust to your surroundings and begin to make out the shapes and forms around you. You see three doorways: they’re equal in size, and all the same distance from where you stand. How do you choose where to go first? (copyblogger.com)

Usability Tip: One Main Call-to-Action Item Per Task (Tammy Guy)

One of the best ways to learn what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to UI and usability is to look at as many samples as possible and test out pages, comparing and evaluating how certain elements are being treated. This online poll from Fame10 was linked to through the Fox News mobile app. In the survey, users are asked to submit their answers through radio button selections. (uxmag.com)

Content-out Layout (Linda van Deursen)

Grids serve well to divide up a predefined canvas and guide how content fits onto a page, but when designing for the web’s fluid nature, we need something more… well, responsive. Enter ratios, which architects, sculptors, and book designers have all used in their work to help set the tone for their compositions, and to scale their material from sketch to final build. We can apply a similar process on the web by focusing on the tone and shape of our content first, then working outward to design fluid, ratio-based grid systems that invite harmony between content, layout, and screen. (alistapart.com)

5 Must Read Perspectives on Social Media Marketing Strategy (Lee Odden)

The eternal debate in marketing: Strategy before tactics vs. Tactics to develop strategy. So many companies have become comfortable reacting to industry trends and competitors with tactics, that they end up with wasted effort, poor performance and plenty of frustration. This is especially true in the world of social media marketing as companies roll out social media tactics only to be left wondering in 6 months what the ROI is. (toprankblog.com)

Content Marketing: Tips from your peers on making use of internal resources (David Kirkpatrick)

A recent MarketingSherpa Blog post, “Content Marketing: Interviewing internal resources,” covered one technique for including internal resources in your content marketing. Today’s post features sources who each an array of quick-hit tips on the topic. (marketingsherpa.com)

Responsive-Design Intranets with Smart Content Prioritization (Kara Pernice)

An intranet implemented with the responsive design technique enables employees to access all intranet content on any mobile device or computer. A responsive-design intranet (or public-facing website) has only one codebase but typically has different user experiences for desktop and smaller-screen mobile displays, perhaps a third UX for tablets, and possibly even more user experiences for other devices and screen sizes. Since designers are able to choose how and where the content and features should appear on each device, a responsive intranet can create the best possible UX for employees no matter which device they are using. (nngroup.com)

Designing for Your Objectives (Rachel McCollin)

Whenever I’m working with a new client, the first question I ask them is what they want their website to do for them. Often, they don’t know. They just think a website is something they should probably have. Because other businesses have them. (sixrevisions.com)

How To Hire & Build An Awesome Team (Addison Duvall)

At some point in your design career, you’ll likely be placed in charge of other people. These might include writers, marketers, programmers, engineers, and other corporate employees. This can be an incredibly rewarding experience which can enhance both the project you’re working on, as well as your overall career as a creative professional. Or, it can be a total nightmare, with clashing personalities and a muddling of the overall vision into an unsalvageable mess. (hongkiat.com)

Why Web Developers Should Learn Web Design (Sam Norton)

As a web developer, you are in charge of making the website do things. You are responsible for creating interactivity on the site, which may may include jQuery and Ajax validation forms, submitting forms to database, rollovers, sliding menus or many other aspects of the site that needs programming. But how about the website’s design? (1stwebdesigner.com)

A Quick Introduction to Agile UX Design (Marcin Treder)

Recently, a coalescing of Agile software development methods and UX design has resulted in what is being called Agile UX design. Agile UX design frames user experience design within the Agile development framework. (sixrevisions.com)

DESIGN BY HÜMANS Best T-Shirts in town (20% OFF Sitewide Code: FREERIDES)

T-Shirts, art prints, phone cases.

Design By Humans features graphic tees, phone cases and wall art prints from over 15,000 diverse international artists from all around the world. Embedded in the culture of Design By Humans is a passion for brilliant design, detailed illustration and a strong appreciation for all things creative.

Twitter to Kill @ Replies and #Hashtags? (Jennifer Slegg)

Could you imagine Twitter without @replies or #hashtags? Well, you might not have to imagine very long, as it seems Twitter is considering eliminating both, even though they are deeply ingrained within Twitter user culture. (clickz.com)

Are Most Winning A/B Test Results Misleading? (Kerry Butters)

A recent report by Martin Goodson of Qubit (a conversion optimization startup) asserted that Most Winning A/B Test Results Are Illusory, due, for the most part, to such tests being badly executed. According to the author, this is something that can lead not only to the ‘needless modification of websites’, but also in some cases can do damage to a company’s profitability. (sitepoint.com)

Why a Responsive Web Design Will Help You Get More Visitors (Jared Chelf)

If you don’t have a responsive web design, then chances are you’re missing out on a lot of potential visitors and customers. You may even be losing some. Here’s why a responsive web design will help you get more visitors, and how not implementing this design could be handicapping your business: (webdesignledger.com)

Why Is It So Hard to Find Good UX People? (Janet M. Six)

Why is it so hard to find good UX people?—from a UXmatters reader “How do you define good?” asks Pabini. “Different organizations have different needs, so should hire UX professionals who can meet their specific needs—people who are good for their organization. Employing boilerplate job descriptions doesn’t help companies to do that successfully. Because user experience gained traction as a profession only relatively recently, most UX people are somewhat inexperienced and can successfully meet the needs of only certain organizations or projects—typically, those in product domains that are similar to domains in which they already have experience. (uxmatters.com)

Announcing Winners in the International Design for Experience Awards (UX Magazine Staff)

We are thrilled to be able announce winners in the inaugural international Design for Experience awards. Presented by UX Magazine, the DfE awards recognize excellence in all aspects of experience design and the winners in each category were chosen in large part based on what the UX community can learn from their achievements. (uxmag.com)

Facebook Is Still Failing Marketers (Nate Elliott)

Our declaration last October that Facebook was failing marketers and that brands should focus their social efforts elsewhere created a lot of discussion. To no one's surprise, most of the people defending Facebook were vendors that rely directly upon Facebook marketing for their livelihood. (forrester.com)

Multidevice users consumer 7 hours of media in 5 hours a day (Cynthia Boris)

Twitter may have 230 million monthly active users but new users aren’t signing up as fast as they used to – that’s a fact everyone agrees on. Why the slow down and how to fix it are two points no one can agree on and it’s got to be making Twitter’s head honchos very nervous. (marketingpilgrim.com)

Narrowing Your Focus and Taking on More Specialized Projects (Eric Karkovack)

Starting out as a freelance web designer often means taking whatever projects come our way. After all, we need to eat too (and a drink every now and then isn’t a bad idea). But, as both your business and skill set evolves, you may come to a crossroads. Do you keep on taking on just any old project that comes along? Or, do you instead narrow your focus and take on more specialized projects? For example, perhaps you only want to work with sites powered by WordPress, or just e-commerce or even projects that fall within a certain price range. (speckyboy.com)

6 design essential ingredients for successful e-commerce (Rob Bowen)

With growing numbers of businesses taking their products and services to the web, offering greater reach and accessibility of their wares to their existing and potential clients, we as web designers need to be ready to deliver on their e-commerce web wants and needs. Across the Web we see numerous examples of both ends of this spectrum, e-commerce websites done extremely well and, unfortunately, some extremely poorly. (webdesignerdepot.com)

Device-Agnostic (Trent Walton)

The more I build for the web, the more the term ‘device-agnostic’ endears itself to me. I used to think it merely dealt with basing responsive breakpoints on content rather than particular devices, but there’s more to devices than the size of their screens. A device-agnostic approach also takes into account infinite combinations of screen resolution, input method, browser capability, and connection speed. (trentwalton.com)

Responsive Web Design with Less Code (Obinwanne Hill)

The Art of Building a website is a noble but challenging one. It got even more challenging after the advent of the mobile device. I can still remember quite vividly the moment when Steve Jobs introduced the reinvented Phone to much fanfare. The Tablet followed shortly after, and the concept of a ‘mobile web’ came into reckoning. (speckyboy.com)

Steller is a beautiful visual storytelling app, similar to Storehouse, but for your iPhone instead (Kaylene Hong)

Early this year, Apple’s former user experience evangelist and UI designer Mark Kawano launched an iPad storytelling app Storehouse. Now a new app has surfaced that has pretty much the same concept as Storehouse, but is available instead for your iPhone and iPod Touch. (thenextweb.com)

The Startup Owner's Manual

Video: "Steve Blank, Author, The Startup Owner's Manual" http://bit.ly/IATelevision (IA TV) #lean #startup

DISCOUNT 63% How To Develop & Document Personas & Scenarios (Udemy)

DISCOUNT 63% (YOU SAVE $41): How To Develop & Document Personas & Scenarios

Design products that fit your audience. Design better products by learning how to create better UX personas. (udemy.com)

The instructor is Susan Weinschenk. Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology, and 30 years of experience applying psychology to the design of software, websites, apps, and technology products. She's the author of How to Get People to Do Stuff, and 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People.

3 Key UX questions to ask before (and while) designing any product (Diego Mendes)

Designing a product, is in many ways much like writing a novel. It is very hard to get it right the first time. It requires iterations, improvements and adjustments. (medium.com)

How To Debug Website In IPad (Thoriq Firdaus)

With billions of mobile users nowadays, building websites that are viewable on mobile devices is indispensable. Luckily, we’ve got many tools and options for debugging websites on mobile platforms. You can use Adobe Edge Inspect, Google Chrome Emulation, or XIP.io to name a few. (hongkiat.com)

Twitter Study: Which Tweets Get the Most Engagement? (Jessica Lee)

We’ve seen third-party studies on what makes a tweet succeed, like this one, for example. But Twitter went ahead and did a study of its own, looking at more than 2 million tweets from verified accounts in the US. What it found was that adding video, links and photos all result in “an impressive boost in the number of retweets,” Twitter said. (clickz.com)

Have you got what it takes to grow from freelancer to studio boss? (Speider Schneider)

There may come a time you get too successful as a freelancer and must decide if you prefer sleep, money, or headaches. The step up to becoming a studio with more than one person can be a nightmare… or very rewarding. Not everyone can do it and not everyone wants to do it. So, what happens if you are forced into expanding your business? (webdesignerdepot.com)

A Beginner’s Guide to Lead Conversion with Social Media (Chloe Mason Gray)

So, you’ve been publishing on Facebook, Twitter and maybe a few other social media platforms, and you’ve built up a decent following in each channel. Your audience is starting to engage more and more with your content. Maybe you’re wondering, “Okay, what’s next? How can I take this to the next level? How can I use social media to drive leads for my business?” (kissmetrics.com)

8 Brilliant Landing Page Examples You Need to See (Ginny Soskey)

Learning how to put together an A+ landing page is tricky. There are so many elements that a top-notch landing page needs, and making those elements the "best" they can be often depends on what your landing page goals are. (hubspot.com)

Understanding cash flow for a design business (marie)

As a graphic design business owner, cash flow is your lifeline. It’s the equivalent of the caloric intake for your body. A proper balance of in and out is needed to avoid getting yourself into financial trouble. Treating your income like fuel for your business is the key to getting to a proper income balance. Just as with many things, too much going in or coming out can be a sign of trouble. (designreviver.com)

Visualizing Progress with Agile Storymapping (David Peter Simon)

Kanban walls, status reports, risk logs … with so many project management tools, it's easy to fall into the complacent feeling that a project is staying on track. But keeping a project on-track in terms of enhanced user experience goes beyond just hitting that next release deadline: it’s also about adding value to the business and building features that matter to end users. It’s also important not forget the UX debt we may have built up thanks to shoddy software practices. (uxmag.com)

Apple Designer Jonathan Ive Talks About Steve Jobs and New Products (John Arlidge)

We use Jonathan Ive’s products to help us to eat, drink and sleep, to work, travel, relax, read, listen and watch, to shop, chat, date and have sex. Many of us spend more time with his screens than with our families. Some of us like his screens more than our families. For years, Ive’s natural shyness, coupled with the secrecy bordering on paranoia of his employer, Apple, has meant we have known little about the man who shapes the future, with such innovations as the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. But last month, he invited me to Cupertino in Silicon Valley where Apple is based, for his first in-depth interview since he became head of design almost 20 years ago. (time.com)

Why “The Fold” Is A Myth – And Where To Actually Put Your Calls To Action (D Bnonn Tennant)

If you’ve spent any time at all learning about web design, online marketing, or conversion-rate optimization, you’ll have heard to never put calls to action below the fold. Indeed, in industries where web designers know enough about marketing to use calls to action in the first place, you see an awful lot of “templati­fication”—websites all starting to look suspiciously alike. Here’s an obvious example: tech startup websites. Don’t they all look a little like this? (kissmetrics.com)

9 lessons learned from redesigning an e-commerce app for growth (Tomas Dirvonskas)

Just recently, Baltic-based startup Vinted – a marketplace for girls to buy and swap pre-loved clothes – raised $27M from Insight Venture Partners. A year ago, they did not have any mobile presence; today more than 50 percent of its traffic comes from apps. (thenextweb.com)

Why people focus on the right-hand side of a design (Chris Da Sie)

Website users instinctively have greater trust for content on the right-hand side, says UX designer Chris Da Sie. In Western culture, we've always been told to design left to right to help guide users. We read left to right so we should position the most important content and elements in our designs to where a user's eye is going to look first. But let me ask you: by designing this way are users trusting the information you are providing? Are we getting the most interaction out of our users that we possibly can? (creativebloq.com)

German IA Summit (IA Konferenz) Early Bird tickets END tonight

German IA Summit (IA Konferenz) Early Bird tickets END tonight MIDNIGHT (March 19), Berlin time. #iak

Hide from your friends with Cloak app (Nicholas Tufnell)

Are you incredibly popular but sick of bumping into your "friends" all the time? Then you should check out Cloak, a newly released app and one of the first self-proclaimed "anti-social networks", which is hoping to provide you with an "incognito mode for real life". (wired.co.uk)

10 Things To Know About Variability In The User Experience (Jeff Sauro)

Most people are comfortable with the concept of an average or percentage as a measure of quality. An equally important component of measuring the user experience is to understand variability. Here are 10 things to know about measuring variability in the user experience. (measuringusability.com)

Eat, design, sleep, repeat. Or how to be a poor designer. (Kristofer Layon)

I came across this t-shirt design this morning on Twitter. (source: http://www.creativebloq.com/design/shirt-sums-life-31411057) What a sad commentary for some designers if this is how they really work! (kristoferlayon.com)

New Time-Spent Metric Seeks to Move Marketers Away From Clicks (Mary Lisbeth D'Amico)

The viewability of digital ads remains somewhat of a sore point for the online ad industry. Market participants recognize advertisers' needs for a more satisfying metric than click-throughs and impressions, which provide no evidence of whether users actually saw and engaged with an ad, but the industry has been slow to change. (clickz.com)

6 Tactics That Turn a Blog Into a Business Engine (Stanford Smith)

Somewhere, a business owner is writing a blog post. She writes the headline first, pens a killer introduction, and makes her point with 892 carefully crafted words. (copyblogger.com)

Crazy Egg Review: Is Your Website Hot Enough? (Rean John Uehara)

So, you have a website. Probably you are selling something or you want to collect people’s email addresses and it works. Or does it? As a marketer, are you satisfied with your current conversions? As a designer, do you feel like you made the right decision when you placed the search bar on the sidebar? But there is one tool that we at 1stwebdesigner.com is crazy about- Crazy Egg. Don’t search high and low about the Crazy Egg review when you can have that here! (1stwebdesigner.com)

4 Design Patterns That Violate Back-Button Expectations (Christian Holst)

During all our usability studies we’ve observed how users, both novice and expert, rely extensively on the browser back button. Often this has severe usability implications in these modern days where we design webpages with overlays, toggled states, accordion checkouts and one page applications. These new-fangled web design patterns often have a default technical structure which break user expectations and clash with the user’s mental model for how the decades-old browser “back” button functions. (baymard.com)

SXSW Interactive Is Big Business And That's A Good Thing (David Armano)

It's been exactly a week since I returned from SXSW. I would have written something sooner, but this delayed post is a great representation of where things stand in life for me these days. Writing for "personal" purpose takes a second seat to direct business building and running which is ironic because that was kind of the vibe at SXSW Interactive and that's not a bad thing. (typepad.com)

Best T-shirts for Designers from Designers (FREE shipping March 17)

FREE WORLDSIDE SHIPPING DAY (no coupon code needed): Get Lucky March 17 for 24 Hours.

Design By Humans features graphic tees, phone cases and wall art prints from over 15,000 diverse international artists from all around the world. Embedded in the culture of Design By Humans is a passion for brilliant design, detailed illustration and a strong appreciation for all things creative.

Wikipedia’s Gender Gap Persists: Why Don’t More Women Contribute To The Online Encyclopedia? (Christopher Zara)

Wikipedia’s women problem isn’t going away. Speaking in Hong Kong at the annual Wikimania conference on Aug. 9, Jimmy Wales said that the vast majority of Wikipedia contributors -- 87 percent -- are men, according to the Wall Street Journal. The number is frustratingly high, given recent grassroots campaigns by Wikipedia users and efforts by the website itself to encourage more women to create and edit articles. (ibtimes.com)

Yahoo to Release New Flickr App and Web Design, Replacing Previous New One (Kara Swisher)

In December of 2012, just six months after Marissa Mayer was hired as CEO of Yahoo, the company released version 2.0 of its Apple iPhone and iPad app for its photo-sharing Flickr with bigger, crisper photos, a cleaner design, filters and easier sharing. (recode.net)

Jony Ive Discusses Design Philosophy, Relationship with Steve Jobs, and Future of Apple in New Interview (Richard Padilla)

In a lengthy interview with The Sunday Times (via 9To5Mac), Apple's Senior Vice President of Design Jonathan Ive discussed a number of topics including his philosophy on design and collaboration, the strong relationship he had with former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and the future of Apple along with thoughts on new product categories. (macrumors.com)

Confidence is a choice, not a symptom (Seth Godin)

The batter has already hit two home runs. When he gets up to bat for the third time, his confidence is running high... It's easy to feel confident when we're on a roll, when the cards are going our way, or we're closing sales right and left. This symptomatic confidence, one built on a recent series of successes, isn't particularly difficult to accomplish or useful. (typepad.com)

User Experience Research-Practice Interaction (Keith Instone)

Here is the presentation that I did at the Connecting Dots conference on Saturday, March 15th. The presentation was based on the paper that I wrote for the conference, plus what I learned during the first day+ of the conference. I added and deleted things once I was there. (instone.org)

Creative Ads That Are Easily Remembered (Alexandru)

Most ads out there are annoying, but given the amount of professionals working in the marketing and advertising industries, they’re bound to come up with something cool and creative sooner or later. We’ve searched the web and collected some of the most creative print ads we could find. (topdesignmag.com)

DISCOUNT 63% How To Develop & Document Personas & Scenarios (Udemy)

DISCOUNT 63% (YOU SAVE $41): How To Develop & Document Personas & Scenarios

Design products that fit your audience. Design better products by learning how to create better UX personas. (udemy.com)

Trends in mobile device use by people with disabilities (Jonathan Avila)

As the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets grows, the number and complexity or mobile websites and apps has increased. Mobile devices have also become more accessible to many users with disabilities. The most recent Web AIM Screen Reader User Survey from January 2014 indicates that mobile device usage among people who are blind or visually impaired and who use screen readers is continuing to increase — indicated by 82 per cent of survey respondents. Close to half — 44% of respondents — indicated that they use mobile screen readers as much or more than desktop/laptop screen readers. It is time for organisations to seriously address the accessibility of their mobile content. (accessiq.org)

The Value of Involving People with Disabilities in User Research (Sarah Horton)

I am a huge fan of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a means to measure progress toward accessibility. They are thorough and well considered. They are flexible. I have used them to evaluate desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile sites, websites, and web applications. They go far in removing subjectivity from the assessment process—a control either is or is not operable using the keyboard; a text input either has or does not have a programmatically associated label. (usertesting.com)

The top 10 mobile design mistakes – and how to avoid them (Dave Shea)

Dave Shea dives deep into what's wrong with the mobile web and considers how we can make it better by identifying 10 design anti-patterns. A few years ago, I spent a few weeks driving around New Zealand's south island. Public Wi-Fi seems mostly unavailable in the South Pacific, so I relied on a prepaid SIM card for connectivity during that trip. (creativebloq.com)

Mobile Emulation In Google Chrome (Thoriq Firdaus)

Simply said, we love Google Chrome. It runs smooth, looks simple, and has many useful Apps. From a developer’s point of view, Google Chrome is always one step ahead in terms of supporting the latest Web standard, which is great. (hongkiat.com)

Google: Keep URL Length Shorter Than 2,000 Characters (Barry Schwartz)

SEOs obsess about the smallest things, even how long is too long for a URL. A Google Webmaster Help thread has SEOs and webmasters asking how long can they go for a URL. Google actually answered the question. (seroundtable.com)

My Advice to Young Designers and Developers (Andy Budd)

I meet them on a regular basis, tech-savvy teens who’ve been coding websites from an early age. They’ll often seek my advice about breaking into the industry. Should they continue their studies or jump straight into the labour market? I usually tell them that ability trumps education and I don’t put much faith on the current raft of tech degrees. So I’d prefer to see three years of experience than three years of study. (andybudd.com)

7 Facebook Marketing "Tips" and "Tricks" That Don't Actually Work (Ginny Soskey)

People will go to all sorts of lengths to get attention from a small subset of Facebook's 1.23 billion monthly active users. Sometimes it's good -- people focus on creating more compelling content or integrating Facebook with the rest of their marketing strategy. Though it takes more time, their Facebook Page grows steadily and actually delivers results. (hubspot.com)

Debunking the myths of web typography (Benjie Moss)

Typography is, put simply, the arrangement of type in order to facilitate communication. As a craft, it’s been around for hundreds of years, but the web form is still very much in its infancy—no doubt typographers in a decade’s time will gasp at our lack of soft hyphen, or half space. On the Web, typography is largely defined by its limitations. We simply don’t have the control that print typographers take for granted. To produce good web typography you have to get the basics right—because basics are all we have available. (webdesignerdepot.com)

Five Tips for Letting Collaboration Fuel Innovation (David McGaw | Zachary Jean Paradis)

Innovation is hard, but less mysterious than you've been led to believe. We wrote a book peeling back the veil of design-led innovation, called Naked Innovation: Uncovering a Shared Approach for Creating Value. It’s roughly based on what’s taught at the the IIT Institute of Design and we’re thrilled that it’s being used by Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, government agencies, and academic programs around the world. But we also believe the book hasn't quite reached its full potential. (uxmag.com)

Iconion: New Tool Converts Icon Fonts To Icon Files (Dieter Petereit)

Icon fonts are the new craze lately. The advantages are clear. Instead of working with a load of files in different resolutions or large sprites to be controlled by CSS, we simply embed a special font. This font contains all the needed icons. Each icon looks crisp no matter the resolution. Everybody’s happy. But in prototyping things are less nice. Of course you can get desktop font variants of most popular icon fonts, yet the handling is not so easy, nor is it to edit them. Iconion is a new free tool, that converts pictograms from icon fonts into files. You can even edit them… (noupe.com)

Your Guide To 'First Kiss' Parody Videos (Bryan M)

​If you've laid eyes on the Internet this week, you're already familiar with the runaway success of Tatia Pilieva's "First Kiss" video, which is close to racking up 50 million views in just four days. But what quickly became unnavigable is the deluge of parody videos aching to pick up some stray clicks. We've already seen too many of them, and unfortunately we'll probably see more before the week is out. But here they are — most of them anyway — ordered for your viewing pleasure. (digg.com)

The Ultimate Design Article (Sacha Greif)

Well here we are. I’ve got one shot at this. After all, only the smartest, most influent designers and assorted web people get to write on this site. This ain’t Medium anymore, so I better bring my A-game! (the-pastry-box-project.net)

Why good storytelling helps you design great products (Braden Kowitz)

One of the biggest flubs that product teams make is confusing designs that look great with designs that actually work well. It’s a simple mistake, but it can have grave consequences: If your product doesn’t work well, no one will even care how it looks, after all. (medium.com)

User-Centered Design Process Map

The user-centered design process is composed of several methods and tasks related to website development. The type of site you are developing, your requirements, team, timeline, and the environment in which you are developing will determine the tasks you perform and the order in which you perform them. (usability.gov)

Noble Ackerson "Designing for Google Glass", MobX 2013 Berlin http://mobxcon.com

Using Meta Tags in HTML: Some Basics and Best Practices (Shaumik Daityari)

Metadata is often referred to as ‘data about data’ and one of the ways it’s done on web pages is by means of the tag. The content of meta tags generally describes information about the HTML page which usually cannot be represented by any other HTML tags. In addition to that, the meta tag can also be used to emulate an HTTP response header (like redirection to a different page) and it has attributes like http-equiv and charset, the details of which have been described clearly on the Mozilla Developer Network. (sitepoint.com)

Usability: Understanding Effect Sizes In User Research (Jeff Sauro)

The difference is statistically significant. When using statistics to make comparisons between designs, it's not enough to just say differences are statistically significant or only report the p-values. (measuringusability.com)

Infographic: Web Design Industry Analysis – Professionals Vs. Amateurs

The web design industry in the US is worth $20 billion and is made up of professionals and amateurs. Designers and developers (the professionals), and amateur enthusiasts dab their toes into creating close to 16 million new websites every month. (hongkiat.com)

SEO is Dead: Long Live OC/DC (Sean Jackson)

I want to let you in on a little secret … I really hate the term “SEO.” This may come as a surprise to many since I am the resident SEO guy at Copyblogger and very active in the SEO community. But for the past two years I have felt that the entire concept of SEO, while an important part of online marketing, had a very “spammy” connotation. (copyblogger.com)

Google removes underlined links, says goodbye to 1996 (Tom Warren)

Google started life as a research project in 1996 to crawl the internet and create a search engine. 18 years later, Google is now removing the last of the design left over from that era. Starting today, the '90s-style underlined links are being removed from Google search results. (theverge.com)

Next Berlin IA Cocktail Hour (March 21)

Next Berlin IA Cocktail Hour: March 21, Haifischbar Berlin, 7 pm http://bit.ly/1cV6dY3 (Berlin IA Cocktail Hour Blog). We hope to see you there. Take your IA- and UX friends with you!

Designers: Why Flat Rates Can Raise Your Value (Addison Duvall)

Plenty of designers have a set pricing strategy when it comes to charging clients for their work. Many prefer to charge an hourly rate, which is specific and ensures that you won’t be undone by scope creep or other issues. (hongkiat.com)

5 Steps To An Integrated Approach To SEO-Friendly Content Marketing (Jim Yu)

The content explosion and the search engines’ shift toward meaning-based content in 2013 has led to a tipping of the scales in the opposite direction from where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was before Panda and enguin. (marketingland.com)

SAVE $144 on Udemy: “Design for Engagement - How to Design So People Take Action” (Discount 62%)

Learn how to apply psychology to create engaging products so that people will take the actions you want them to take. You'll learn what you need to know about people, how they think, decide, remember, and what motivates them. You'll learn how to apply psychology to the design of websites, apps, and products so that they are engaging.

Why I Sketch Every Day--And why you should too (Troy Church)

I sketch every day. It’s a habit I’m proud of. If I haven’t got some quality sketching time in by evening, I crave it, and I make it happen. And by “sketching time” I mean uninterrupted time to think clearly about a problem or opportunity and visualize solutions by hand. Learning to sketch in a meaningful way hasn’t come easily to me, but it’s been worth the effort many times over.

Usability Testing at a Fast Paced Company (Molly Wolfberg)

At HubSpot, we have one of the fastest development teams around. Our dev team continuously deploys code, up to 100 times per day, so our product is constantly changing. This leads to several challenges for us on the UX team, whose job it is to ensure that the software is easy and enjoyable to use.

5 Design Techniques to Incite User Emotion (Sylvia MLewis)

For years, designers have focused on traditional design factors such as meeting web standards, organizing navigation, choosing layouts and fonts. However, the design world has evolved and inciting user emotion is more possible than ever. Designers can now create user interfaces that give users a complete experience by not only meeting their needs or presenting them with beautiful aesthetics, but offering them something more that touches their emotion. Here are some ingredients you can use to spice up your UI and deliver an emotional and mind-blowing user experience.

Designer’s toolkit: A primer on capturing research (Lauren Chapman Ruiz)

You’ve been preparing for your research—recruiting, screening participants, devising schedules, testing discussion guides—and now you are deciding the best way to capture your research. But how? If you’re busy scribbling down notes, you might miss a sound byte. If you film the interview, you might unknowingly influence the conversation. These are all serious considerations. Properly capturing and documenting each research encounter prevents spending time and money on data that sits solely in the memory of the researcher.

4 Types Of Customer Analytics Data To Collect (by Jeff Sauro)

While they may be called customers, users, buyers, or even guests, they are all people. ...

Axure 7, Usability-Tests und Digitale Services

Im Podcast AKW058 Axure 7, Usability-Tests und Digitale Services spreche ich mit Dr. Rolf Schulte Strathaus, Geschäftsführer der eparo GmbH, über Neues in Axure RP 7, Usability-Tests, Prototyping und UX-Verantwortliche. Wir reden über Nutzer die nicht lesen wollen und Designer die nicht Coden können. Und immer wieder geht es um die Frage: Worauf kommt es bei bei Usability-Tests wirklich an?

Viel Spaß beim Hören.