How To Become A Design Thought Leader (Addison Duvall)

What does it take to become a thought leader in the design community? By thought leader, I mean someone who can make a statement about design or designers, and have it be listened to, blogged about, retweeted, and argued over by thousands of professional designers and others in related industries. (hongkiat.com)

SEO Storm or Light Shower? Google’s Panda 4.0 Update (Lee Odden)

The thunder clap of Google’s Matt Cutts’s Twitter post could be heard across the web this week with the announcement of the search engine’s latest update, Panda 4.0. Of course the type of Panda I’m talking about isn’t a cute bear from China. It’s the name of an algorithm used by Google to filter out low quality content from search results. (toprankblog.com)

Facebook Wants to Tap Into Your Cell Phone's Mic. Will You Let Them? (Corey Eridon)

Today, Facebook announced a new feature that might make even the oversharers among us squeamish. It's a feature that taps into your cell phone's microphone, and identifies the TV show, movie, or song playing in the background so you can share it on Facebook. (If you've ever used the popular app Shazam to identify a song -- or seen someone waving their phone in the air at a bar -- it's kind of like that.) It's rolling out on iOS and Android in the U.S. over the coming weeks. (hubspot.com)

How to come up with great UX ideas (Neil Turner)

Thomas Edison famously said that genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration and the same can also be said of UX design. Whilst great UX design is undoubtedly all about the hard work, there can be no great UX design without great inspirational ideas. But how do you come up with great UX ideas in the first place? Whether you’re trying to come up with ideas for UIs, features, products or even new services follow these tips to give yourself the greatest possible chance of having that eureka moment. (uxforthemasses.com)

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Should Your Driverless Car Kill You to Save Two Other People? (Eric Limer)

There's a train speeding down the tracks towards five innocent people who will never get away in time. You can save them by pulling a switch, but it'll kill another person on a different track. It's a thought experiment people have debated for ages, but it's about to become a real dilemma when we program robots to pull the switch, or not. (gizmodo.com)

Creating a Customer Ecosystem Using Brand Experience Metaphors (Tom Schneider)

Brand experience metaphors are based on real world interactions and help bring a brand's nature, character, and function to life. Discovering a brand experience metaphor facilitates effective brand planning based on accurate user ecosystems and can lead to designing effective customer journeys that yield measurable results when planning campaigns and user touch points across channels (online, print, mobile, in-store, app, etc.). (uxmag.com)

How Wearable Technology Will Impact Web Design (Jacqueline Thomas)

Remember how wearing a calculator watch back in the day made you feel like George Jetson or his boy Elroy? Technology has come a long way from spelling out naughty words (upside down) on your calculator. These days, you can make calls, record videos, check your health, and buy coffee from your smartwatch–and that’s just the beginning. With the advent of Google Glass, Android Wear, and the distant promise of Apple iWatch, the world is slowly getting comfortable with the idea of wearing technology, instead of holding it. This idea of wearing a computer will undoubtedly shift the way users interact with the internet and its design. Is your web design future proof? (webdesignledger.com)

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What Should New & Inexperienced Designers Be Learning? (Addison Duvall)

Today I’m speaking to those just getting started in design. Maybe you just graduated from design school, or you’ve read through all the fundamental lessons offered here and on other design blogs, and you feel you’re ready to start taking on clients. Or maybe you have a couple of projects under your belt and you’re looking for more detailed advice as to what path you should be taking to propel your career to the next level. (speckyboy.com)

Mobile Navigation Menus and Great User Experience (Page Laubheimer)

In my most recent post, I talked about how to make your website’s menu system more user friendly by making it “sticky,” so that it’s ever-present on the site. One of the things I talked about in that post was the importance of tailoring your site menu for mobile devices. That means working with the mobile device’s inherent limitations to create menus that make sense in that context rather than just slapping the same menu functionality on your mobile header. Let’s dive in a bit deeper on the subject of mobile menus, starting with the menu icon itself. (newfangled.com)

Top 5 Activities to Consider for Team Building (Tim Brown)

Team building activities are mainly aimed at improving the capacity of team members to work together as a team more efficiently and easily without conflicts. Such activities are arranged not only to have fun and enhance communication among participants, but also to help teams overcome their weaknesses or to enhance their skills. So, team building activities are to be chosen carefully considering many different factors such as age group of participants, education qualification, career background, exact purpose etc. (despreneur.com)

How to Embrace Imperfection and Turn It Into Creativity (Rean John )

The frailty of creatives is that they never get 100% content with their creation. As Leonardo Vinci said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” It resounds true to most designers. There’s always a little bit of regret when closing a project they’ve spent several hours to a couple of weeks refining to the pixel. Creatives seem to have a problem on how to embrace imperfection. (1stwebdesigner.com)

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A Different Letter to a Junior Designer (Andrew Clarke)

To be honest, I envy you. I envy your energy and your enthusiasm and the fact that for you, design is still new, still exciting. I envy your self-confidence. You know you’ll be a better designer than me. Maybe you already are. With age comes experience, and there’s no doubt that I have more of it than you—especially experience in balancing the needs of people who use what I design with those who pay for it. That experience gives me an advantage today, but you’ll gain it too, in time. (alistapart.com)

Why I never design the home page first (and which page I design before anything else) (Preston D Lee)

I’m in the middle of a huge redesign for a web site that gets hundreds of thousands (and sometimes millions) of monthly visits. It’s a big deal. And it’s pretty stressful. But if you’ve ever done any sort of redesign (maybe you’ve redesigned your online portfolio?), you know that it’s also exhilarating. (graphicdesignblender.com)

Exclusive: Found after 500 years, the wreck of Christopher Columbus’s flagship the Santa Maria (David Keys)

More than five centuries after Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked in the Caribbean, archaeological investigators think they may have discovered the vessel’s long-lost remains – lying at the bottom of the sea off the north coast of Haiti. It’s likely to be one of the world’s most important underwater archaeological discoveries. (independent.co.uk)

5 Myths About Social Media Marketing (Steve Olenski)

Marketing twenty years ago was rather rudimentary: design-catchy billboards, mail-out flyers to millions, and of course, television advertising. Consumers have now moved into the digital space, yet they still crave the attention of corporations they admire. Unfortunately, many brands are still getting stuck on social media, failing to effectively utilize this channel. (marketingland.com)

The reason every book about Africa has the same cover—and it’s not pretty (Michael Silverberg)

Last week, Africa Is a Country, a blog that documents and skewers Western misconceptions of Africa, ran a fascinating story about book design. It posted a collage of 36 covers of books that were either set in Africa or written by African writers. The texts of the books were as diverse as the geography they covered: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly divergent styles, by writers that included several Nobel Prize winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orange sunset over the veld, or both. (qz.com)

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Setting yourself apart from other designers (marie)

The design field is growing, specifically web design, logo design, and the graphic design fields. With growth comes competition and, in order to survive, you need to stand out from all the rest. I wanted to give some advice to designers coming into the field, as well as create a refresher for current designers. (designreviver.com)

Identifying Edges and the Art of the Wireframe (Jordan Julien)

I’ve read criticism recently describing wireframes as a crutch for teams that lack true collaboration. I’d argue, however, that sketching out wireframes should be a collaborative exercise, much like putting together a puzzle with friends. The wireframe debate is less about whether or not to use wireframes, and more about how to use them. No one argues the value of sketching out ideas before moving into code or production, so the discussion surrounding wireframes seems to be about three things: ... (uxmag.com)

The Smart Way to Use Other People’s Audiences to Build Your Own (Eric Enge)

In the beginning, there was no audience. Yet the overlords demanded that one be created. The wizard came forth and cast great spells and the audience was conjured out of thin air, and the content marketing campaign was begun. If only that was all there was to it! (copyblogger.com)

Good design ain’t pretty (Luke Jones)

Good design is not about making something pretty. It is about making something usable and intuitive – the beauty of the product will be a result of these things. (lukejones.me)

6 Differences Between B2B And B2C Usability (Jeff Sauro)

I received the following email last week about an upcoming change in the learning management system used at the university where I'm an adjunct professor: "Blackboard, has grown to become an essential tool for teaching since it was first adopted in 2000. Over the past few years, however, users have become increasingly dissatisfied with Blackboard from both ease-of-use and technical perspectives." (measuringusability.com)

How Do We Design for Better Team Experiences? (Paul Brooks)

It took me just over an hour to first read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard. I woke up at 6am and raced through every page, completely glued to the story. Despite its readability, the book has received its fair share of criticism—most notably the argument that it portrays an overly simplistic view of how people actually work. (uxmag.com)

The Essential Landing Page Checklist: 16 Things You Need to Double Check (Ginny Soskey)

Whether you're setting up a landing page for the first time or the billionth time, it's easy to forget something. Though it's just one page on your website, there are lots of moving parts you need to juggle. Some of those moving parts are more important than others -- if they get dropped in the chaos, you will lose out on valuable conversions. (hubspot.com)

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Avoid Inline Scroll Areas (50% Get it Wrong) (Christian Holst)

During our recent large scale usability study of e-commerce navigation inline scroll areas were found to cause a myriad of usability issues. Whenever a section scrolled independently from the rest of the page, the test subjects ran into several low-level interaction issues along with some more fundamental conceptual difficulties. (baymard.com)

Primer on Types of Navigation in Mobile Apps (Nataly Birch)

Navigation patterns can vary, even when it comes to prototyping mobile application interfaces. Even though they may seem to impose tight restrictions, because of small sizes and necessity to compactly arrange lots of data, there are a variety of options. (designmodo.com)

Why Users Aren’t Clicking Your Home Page Carousel (anthony)

A website study found that out of 3 million home page visits only about 1% clicked a carousel slide. How could a large, graphical element on the home page get such few clicks? The reason most carousels do poorly might surprise you. (uxmovement.com)

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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.

The Information Architecture Value Chain (Nathaniel Davis)

I recently witnessed the collapse of an information architecture practice that lacked a sustainable level of advocacy. Information architecture was not part of the cultural fabric of the enterprise and a major leadership change significantly impacted the organization’s IA IQ. Plus, the lack of external advocacy by industry associations and influential analysts further reduces the chances that the future senior leaders of digital organizations will see information architecture as a priority. So, what should you do in a scenario like the one that follows? (uxmatters.com)

The Psychology Of The Checkout (Rob Toledo)

When you run an eCommerce business, it’s natural to invest a lot of time and attention in the elements of the site that attract purchasers. Home pages are essential for drawing people in, while product pages are vital when it comes to encouraging users to become customers. But focusing on the pages that attract customers can sometimes lead to companies neglecting the pages that help retain customers. And what’s the use of a streamlined navigation or a tempting product page if your viewers become frustrated by a clunky checkout and fail to make the purchase? (usabilitygeek.com)

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The Book Metaphor (Adrian Zumbrunnen)

When we design interfaces, we often rely on metaphors as a starting point and source of inspiration. If we are to choose a metaphor for reading, we quickly think about the most obvious of all: the book. While the web isn’t exactly new, it’s certainly not old compared to print. Therefore it makes sense to borrow design decisions that have proven valuable for centuries and apply them to a digital counterpart. This very act of adaptation is often referred to as designing with metaphors. (uxmag.com)

10 Steps To Mapping The Customer Journey (Jeff Sauro)

Think about the last time you bought a new computer or rented a car. What were all the things that went well and what seemed like torture? (measuringusability.com)

What is Creativity? The Answer Could Grow Your Business (Lee Odden)

A big part of our identity and the nature of our work at TopRank Online Marketing is focused around creativity. In fact, the tagline on our company website is: “Smart, Creative, Focused On Results”, three key principles that drive a lot of what we do and what we stand for. (toprankblog.com)