Video: "Google I/O 2014 - Design principles for a better mobile web"

Many websites still provide a poor experience on mobile, and so we wanted to develop an in-depth understanding of what differentiates a great and an inferior mobile experience. ... Video: "Google I/O 2014 - Design principles for a better mobile web" #mobile #ux #design

How to solve the hamburger icon problem (Paddi MacDonnell)

The hamburger icon—three little bars used to indicate a link to a menu—is one if the most controversial techniques on the Web right now. Designers, we are told, all hate it; customers, we tell everyone, hate it too. Why then, is it everywhere? (webdesignerdepot.com)

An Overview of Expert Heuristic Evaluations (Ritch Macefield)

An expert heuristic evaluation is a form of discount usability evaluation. The essential idea is that such evaluations are, or should be, quicker and cheaper to perform than usability studies with a sample of participants that are representative of actual users. (uxmatters.com)

Interface Design for Non-Interface Designers (Jordan Koschei)

Interface design requires a different mode of thinking than traditional design. 

This may seem counterintuitive at first. After all, design is design – whatever the medium, it requires a similar focus on problem-solving and empathy for the user. Superficially, a website or app looks a lot like a print layout, but the core behavior towards each is fundamentally different. Interface design more closely resembles architecture or industrial design in that its results are meant to be used, not observed. (jordankoschei.com)

5 Tips For Conducting A Mobile Usability Test (Jeff Sauro)

As companies continue to focus on improving the usability of their mobile websites and applications, testing these interfaces can feel a lot like testing websites in 1996--lots of surprises, unfamiliar conventions, workarounds, and frustrations. (measuringusability.com)

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Growth Hacking: User Onboarding

Growth Hacking: User Onboarding. Learn and get anytime access to the UX techniques modern startups are using to accelerate their growth. When a new user lands on your site, you have one of the greatest opportunities available to you - a shot at turning them immediately into an active user. Learn how.

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Essential UX Tips for Your Website (Rudolph Musngi)

Maybe you all know what UX is and what it really means. UX or user experience is an important aspect of website development that gauges of the reactions of visitors to the design. UX focuses on how design elements help the visitors get what they want, or know what they have to know. If you want to read more about UX, we have a separate article for that. (1stwebdesigner.com)

Riffing on the 'content is king' metaphor (Eric Reiss)

We’ve heard that “content is king” for years. Curiously, the metaphor stands up extremely well, even when stretched, prodded, and otherwise abused. Here’s my take. 

Content rules all things. Food ingredients are the content objects that allow us to cook recipes. And online, content is what communicates products, services, and ideas. Content strategy, in many ways, represents the rational, left-brain view of things. It ensures all the needed content elements are available and that the messaging is on target. It defines the responsibilities for keeping the content fresh, it appoints those who will govern the process. And it helps architect the placement of these content elements to make them easy to locate. Content is king. (fatdux.com)

Essential Q and A on the Value of Content Marketing (Lee Odden)

In advance of the Content Marketing Conference Europe event last week, Maaike Gulden did an interview with me to surface some essential advice about improving content marketing. 

Since the interview was published in Dutch, I’m posting portions here for our readers looking for a useful perspective on content marketing that will hopefully bring some clarity to an increasingly misunderstood concept. This Q and A covers everything from a definition to why to why content marketing is valuable, a solid B2B content marketing example and my perspective on the future. (toprankblog.com)

When Form Follows Fugly (Rain Noe)

I consider your average sinkside soap dish a design failure. They either have no drainage, leaving the bar to sit in a puddle of water that transforms its underside into slime, or they drain into a container, and either way you have to empty the damn thing. The notion that this thing is designed to hold soap for you, yet you must constantly attend to it by draining it into the sink, is absurd. Oughtn't good industrial design free us from this minutiae? (core77.com)

Decision Making in the E-Commerce Shopping Cart: 4 Tips for Supporting Users (Amy Schade)

Many shoppers use the shopping cart to make final purchase decisions. Usable shopping carts provide product detail, allow access to product pages, and let users easily delete items. (nngroup.com)

Deconstructing E-Commerce Search: The 12 Query Types (Jamie Appleseed)

In this article we’ll introduce 12 types of search queries identified during our large-scale usability study of e-commerce search. While not exhaustive they reflect the main types of queries that users rely on when searching in an e-commerce context. (baymard.com)

Video: How To Become a UX Designer

Video: "How To Become a UX Designer" (IA TV) #ux #design

5 Basic Usability Principles Every Website Should Follow (Armen Ghazarian)

What makes for a user-friendly website? Just like any other success recipe inquiry, this question is also very frequently asked and is never answered with a concrete working formula. Because there is no shortcut for website usability, though too many would opt for it. (despreneur.com)

The Most Fundamental Concept In Usability (Jeff Sauro)

Usability is a lot of things. 

It's about making interfaces easy to learn. It's about preventing errors and reducing the time to get things done. It's even about making an experience more satisfying and delightful. (measuringusability.com)

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MOBX 2014. Europe's Premier Mobile UX Summit (September 13 in Berlin).

Amazon launches a shopping machine and calls it a phone (Dan Frommer)

Amazon’s Fire Phone is here: CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the company’s first smartphone at an event today in Seattle. Details are still rolling in, but Bezos has already made one thing clear: This is a shopping device. (qz.com)

The 3 Clicks Rule. How many clicks should it take to reach your content? (@allyreeves)

I recently worked with a client that was very concerned about the “3 clicks rule”. 

You’ve likely heard of this before: the idea that a user is only willing to click three times before abandoning a site if they don’t see the item they are after. This thinking becomes troublesome when designing complex sites like libraries, large organizations or e-commerce: it can make clients nervous about answering to everyone’s needs (put it on the on the homepage!) and it can lead to suggestions of loading everything into a structure that cannot accommodate growth over time or that creates an overwhelming experience for users. (medium.com)

Video: Next Future Terrifying Technology Will Blow Your Mind

Great video: "Next Future Terrifying Technology Will Blow Your Mind" (IA Television)

30 Useful User Experience (UX) Tools (Bartosz Mozyrko)

With the growing access to online services, websites and web applications have developed to become increasingly complex. If you are reading this article, the chances are you use the Internet not only to relax but also for work. Perhaps even for running your own business. (usabilitygeek.com)

Design Principles for Wireframing (Chris Bank)

In A Practical Look At Using Wireframes, I talked about who uses wireframes, what’s their purpose & how do they work together. In 50 Shades of Wireframing, I talked about the many types of wireframes you can create in the design process. And in 4 Non-Digital Wireframing Weapons and 4 Digital Wireframing Weapons, I cover a wide variety of tools you can use to get the job done - UXPin was obviously included but use what works for you. I also laid out the top web and mobile wireframe example and pattern sources in The Design Pattern & Wireframe Libraries Guide, and highlighted some of the best web and mobile UI design patterns that have cropped up in Fresh UI Design Patterns Gaining Traction. (onextrapixel.com)

Designing for Mobile Part 3: Visual design (Elaine McVicar)

As a direct response to platform capabilities, the first mobile sites were an exercise in ‘compromise’ rather than ‘craft’. Today’s more full-featured devices, however, give us the opportunity to create more visually appealing designs that can not only inspire and attract users, but also increase the usability of the experience. However, along with this opportunity there are also new challenges. (uxbooth.com)

The New Icons of OS X Yosemite – A Side-by-Side Comparison (Jim Tanous)

Apple is giving its desktop operating system a complete visual overhaul with OS X Yosemite. From widespread use of transparency, to new typography, to cleaner and flatter app design, OS X Yosemite will clearly stand out when it launches this fall. (tekrevue.com)

30 Weeks: An Experimental New Design School, Backed By Google (Suzanne LaBarre)

Following Apple's success, many companies are finally starting to recognize the crucial role design plays in building a desirable (and profitable) product. Yet very few companies are actually founded and led by designers. Here to change that is 30 Weeks, a new program by a powerhouse team of New York design schools--Parsons, Pratt, School of Visual Arts, and The Cooper Union--in collaboration with the education company Hyper Island and Google. (fastcodesign.com)

35+ Creative Examples of UI and Wireframe Sketches (designpixel)

A paper and a pencil, is the best tool, that clears the concepts and logics to the human brain, than anything else in the world, may it be a tablet PC, a super computer, or whatever, but something drawn by hand on a paper, clears the concepts and leaves the perfect strategy of the plan. Wireframe is a rough sketch of the project, that is to be worked on. Wireframes define the modules, sub modules, how they will be connected, on a paper, that helps you in the future, when you are finally on the coding and the designing part. (thedesignpixel.com)

The culture that made the whole of GM miss one engineer’s fatal mistake (Max Nisen)

General Motors’ report on its ignition switch recall is an extensive and disturbing document on a corporate and engineering culture that failed. It’s also a chronicle of a management structure gone terribly wrong, which allowed the errors of a few people to have massive repercussions. 

Though many are at fault, the original defective part, as well as perhaps the biggest contributing factor to delaying the problems discovery, came down to one former GM engineer, Raymond DeGiorgio. (qz.com)

The ultimate guide to email design (Cameron Chapman)

While a lot of online communication has moved to social media, email is still a very important part of any online marketing campaign. And when we think of marketing emails, what generally comes to mind is HTML email, rather than plain text. 

Designing for email is much like designing a simple webpage, but there are some key differences you need to take into consideration. You also need to keep in mind that email is a push, rather than pull, communication.(webdesignerdepot.com)

Choosing the Right Metrics for User Experience (Pamela Pavliscak)

Although most organizations are tracking metrics like conversion rate or engagement time, often they do not tie these metrics back to design decisions. The reason? Their metrics are too high level. A change in your conversion rate could relate to a design change, a promotion, or something that a competitor has done. Time on site could mean anything. (uxmatters.com)

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Nine Lies We Tell Ourselves About Mobile (Steven Hoober)

As someone who spends a lot of time looking up mobile stats, poring over research reports, and who was around for the early days of mobile, I can barely stand to read half the articles that try to wax philosophical about mobile’s history, or draw some broader conclusion about the industry and it’s direction. They are almost always based on some mistaken assumption, and we perpetuate lies about mobile by putting them down in writing and spreading them around. (uxmag.com)

The Hidden Benefits of Remote Research (Kathleen Asjes)

Remote user research is often considered a last resort, suitable only when no other options are available. This week, Kathleen Asjes shows us situations where remote research may actually be the preferable option. 

Last year I found myself in a rather unenviable situation: with only one week left to run usability tests for an online poetry magazine, I was experiencing incredible difficulty locating test participants who would be willing to spend as little as 30 minutes with me. The holidays were fast approaching. And although I wasn’t a fan of remote testing at the time, it became obvious I had to bite the bullet. (uxbooth.com)

Eliciting user goals — Part 1 (David Travis)

The great promise of user experience research is to go beyond asking people what they want and instead to discover what they need. But goal-based interviewing is difficult because it requires a very different approach to user interviews than simply running through a list of prepared questions. Two approaches that offer some promise are story elicitation and “jobs to be done”. (userfocus.co.uk)

The Complicated History Of 'Tetris,' Which Celebrates Its 30th Anniversary Today (Karyne Levy)

Want to feel old? 

"Tetris," the game where you have to manipulate falling blocks to create lines that are then cleared from the screen, is celebrating its 30th anniversary today. That's 30 years of yelling at the screen when the blocks speed up at an almost unmanageable rate. That's 30 years of getting the theme music stuck in your head. 

The game is simple. But its story is anything but. Let's go back in time and check out the history of those falling blocks — called "tetrominoes" — and how they came to be synonymous with Nintendo's Game Boy handheld gaming system. (businessinsider.com)

Prototyping Your Workflow (Mark Llobrera)

Last year the digital agency I work for, Bluecadet, started a website redesign project for The Franklin Institute—a renowned Philadelphia science museum undergoing the largest expansion in its history. My colleagues and I were excited because not only were we getting to work with an iconic local institution, but the project represented an opportunity to incorporate a number of techniques into our responsive web design practice: atomic design, HTML wireframes, style tiles, element collages, and front-end style guides. We envisioned a series of quick prototypes that lent momentum to a harmonious back-and-forth between design and development. We felt like this was an opportunity to overhaul the way we created for the web, from start to finish. (alistapart.com)

Video: Intro to User Experience Design: Rethinking the Design Process (Mike Jones)

Websites are not just text. As they become more complicated, taking on many of the same features as traditional software, we must think differently about the design process. ...

How Comments Shape Perceptions of Sites' Quality—and Affect Traffic (Adam Felder)

There’s a game I like to play sometimes. It’s called “How many Internet comments do I have to read until I lose faith in humanity?” All too often, the answer is: one comment. (theatlantic.com)

The Pocket Watch Was the World’s First Wearable Tech Game Changer (Clive Thompson)

Would you wear a computer on your wrist? 

It’s a new high-tech debate, as “wearable” computers begin to go on sale. We’ve long grown accustomed to carrying a computer in our pockets—but now tech firms are betting we’d rather have one on our wrist, showing us our messages, social-networking pings, maybe some Google searches. Already, over 400,000 people bought Pebble smartwatches last year, and Google’s head-mounted Glass computer was released to over 10,000 early adopters. Apple is widely rumored to be putting out a smartwatch later this year. (smithsonianmag.com)

3 UX Organization Personas (Ronnie Battista)

Welcome to Strategy Matters, my new column on UXmatters, which will focus on answering these essential questions: How should we define UX strategy today? Where is it going? As UX professionals, how can we better develop ourselves and those who have yet to find their home in this field? Building on that premise, I’d like to put out a few disclaimers as I kick off this column: - See more at: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2014/05/3-ux-organization-personas.php#sthash.k1pIFTJA.dpuf... (uxmatters.com)

You’re Not Emotional: Emotions and Web Design (Jacqueline Thomas)

How does this website make you feel? On the surface, it may seem that reading an article on a website is an emotionless experience, but science tells us that we use emotions to inform our understanding. So, yes, you are experiencing an emotion right now, but what could it be? Let’s come back to that question at the end of the article, with enhanced understanding. (webdesignledger.com)

The Influence of iOS 7 and Designing for Mobile in an Omnichannel World (Nour Diab Yunes)

Digital design paradigms are shifting faster than ever before. In less than a decade, we have moved from point-and-click to skeuomorphism to flat design. This pace of change impacts designers who need to keep up with ever-changing standards, companies that have to manage increasing fragmentation and updates across platforms, and it also affects customers who have to process and adopt novel patterns while seeking familiarity in the tools that they use. In an omnichannel, ever-evolving world, how can designers manage all of this disruption? (uxmag.com)

Don’t be a douche bag! A simple guide to being an ethical designer (Speider Schneider)

The creative field, which encompasses design, illustration, photography and anything else that is a commercial-based service and takes imagination and a certain amount of talent on the part of the vendor, is unregulated. There are no real guidelines for ethics among creatives to compare with such things as the Hippocratic Oath for doctors, or the BAR association that keeps lawyers on the straight and narrow. Plumbers, carpenters, cab drivers, pilots and just about every other career/industry has some sort of checks and balances to keep members of the industry professional and continue the sound reputation of that field. Even criminal organizations and prison inmates have more self-governing rules than members of the creative field. (webdesignerdepot.com)

Blogging is the New Resume (Tomas Laurinavicius)

Most of young people can’t find a job. Most of the time it is an underpaid position or very boring for the millennials who grew up with the technology and massive amount of information available at any second. High standards and expectations make it very hard for Y generation to get a job they want. But there is a solution for this problem. (despreneur.com)

10 Surprisingly Common But Painful User Experiences (Jeff Sauro)

Technology is the amazing result of humanity's evolution from self-sufficient hunter-gathering societies to increasingly interconnected social organizations. The specialization of labor has freed-up spare time to invent, improve and inspire. We have all benefited from this evolution. (measuringusability.com)

Google Invests in Satellites to Spread Internet Access (Alistair Barr, Andy Pasztor)

Google Inc. plans to spend more than $1 billion on a fleet of satellites to extend Internet access to unwired regions of the globe, people familiar with the project said, hoping to overcome financial and technical problems that thwarted previous efforts. (wsj.com)

Should Your Site’s Design Be Sexy or Smart? (Jerod Morris)

This might surprise you. (It surprised me.) Since being released in February, Parallax Pro has been the top-selling child theme for Genesis. No, that’s not what is surprising. Parallax Pro is a gorgeous theme and the web is smitten with parallax effects. (Plus, the worst fears about parallax are unfounded.) Its enormous sales numbers are expected. (copyblogger.com)