27. Juni 2014

21. Juni 2014

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Limited offers. Handpicked for you, dear readers. Or you may want to discover awesome courses with big discounts on your own. Use coupon code STANDOUT to benefit from this limited offer (coupon only valid until Tuesday June 24th, 2014).

Project Management Master Class

Project Management Master Class: Provide detailed theories and practices unique to building and construction project management. In guiding a project – particularly one in the building and construction industry - to either success or failure, an intricate knowledge of Project Management is critical in determining the project’s outcome. In reality, people practice many of the concepts involved in Project Management however to fully utilise and benefit from such a detailed understanding of Project Management Diploma theory. Learn Project Management now.

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.

Flat Responsive Website

Build Flat Responsive Website from Scratch - Complete Course: Learn the whole process behind building a website - from theory and planning to a functional responsive layout. This course takes you from very little knowledge about web design to being able to create beautiful, thorough and problem-solving websites and get you going as a web designer.

Designing Gamification

Designing Gamification Level 1 (Certification): Earn your Gamification and Engagement Design Certification in this practical course designed by the leading experts. In this course, you'll learn the basics of gamification and engagement science, and how this powerful new design trend will affect your business from a practical, non-academic perspective.

Secrets of Intuitive Design

Secrets of Intuitive Design-How To Design a Conceptual Model: Learn how to use conceptual models to create usable and intuitive websites and apps. Learn how to make critical conceptual model decisions before you wireframe or prototype a single screen in order to make sure that the conceptual model of what you design fits the users' mental models.

Effective Mind Mapping

Learn the Skill of Effective Mind Mapping: Thinking and Productivity Skills to Equip you for 21st Century Business and Rapid Learning. On this course you’ll learn how to create effective Mind Maps. The effective use of Mind Mapping requires a different way of thinking to the way we learnt to think at school. So integral to the course is ‘seeing’ this different way of thinking as mind maps are created. icon

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)

8. Juni 2014

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)

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


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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.
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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)

7. Juni 2014

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. ...

2. Juni 2014

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)