Up All Night to Get Lucky? Why Having Sex with a Freelance Client is a Good Idea… (Speider Schneider)

I hate to admit it, but I’ve had sex with a lot of my clients (female). Maybe it was just being young, in New York City where dating is strange, or it was the looser morals in the design and advertising world. I wasn’t alone, either. My peers seem to be having a shtupfest, also. We did question the possible problems sex with a freelance client might cause, just as someone would think twice about an affair with an office coworker. The thing is that it WAS a good idea! (noupe.com)

This Year’s 8 Smartest UI Design Ideas (Kyle Vanhemert)

When your family gathered for the holidays this year, did you take note of the technology everyone was using? There’s a decent chance you could’ve observed someone from every generation present ably navigating some sort of touchscreen. (wired.com)

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Leading Designers Share Their New Year’s Resolutions for 2015 (Lior Frenkel)

The holidays offer us the chance to relax and rethink what we wish for ourselves for the next year. But starting with a blank page is hard, so we thought you might want to hear what other designers wish for themselves. (thenuschool.com)

A 6-Hour Usability Test In An Agile Environment (Jeff Sauro)

In the fast-paced world of Agile development, where it's difficult to find time to get data from users, unmoderated remote testing gives us a way to quickly collect feedback on interface design. (measuringu.com)

Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking that IQ Tests Miss (Keith E. Stanovich)

No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who repeatedly make poor decisions. The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities. I coined the term “dysrationalia” (analogous to “dyslexia”), meaning the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence, to draw attention to a large domain of cognitive life that intelligence tests fail to assess. Although most people recognize that IQ tests do not measure every important mental faculty, we behave as if they do. We have an implicit assumption that intelligence and rationality go together—or else why would we be so surprised when smart people do foolish things? (scientificamerican.com)

It's Time For Industrial Design To Grow Up (Gadi Amit)

I am an industrial designer by training, but it’s been a while since I called myself one. Industrial design has changed, and what I do has changed, too. The kinds of projects I work on require skills beyond those taught in any conventional industrial design curriculum, and the people I hire are typically proficient in areas that borrow from technical fields rather than classical design disciplines. (fastcodesign.com)

2014 Retrospective (Luke Wroblewski)

As the year comes to a close, it's time for my annual round-up of the most read articles I published this year. In order of popularity, the top five articles from 2014 are... (lukew.com)

A Designer’s Guide to Gift Giving (Steve Selzer)

The best gift I’ve ever given was a 1940s Parker 51 fountain pen. It was a birthday present to my best friend Taylor, a PhD student with a professorial look — round tortoise shell spectacles, elbow-patched blazer, a leather briefcase and loafers. The pen not only rounds out his look, but it's one of his favorite gifts of all time. (frogdesign.com)

40 Settings Page Interfaces for Mobile App UI Design (Jake Rocheleau)

This gallery includes a handful of brilliant settings page interfaces for mobile designers. Both Android and iOS applications are featured in the gallery including some older styles like iOS 6. You’ll find a hodgepodge of ideas from profile settings to notifications and account details. Most applications will require a settings page and this gallery is perfect for generating new ideas. (dzineblog.com)

UX Lessons Learned from Santa Claus (Mario Sakata)

This is a Christmas story recreated from the actual experiences I had spending most of my childhood living in the US. While mostly just a guess, thinking back on it now, I realize that Santa Claus himself may be one the best User Experience Designers there is. (medium.com)

Slow is Fast: Why Startups Should Make Time to Design for Customer Goals (Ryan Bloom)

If there is one word to describe a startup, it would be “busy.” At a growing company, there are always more things to do than people to do them, and often times those who are most successful are the ones who can be decisive and execute on a given objective efficiently. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, after all the old saying “time is money” has never been truer in the fast paced world of internet startups. However, this approach can lead to trouble when employees begin to jump to solutions before truly understanding their customer’s problems. Often, companies will line up a slew of customer interviews and soon after, product teams will have a list of features and screen-shots ready to go into production. Thoroughly defining your user’s goals can feel like a step backwards; why think about the problem when you’ve already got the solution? (cooper.com)

Has flat design gone too far? (Marc Schenker)

These days, it seems, you can’t turn anywhere on the web without hearing about or directly encountering flat design in some way, shape or form. What started out as a mere design trend just a couple of years ago is now clearly a mainstream design aesthetic that’s a force to be reckoned with. (webdesignerdepot.com)

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Treating Users Like Adults: Incorporating Six Principles of Andragogy into UX Design (Victor Yocco)

Most digital experiences require users to learn something new. Sometimes the purpose of an app is to learn, such as in an e-class. More often, the user needs to learn how to use the app itself, be it an updated word processing program or a redesigned online banking experience. We call it the onboarding process, and done poorly it can turn users away, which makes it critical that design teams incorporate sound learning principles into their designs. These principles, or “laws of learning” ensure that the experience will be smooth and intuitive. (uxbooth.com)

How Bad UX Makes Users Blame Themselves (Ivana McConnell)

We don’t do well with uncertainty. When things go wrong, we want to know why as quickly and easily (but maybe not truthfully) as possible. But when technology is thrown into the mix, the problems are more complex. Our perceptions change. When something goes wrong with a user interface, the questions don’t always have easy answers. It’s the designer’s job to connect and empathize with the user, to teach them the language of design, to put MVPs in their hand, test, talk, and arrive at a solution. (uxpin.com)

Working Agreements for Huge Meetings (Alex Pukinskis)

Have you been in a meeting lately where people were focused on their laptops, interrupting each other, distracted, or otherwise behaving badly? In Jean Tabaka’s “Leading Collaborative Meetings” class, Jean talks about the importance of working agreements to create the safety that makes productive dialogue possible. (rallydev.com)

How Button Color Contrast Guides Users to Action (anthony)

Have you ever clicked a wrong button by accident? Users make wrong decisions on modal windows when they’re not guided in the right direction. Many modals prompt users to act without making the different actions clear. Clear color contrast between different buttons is what guides users to choose the right one. Not seeing a clear action to take causes uncertainty in users and slows down their task. It may even cause them to choose the wrong action that derails their task. (uxmovement.com)

Information architecture for lean and agile projects (Austin Govella)

Thinking back, I can't recall a single development team where everyone didn't agree on documenting the interface in some fashion. Maybe it was a sketch or a wireframe or some prototypes, but whatever it was, everyone agrees you need something where everyone can agree: yes, this is what we're building. (agux.co)

This Tool is Going To Completely Change Web Design (Trevor Dayley)

About every five years a company comes along and really shakes things up. Rather than try to make slight improvements over their competition they completely redesign the concept and reform the way we do things. Over the last decade many of us have experienced the painful, time-consuming task of making ourselves a website. We've probably all wished their was a better way. Fortunately in 2015, The Grid is about to change all that. (fstoppers.com)