User Experience

Cristian Pascu comes up with 8 reasons why interactive prototyping helps. It's defenitely not something you didn't know before, yet a good start to perceive someone to include interactive prototyping in the design process. - Alexey Ivanov from Bookmarklet

Here's a print-ready flipbook that includes a bunch of modern RIA patterns. It can be used as an illustrated pattern catalog or cut to create UI postcards. Direct download link — http://www.theresaneil.com/files... (PDF, 2.5 Mb). - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Modified Morville's UX model - with strategic (context) and tactical (execution) axes added. User experience is not (only) about usability, information architecture or visual design as we traditionally see it. User experience only happens when great design is executed in the right way and for the right reason. Because user experience will not happen, until the design is in fact used by a user. - Olga Safonova

UXBooth comes up with a solid review of prospective user interfaces to come in our every day life within a couple of years. - Alexey Ivanov

Juice Analytics offers a simple framework for effective use of fonts in your dashboard. With a few simple decisions, you can ensure that the text on the dashboard will both look good and communicate effectively. - Alexey Ivanov from Bookmarklet

A small but interesting case study from MS Office 2010 design team. The story tells about integration of a new complicated feature (collaboration) into familiar process (rich document editing) without breaking old one. One of most interesting parts is a set of principles they've set during this process. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

The team tells about their UX research tools and techniques — http://blogs.technet.com/office2.... - Juras Vetrau

How the team works with the product usage statistics — http://blogs.technet.com/office2.... - Juras Vetrau

Mockingbird is an online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application. It looks pretty much the same as Balsamiq. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

A great article from Don Norman on "usability vs security" topic. He talks about right and wrong examples and processes of security integration. One of most interesting things is his parallel with wrong UX design process. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Many tools have pleasant, user-friendly interfaces and take advantage of well-designed physical devices (i.e., they're easy to use from a human-computer-interaction perspective). But it's in the sociological and anthropological arenas where they run into trouble: most social software tools are clumsy and ineffective at smoothly facilitating interpersonal interaction - Sachendra

"HTC says apps, widgets and web pages would be represented by virtual book pages, making it intuitive for users to browse and organize their widgets. The interface would be flexible enough for carriers and service providers to add custom widgets, services and applications simply as additional pages in a book." - A. Khmelevsky™

I've started a UX list at Twitter to put together feeds from UX practioneers, companies, events, magazines etc. It would be great if you suggest users/companies that should be added to this list. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Bill Buxton from Microsoft Research has put together a history of multi-touch interfaces. He also talks about principles and limitations of these interfaces. Its a live document — Bill expands it with new sections since 2007. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

A brief history of gestural interfaces — http://creativity-online.com/news.... - Juras Vetrau

A great tutorial from Sean Hodge in which he tells about website modeling & design process in Fireworks. He shows the process in tiniest details — from sketches to wireframes to design and doesn't forgets about tips & tricks. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Will Evans has put together a list of articles that cover interaction09 conference held February 5-8 in Vancouver. Here's a bunch of workbooks, videos, presentations and other reports. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Mark Baskinger on Drawing Ideas and Communicating Interaction — http://vimeo.com/7339214 - Juras Vetrau

Wireframing, prototyping and usability testing tool that works both on desktop and web browser. It allows you to create wireframes and clickable prototypes the same way Axure and others do. It also allows you to conduct remote usability tests for wireframes and prototypes using VoIP. A review of the application — http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2009... - Juras Vetrau

@nahrihra: thanks, I've changed description a bit :) - Juras Vetrau

Henk Wijnholds presents an interesting approach to UX design — you should address your designs to four types of people — competitive, spontaneous, humanistic and methodical as defined by MBTI methodology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...). - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Sketching paper templates for this framework — http://www.henkwijnholds.com/mbti-sk.... - Juras Vetrau

It's basically a StackOverflow clone, except for UX/UI. Kinda neat. - Maxamad (Amazigh) from Bookmarklet

@See-ming: Have you ever heard of StackOverFlow, SuperUsr, Doctype, ServerFault, OnStartups, and a ton more clones of the original awesome Q&A site; Stackoverflow? Yeah, that's it. - Maxamad (Amazigh)

The 4th IDEA conference was held September, 15-16th in Toronto by The Information Architecture Institute. We'll try to put together a coverage of the event in comments to this post — presentations, videos, photos, reports, workbooks etc. Official site of the event — http://ideaconference.org/2009.... - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

A review from UserGlue — http://www.userglue.com/blog... - Juras Vetrau

Website information architects try to determine how users categorize, organize and label information on a site. Information architects use a number of methods to determine the best site architecture - Olga Safonova from Bookmarklet

After three iterations of usability testing on one particular business-to-business healthcare website, I noticed something interesting: pages that the in-house SEO professional created did not match the mental models of the primary and secondary target audience. Words such as “fluff,” “propaganda,” and my personal favorite, “what the [expletive],” were used to verbally describe these pages. Furthermore, these same words appeared in test participant comments and category/section labels. - Olga Safonova

Dear readers, we are so excited to show you what we have been up to for the last week! We’ve been working on the Wireframing Toolbox list, in which we have tried to combine all the tools that there are out there available for IAs, UX designers, web developers, etc. Prototyping market is indeed a crowded one, and making the right choice is hard. We’ve heard you and started working on a unified directory of wireframing and prototyping solutions of all sizes and colors. - Sasha Kovaliov(.com) from Bookmarklet

Project sample: https://www.coutline.com/coside... - coutline

As Paul Sherman says, "This document has been created as a reference for senior management in product groups who wish to learn more about incorporating user centered design practices into product ideation, design, and development processes. The terms ‘user experience’ and ‘user-centered design’ are used interchangeably in this document. The four main sections of this document provide the following information: 1) An overview of user centered design methods and techniques, and how they are incorporated into UX teams’ processes 2) A description of how the team fits into the development lifecycle. 3) A detailed breakdown of what it costs to implement and UX/UCD team in a single product organization. 4) The UX team engagement mode – that is, what services the team provides, to whom, and when. 5) Descriptions of the difficulties typically encountered when a product organization decides to build a UX team. 6) A reference section that provides descriptions of and access to user centered design tools and templates, deliverable samples, and recommended readings." - Juras Vetrau

A great overview article about eye-tracking from Jim Ross. As the author says, "It is easy to get excited about eyetracking. Seeing where people look while using your Web site, Web application, or software product sounds like an opportunity to get amazing insights into their user experience. But eyetracking is expensive and requires extra effort and specialized knowledge. The heat maps and other visualizations certainly look impressive, but what can you really learn from them? After using eyetracking for the first time, many find that it is not easy to know how to analyze the visualizations and make conclusions from them. Does eyetracking really provide any additional insights you would not have discovered anyway through traditional usability testing? Does the value of eyetracking outweigh its limitations? This article will discuss and answer these questions." - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Which method of user interface evaluation is the most suitable for your project — usability testing or expert reviews? This is a popular question for a long time. A group of usability practioneers gives some advices on that point. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

"CUE stands for Comparative Usability Evaluation. In each CUE study, a considerable number of professional usability teams independently and simultaneously evaluate the same website, web application, or Windows program. The Four Most Important CUE Findings have been:" - Alexey Ivanov from Bookmarklet

Some interesting insights about CUE in the A List Apart Article — http://www.alistapart.com/article.... - Juras Vetrau

The 5th EuroIA conference was held September, 25-26th in Copenhagen by ASIS&T. We'll try to put together a coverage of the event in comments to this post — presentations, videos, photos, reports, workbooks etc. Official site of the event — http://www.euroia.org/. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

@ptx: sorry, fixed :) - Juras Vetrau

excellent model from Bill Gassman to start working with clients to analyze web-resources - Svetolish

As author says: here are four kinds of landing page tests that can help you learn about your market. What you test on your pages—and what you learn from those tests—can better inform tactics and strategies throughout your entire marketing program - Svetolish

Juice Analytics (http://www.juiceanalytics.com/), a company that specializes in data visualization, has started a series of articles on dashboard design. Here's the first part of the article. Other parts will be posted in comments to this post. - Juras Vetrau

2nd part: Structure — http://media.juiceanalytics.com/downloa.... - Juras Vetrau

3rd part: Information Design — http://media.juiceanalytics.com/downloa... - Juras Vetrau

Tyner Blain proposes a method to define user competence — whether he/she is novice, competent or expert user. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet