What I’ve been reading lately (week 50)
- The 20 best new tools for web design and development of 2012
If you’ve had a quiet time of it these last 12 months, then well done you, because the rest of us were sweating just to keep up with the base rate of change online. HTML5 has reached critical mass, responsive development continued to barrel along at full tilt, then there’s audio APIs and WebGL…
- Forms are a Conversation
The users of your software always visit with a goal in mind. Often in web applications, a form stands between them and that goal. Whether the user wants to join a community like Facebook to connect with their friends or use a project management tool to organize their business, forms are there to hurdle.
- The 3 Elements of Good Design: Usability, Utility and Desirability
It’s no secret, Google has let loose their designers. You may have noticed them making changes to things like Gmail and the results page, among many more. After years of focusing solely on utility, the search juggernaut is finally letting design drive action.
- Convert with Content: How Product-related Content Shapes the User Experience
While manufacturers continue to rely on Mad Men-style agencies to help sell their products to today’s information-hungry and device-savvy consumers, they must invest in much more than catchy jingles and six-figure Super Bowl commercials to succeed. Without comprehensive, user-friendly, and accurate product information on their own websites and retail partner product pages, manufacturers will lose their ability to affect the way consumers make buying decisions.
- Patent Skills for User Experience Design
The Apple/Samsung patent case was arguably the most important design event of 2012. Not just because it gave a measureable value to design patents and the role of intellectual property in user experience design, but because of its visibility and potential impact on design processes.
- Responsive is the Mobile Web of Tomorrow
There are a lot of misconceptions, or myths, going around constantly about responsive design. We’ve even busted a few ourselves. Recently, another article caught our eye that had us scratching our heads, because it seemed to miss the point.
- User engagement is not a subset of UX
“When engagement is treated like a UX feature or function instead of a defining sensibility, you get less of it. At risk of sounding “meta,” one of the great design challenges innovators increasingly confront in increasingly competitive markets is how to get their best people to engage around engagement. You need to devote as much creativity and ingenuity around designing for engagement as you do for the entire user experience. A decade ago, companies hurt themselves by treating “interface design” as what you slapped on to your finished product. Today, innovators hurt themselves by treating “engagement” as a subset of the total UX. Don’t make that mistake. Re-engage with engagement.”
- An Approach to Looking for Positive Signs
“We all need to better understand the questions we should ask and the approaches we should take to prevent our jumping too quickly into selling our services and methods….”
- Demystifying UX Design: Common False Beliefs and Remedies: Part 2
“Many hold a firm belief that high information density is something to avoid at all costs.”
- Research Drives Innovation
“Apple builds products their own employees would want, which translates nicely to the consumer population as a whole. This does not mean that Apple is not conducting research. It just means they’re doing research internally—and for Apple that just works.”
- Designing for Users and Their Devices
“People use smaller tablets and eReaders in somewhat different ways: Their usage rates are different. Their use outside the home is more prevalent. And their users hold them differently.”
- Designing With Sensors: Creating An Adaptive System To Enhance UX
In computer science, the term “adaptive system” refers to a process in which an interactive system adapts its behavior to individual users based on information acquired about its user(s), the context of use and its environment. Although adaptive systems have been long-discussed in academia and have been an aspiration for computer scientists and researchers, there has never been a better time than today to realize the potential of what future interaction with computer systems will be like.
- 5 Trends That Will Shape Digital Services In 2013
What will the key changes be in business and design during 2013, and what should you do about it? Here are five predictions from the design firm Fjord.
- 4 Benefits of Unmoderated User Testing
Product designers are rushing to adapt to our increasingly mobile world. With advancements in tools that allow us to record behavior and collect data quickly, they are turning to unmoderated user testing so they can test without facilitator bias.
- Review: The Mobile Book – Smashing Magazine
Maybe you’re an executive who doesn’t truly understand all the forces at play within the mobile phone market who needs a definition of responsive design along with associated justifications for its use. Or, you might be a user experience designer who simply wishes to create that cool, intuitive webpage, but who can’t quite navigate all of the potholes created by proliferating browsers and varying screen resolutions. Perhaps you’re a marketeer (not to be confused with a musketeer) who must make market-specific development choices with a UX compass. Whatever your reason for picking up The Mobile Book by Smashing Magazine (and various authors who each produced a chapter) you’ll find a timely and accesible guide for navigating the complex world of mobile design.
- Research Where Your Channels Cross
Cross-channel user experience describes what happens when a customer begins interacting with two or more faces of the many entities that form her consumer universe. If she’s ordering a second color of her favorite shoe style, making an appointment for an appliance repair, or resolving a problem with her wireless bill, she may find herself logging into her account on a web portal, tweeting a customer service rep from her smartphone, or dialing a customer service number she finds on a paper statement—all of them potentially cross-channel experiences.
- 2013 Interaction Awards: Winners Announced!
- Why Won’t Helvetica Go Away?
The other day someone sent me a link to a website with the preposterous title of “The 100 Best Typefaces of All Time”. Topping the chart was Helvetica, and that stirred my ire. I dismissed the list because it was based on marketing figures from one source, FontShop, coupled with the opinions of half a dozen Berlin-based typographers, but I was still incensed.
- Times, They Are A-changin’
The process of making a website used to be like an assembly line. It was a series of hand-offs with each team member contributing his/her part before giving it up to the next person. Like a game of telephone, the same content was passed from person to person, and, at each step, it took a slightly new form. What started as a glimmer in a client’s eye became a sitemap, then a wireframe, then a Photoshop file, and eventually it became code that went to live in its final resting place, the browser.
- 15 Practical Tips How To Use Typography For Emotional Design
Typography is an essential part of any website. There is no doubt about it. Websites usually offer information and the easiest way to present this information is through text. Besides, “people who are reading a well typeset page are more engaged in the experience and find that time flies by faster.” Good typography is not only a convenient carrier for information, it can also help to engage our website visitors.
- Translation is UX
There is a world where Harry Potter’s arch enemy is “Du-weißt-schon-wer,” Facebook users click the “Me gusta” button, and the Dude is named “le Duc.” This world is a translated world.
- Interaction Design: When You Shouldn’t Use Fitts’s Law To Measure User Experience
The key statement of Fitts’s Law is that the time required to move a pointing device to a target is a function of the distance to the target and its size. In layman’s terms: the closer and larger a target, the faster it is to click on that target. This is easy to understand, not too difficult to implement and it doesn’t seem to make much sense to contradict such a simple and obvious statement.
- When Pixels Dominate Design, Your Hardware Is The Brand
Frog’s Max Burton advocates a new era for industrial design, in which hardware becomes a brand asset and the product is the interaction ecosystem.
- The UX Chameleon and Its Multidisciplinary Skin
Among the many disciplines involved in the creation and development of a product or service, user experience design is the one of the few that relates to everyone. The UX designer, then, is often asked to create deliverables that help the entire team visualize what is being built. This level of adaptation is normally something for which only chameleons are renowned.
- Stuck in the Details? Mind Map User Tasks
Working in a team of brilliant creatives is a double-edged sword. Sure, passion and expertise facilitate great discussions, but focusing too much on your own craft can be counter-productive. Sometimes, being a UX practitioner in a team of technology experts inspires new tools for the job.
- Can Non-UXers Really Know UX?
You see, my football knowledge is equivalent to the UX knowledge of many non-UX people that speak up in meetings. Like them, I have a general knowledge about the topic, and may even provide high level insight, but I certainly can’t project who is going to “win it all”. Thus, these non-UX people can know about UX, and their interjections can actually prove helpful to us.
- Practicing What We Preach:Leading with Empathy
First impressions are immediate and not easily undone; if the person that you are engaging is put off by your initial tone, the conversation could be finished before it even begins.