A quite long and detailed piece from the Microsoft Journal for Developers. It's not techie, although the focus is on interface design rather than websites.
Sunday, 26 February 2012
7 questions to ask of your personas
David Travis sets seven questions for you to ask of your personas. A great way to review your work and make sure you're on the right track.
Strategic content management & CMS selection
A great article by Jonathan Kahn for A List Apart, in which he discusses the problems in CMS design that arise from not thinking enough about the nature of the content or the skills, processes and time of website editors.
The risks in redesign
An interesting little article about how lots of companies approach website redesign. It's about e-commerce websites, but a lot of this resonates with university web publishing too.
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
FAQ usability guidelines
A great article on how to get the best out of Frequently Asked Questions. Author Stephen Gracey is pretty up front about the fact that he doesn't like them (a man after my own heart) but his article is pretty balanced and well referenced.
Saturday, 18 February 2012
UX practitioner skills set
A really interesting piece from David Travis who reflects on what he feels it takes to be a successful user experience consultant. Most of us will never be (and possibly don't want to be) a UX consultant, but I think this article is useful for the budding amateur and the jack-of-all-trades.
Search patterns podcasts
A couple of really interesting conversations about trends in searching and navigation behaviour. One of the interviewees is Peter Morville, co-author of the seminal Information Architecture for the WWW (otherwise known as the Polar Bear Book).
Effective scenarios for personas
Persona expert Kim Goodwin talks about scenarios - the stories we place our personas in. To effectively make use of personas, we need to be able to get stakeholders to engage with them. And the best way to do that is to tell stories.
Web forms questions podcast
Jared Spool interviews forms expert Luke Wroblewski covering a load of common questions about what makes forms easier or harder to use. It's a follow up to a paid seminar, but even without seeing this, there's a lot of good advice for anyone creating web forms.
User experience search engine
UX Pond is a great idea - a search engine that only trawls websites related to usability and user experience. As their blurb says - "Why search the ocean when the answer's in the pond?"
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
6 design & usability guidelines
Some core principles summed up in 6 guidelines; Pamela Vaughan's article is well worth a review.
Comparing usability testing methods
Jeff Sauro provides a comparison of different ways to approach usability testing - in person, remote moderated and remote unmoderated.
Shared understanding through collaboration
Everyone on the same wavelength is probably one of the biggest factors in a successful project. Working together on activities is a great way to get common consensus and shared vision. In this article Jared Spool discusses a few ways in which you can do this.
BBC - 15 website principles
I wish I could express myself as well as the 15 points laid out here. They were developed in 2007 as part of the BBC 2.0 project and still stand good today.
Link writing tips - McGovern
A witty and engaging take on link writing advice from Gerry McGovern. Worth two minutes of your time to re-enforce a few points.
Monday, 30 January 2012
McGovern challenges audience navigation
An interesting piece from content management specialist Gerry McGovern who suggests that audience-driven navigation often isn't the best approach.
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
Remote user testing tips
An excellent introduction to using remote unmoderated user testing services like usertesting.com. If you've never tried and are considering giving it a whirl, read this first.
Planning user research
An excellent set of questions to run through with your colleagues or clients (or just in your own head) before beginning the process of planning user research.
Personas: beware creative writing
Jared Spool discusses the dangers involved in creating personas with little or no user engagement. There comes a point where the persona creation exercise is simply a process of creative writing and therefore virtually useless.
Eyetracking with a webcam
The author of an upcoming book on eyetracking blogs their experience of trying out an eyetracking service that uses nothing more than a webcam.
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