occasionally subtle
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PR's Tumblrdome
ojovivo
$LAYYYTER
Interview Vampire Daily
cherry valley forever
Andulka
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Misplaced Lens Cap
Origami Around
Sade Olutola
TMBGareOK. The Official They Might Be Giants tumblr
EXPECTATIONS
Cosmic Funnies
titsay
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Cosimo Galluzzi
hello vonnie
seen from France
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@jamie-plouff-blog
Strategy is a collaborative, creative exercise. Use the Strategy Blueprint to align teams around what really matters. It's now available from the Frameworks tab in MURAL so you can keep working no matter where your team is.
Struggling with your strategy? This article offers some great tips on creating a blueprint to overcome that. Excited to apply this to my next project!
Ah, the holidays. A time to reflect, connect with friends and family, and agonise over the awkwardness of exchanging gifts with colleagues and clients. Looking for gift ideas for fellow UXers, clients
A little goofy but there are some really cool, helpful UX tools in this list!
Enhance your design skills with these free ebooks from experts in UX, Data, IoT, and more.
O’Reilly is offering some free ebooks.
This post was updated on September 25, 2015. I’ve always considered myself a lifelong learner. I have not one, but two college professors in my immediate family. The importance of education and continued learning has always played a big part in my life. So when I came to work at UserTesting a few months ago, [...]
Good list of places to pursue continuing education.
2017 UX conference list
UX conferences in 2017:
An event apart (dates all year, multiple cities)
IXDA (february, NYC)
Convey (february/march, seattle)
O’Riley design (march, san francisco)
IA summit (march, vancouver)
MinneWebCon (may, minneapolis)
Knowability (may, austin)
How design live (may, chicago)
Front (may & june, SLC)
Confab (june, minneapolis)
Awwwards (june, LA)
Digital Summit (august, minneapolis)
Midwest UX (september, cincinnati)
resources for card sorting
I’ve started working on a project that requires a good, hard look at an existing website’s IA. The site owners are open to aligning the site’s content and structure with their users’ mental models, so I’m conducting a card sort with the topics in their existing site.
What is card sorting going to do for this project? It is going to tell us whether:
the site’s content is grouped properly
specifically, which items do users most often group together
the site’s terminology makes sense to its users
I’ve been brushing up on best practices, and here are some takeaways:
keep the number of cards to 30-40 (in person) or 50-60 (online)
let users set aside topics they wouldn’t want on the site
if you’re doing an in-person session, encourage users to create more groups if their categories seem too broad
refer to search engine data as you decide on your site’s final grouping terminology
Articles and resources:
Usability.gov (overview of different techniques, best practices, and benefits)
Interaction Design Foundation (exhaustive resource, including good examples of why and how to do it, as well as what to do with the results)
Free-listing methods (how and why to free-list, which can be a great precursor to card sorting)
LukeW Ideation + Design provides resources for mobile and Web product design and strategy including presentations, workshops, articles, books and more on usability, interaction design and visual design.
Good case for designing thumb-friendly mobile workflows.
Take-aways:
94% of the time, smartphones are used in portrait orientation
most of the time, people use the same hand to hold the phone and interact with the UI
design focus should be on one-thumb interactions in portrait orientation
Related: Article with helpful info on designing for thumbs.
Horizontal filtering designs have become more common recently, with 24% of major sites using them. In this article we share our test findings on how horizontal filtering designs actually perform, how they are best implemented, and when to avoid them.
Interesting arguments for replacing a side-nav filter with a horizontal one.
In short:
eyes are drawn to the top of a product listing, not to the side of it
implementing a horizontal filter is ideal for sites that don’t have tons of filtering, such as clothing sites
this is only beneficial when implemented correctly, so: allow users to multi-select, show them what they selected somewhere outside of the filter, and auto-refresh the page after a selection is made
design + science = awesome
Last night I went to a talk by Brian Brooks--a cognitive scientist at 3M, because I was curious how cognition affects design. Last week there was a session at the IA Summit in Minneapolis which gave a broad overview on the topic, but this was a good deeper dive into how mental image processing can affect design.
Here are the main take-aways:
The first 3-5 seconds you spend looking at an image is called pre-attentive processing.
In those 3-5 seconds, your brain makes quick decisions about where to focus your vision and tries to figure out what’s important and what’s not.
During pre-attention, your eyes are drawn to color, contrast, faces, intensity, and edges. (So as a very very simple example of how this might work with design: putting a call to action near an image of a face can dramatically increase the number of people interacting with that call to action.)
3M has developed a really cool program--VAS (Visual Attention Software) that uses cognitive science to analyze your design or website and tells you (with 92% accuracy) what will immediately grab your attention.
Here’s just one example of how the program can analyze which of your design elements will command attention.
This can be a great tool for eliminating design churn and settling subjective arguments about where things like calls to action should be on a website. I can’t wait to try it out on my design work!
Resources:
This article does a good job of explaining how preventative processing works and how it can factor into design.
3M’s VAS (Visual Attention Software). I believe you can try it for free by signing up.
Start your next UX project with this checklist and don't forget about anything!
This is pretty neat. Depending on your project, the checklist might be overkill (or it might not be sufficient... I can think of a few things I'd add), but this is a cool starting point.
Hiya, This is meeting 2 of 3 of our conducting and conveying user research topic. Our book for this meeting will be It's Our Research by Tomer Sharon.
UXers: If you're in Milwaukee, come join us tonight. We'll be discussing Tomer Sharon's It's Our Research and doing a research activity related to IOR and Erika Hall's Just Enough Research. Hope to see you there!
File this under: if you have to use a hamburger menu, this is kind of a cool way to do it.
I wish I could see the rest of the UI though; I have serious doubts about whether the menu needed to be hidden in the first place.
Go behind the scenes with Redbooth's Product & Design team — and see why they banished the dreaded hamburger menu from Redbooth's iPhone app.
Interesting article. Although I'm a little weary about their method (only using employees to provide feedback on the redesign and not initially checking with users), getting rid of the hamburger menu lead to a great outcome for them.
Here's a collection of style guides from different companies. This is an awesome resource if you need help creating your first style guide.
I especially like Mail Chimp's style guide, as it gives good notes as to when to use different elements, as well as the code that goes along with it. I imagine that for developers, this takes a lot of guess work out of development and makes for a cleaner, more consistent product.
Best Buy also has an interesting one, as it doesn't just cover visual design, but also takes into account things like how "voice" (or the way you talk) informs the brand experience.
Also, here's some information for developers about creating your own style guide.
color resources for design
I'll admit: Design can be a challenge for me and finding colors that work well for a project can be a loathsome task at times. To help ease the pain of the process though, there are some cool resources out there. Here are some of my favorites:
Material Palette: This is great if you're looking for inspiration for your project's color, and it's super easy and fast to use. Just select two colors from a limited (but workable) list of colors, and Material Palette generates a range of colors for your palette, including primary and secondary text, an accent color, icon colors, and various primary colors.
Paletton: Creates color scheme styles however you want them, including: mono, triad, tetrad, free style, and complimentary. Basically you select a color, tell Paletton what kind of scheme style you want, then BOOM! You have a great palette to work with.
COLOURlovers: If you really don't know where to start or just feel like looking at what thousands of others have done, this can be your starting point. You can also create and submit your own palette.
ColorZilla: Sometimes I see an online image or painting that has beautiful colors that work well together, and I want to use that in my own work. Typically when I find something I really love, I'll save it to a palettes folder, then browse my images when it comes time to add color to a project.
Other times though, I'll run across a color that jumps out at me and I want to "save" it right away. For those situations, I use ColorZilla. It's a Chrome and Firefox plug-in that works like a bookmarking color picker. See a color you like, turn on the color picker, click on the color you like, and it gets saved to your history.
Happy coloring!
research: tips for selling it to your team
Right now I'm reading It's Our Research by Tomer Sharon, and it's all about getting stakeholder buy-in for UX projects. If you're just getting started in UX, or find yourself having to sell it to stakeholders, this is a great book to check out.
In chapter 1, Tomer has some advice for leveraging certain situations to sell UX research. Here's what he says:
"When the organization wants to develop a new product, offer to help uncover user needs, identify who the users are, their current pain pints, and how the organization can add value.
When the team plans the next version, offer UX research to understand what's working well and what can be improved in the current version. Offer to look into the usability of competitor products to better understand their strengths and weaknesses.
When the product is about to launch, lend a hand in planning and instrumenting sensors that will educate the team about user experience success metrics based on usage data.
When a new senior decision maker joins the team, meet with him or her. Show them what you do and highlight the benefits.
When a product is succeeding, propose research to make it even better.
When a product is failing, offer research to help identify the problems and suggest solutions.
When someone is already doing "research," use other terminology and find ways to avoid conflict."
My New Year’s Resolution for 2014 was to get more people started in User Experience (UX) Design. I posted one lesson every day in January, and thousands of people came to learn!
Below you will find links to all 31 daily lessons.
I just ran across this and it's great! 31 quick and dirty UX lessons. This is a great read if you're just getting started in UX or need help explaining to your co-workers what you do all day. Check it out!
