Usercentric
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Are your users S.T.U.P.I.D?
by Stephen Turbek | [32 comments]
Stephen Turbek highlights the various, subtle pressures on a user that reduce a user's "effective intelligence", or what they actually use when using an interface. more...
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Blasting the Myth of the Fold
by Milissa Tarquini | [59 comments]
The need to cram as much into the top few inches of any interface has become nearly branded on the design psyche over the years. Milissa Tarquini considers how the myth of the fold does everyone involved a great disservice. more...
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Blasting the Myth of the Fold
by Jeff Parks | [4 comments]
Milissa and Jeff discuss how this long held rule in web design is being de-bunked by web analytics and user testing, as well as how this will impact design and development processes based on screen resolution and browser compatibility. more...
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Bring Your Personas to Life!
by Zef Fugaz | [15 comments]
Method acting can take your personas from the page to the stage. Think beyond traditional practice to give emotional life to your personas. more...
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Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment
by Anthony Colfelt | [31 comments]
Anthony Colfelt is not anti-Agile, but he believes strongly about how user-centered design can operate in an Agile environment. Here he explains how he came to feel this way, the major pitfalls of Agile, and how he sees Agile and UCD fitting together in harmony. more...
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Bringing Your Personas to Life in Real Life
by Elan Freydenson | [5 comments]
The way you communicate the personas and present your deliverables is key to ensuring consistency of vision. Without that consistency, you’ll spend far too much time arguing with your colleagues about who your users are rather than how to meet their needs. more...
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Case study of agile and UCD working together
by James Kelway | [13 comments]
How does Agile work effectively when redesigning a site? James Kelway uses case studies as starting points to explore how Agile and UCD can work together during wholesale redesigns. more...
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Comics for Consumer Communication
by Rahel Anne Bailie | [4 comments]
Though popular in the development process, designers can use comics for communication to consumers as well. Rahel Anne Bailie digs into her past to show us how she has used comics in the past in the hope that we can utilize them with a wider audience. more...
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Designing Customer-Centered Organizations
by John Zapolski and Jared Braiterman | [4 comments]
Even with the present downturn in the economy, more companies, from new media to established banks, have larger usability and design teams than ever before. Should we be content that we have come so far? more...
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Designing the Democratic
by Jamie Owen | [9 comments]
It is increasingly rare that our users are all from a single nation or culture. Jamie Owen talks about how our own cultures affect our design decisions. more...
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Don't Test Users, Test Hypotheses
by Avi Soudack | [7 comments]
“Observe your users” — a maxim most user experience professionals subscribe to. But how do you “observe?” When testing websites, generating hypotheses about user behavior can help inform the observation process, structure data collection and analysis, and organize findings. more...
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Ease of Use Outside the Box
by Mike Padilla | [3 comments]
When working in an enterprise environment, the interaction between browsers and multitudes of applications often creates user experience nightmares. Mike Padilla introduces some practical ways to relieve some of the biggest issues and start helping shape a larger context. more...
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Extending a Technique: Group Personas
by Mike Kuniavsky | [4 comments]
Entertainment, education, and collaboration software is often used by two or more people simultaneously. Each of these groups has a different set of needs and expectations, and each can be modeled as a group persona, rather than as individual users. more...
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Getting a Form's Structure Right
by Jeff Parks | [0 comments]
Jeff Parks talks with Afshan Kirmani about her article, expanding on various subjects including her User Experience Model. more...
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Getting a Form's Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Email Applications
by Afshan Kirmani | [19 comments]
Afshan Kirmani explains some fundamental principles that can help us design effective online forms. more...
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In Appreciation of Measures That Tell Stories
by Alison J. Head | [8 comments]
Click streams have made room for bounce rates, search analytics, and much more. Inspire stakeholders to act by telling stories with key metrics and better supporting the narrative with data. more...
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Making Personas More Powerful: Details to Drive Strategic and Tactical Design
by George Olsen | [6 comments]
Personas ought to be one of the defining techniques in user-focused design, but they've unfortunately become more of a check-off item than a useful tool. So how did we get here? more...
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Novices Orienteer, Experts Teleport
by Tyler Tate | [4 comments]
Expertise significantly impacts how
we seek information online. Tyler
Tate explores how the differences
between novices and experts help
us design better search interfaces for
both groups of users. more... -
Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research
by Andrew Hinton | [2 comments]
With all the attention to usability over the last five years or so and the wonderful swelling of information-architecture-related books just since 2001, you would think we would have enough methods and advice to keep our projects in perfect tack. But so many of these resources, excellent though they are, tend to be more about how to pilot the ship than how to find that all-important star and keep it in sight. more...
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Practical Plans for Accessible Architectures
by Frances Forman | [13 comments]
Accessible information architecture builds a bridge between planning, design, and development. Frances Forman gives us a place to start thinking more deeply about how information can be structured and transformed to make user interaction more flexible for everyone. more...