Usercentric
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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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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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UX Design-Planning Not One-man Show
by Holger Maassen | [20 comments]
Holger Maassen posits his ideas about the process of planning and designing for User Experience Design-Planning (UXD-P) as Expectation Design. more...
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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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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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Usability Heuristics for Rich Internet Applications
by Jess McMullin and Grant Skinner | [39 comments]
Over the coming months and years, RIAs will move from cutting edge to mainstream. That transformation will accelerate with the Flash and user experience communities working together to understand and develop best practices and shared knowledge. more...
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Searching for the center of design
by Jess McMullin | [9 comments]
Design is driven by many considerations. But on each project I’ve worked on, there seems to be a consistent center — a driver that determines priorities, direction, and the metrics used to measure success. 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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Case study of agile and UCD working together
by James Kelway | [14 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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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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What You Should Know About Prototypes for User Testing
by Chris Farnum | [12 comments]
There are several important factors to consider when you are planning to do prototyping for user testing. You will want to make careful choices about fidelity, level of interactivity and the medium of your prototype. Chris Farnum offers descriptions and best use scenarios to help you make the best prototype decision for your tests. 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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The Stranger's Long Neck
by Jeff Parks | [5 comments]
In this B&A podcast, Jeff Parks speaks with Gerry McGovern about the thinking that went into his new book. They discuss customers as strangers, the Long Neck, and task management — how to deliver and
measure what your customers want. more... -
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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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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Wanted/Needed: UX Design for Collaboration 2.0
by Matthew C. Clarke | [27 comments]
Matthew Clarke asserts that no current software supports the full process of collaboration, and proposes a model that may help get us closer to a more effective collaboration environment. 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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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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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...
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Uncovering Users In Your Own Organization
by Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo | [2 comments]
Buying new clothes and looking at current fashions is usually much more interesting and exciting than digging through one's closet or laundry hamper. However, there is a lot one can learn by stopping and taking a minute to examine one's own clothes... more...