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This is a Chrome extension that I find really useful. It adds a button to your browser bar, and when you click, it displays a list of popular viewport sizes. I like that it's a quick way to check your work.

Why? Because I love infographics. This really reinforces the value of user testing: "Testing with just 5 users can find 85% of your site's problems"

Seems like we are already doing what this article describes. :)

"For example, when Twitter was redesigning their desktop experience, live usability tests were projected on the wall of the development war room, as the developers were working. When something interesting happened in the test, the user researcher (observing from the war room), would say, "Hey everyone, you need to see what's happening here." Real time user research is a component of a Lean UX process."

Marty Cagan again, this time making a case for live-data prototypes in order to facilitate user testing and A/B tests.

Steve Krug's video demonstrates how simple usability testing can and should be. The test conducted on this demo is an abbreviated version of the one Krug recommends you perform on your own site. You need to upgrade your Flash Player. You need version 9 or above to view this video.

This is really slick! I'd love to have a project to test out this library!

interesting findings

CAPTCHA is more than a catchy name, it's an acronym - Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. But in practical terms, CAPTCHAs are often Consistently Annoying, and Prevent The Conversion from Happening A-Lot. One study by Stanford University (link opens as PDF) found 3 human users agreed on the "translation" of the CAPTCHA only 71% of the time. Overall success rates were ~85% on average.

UX researchers are exposed to a broad cross-section of people and personalities, especially when it comes to conducting user tests. Frequently, the people we encounter are willing, helpful participants to the research process - but what happens when respondents aren't so willing or helpful?

The BBC has a pretty innovative design practice. Bad pictures, good read.

I like this comment about traditional prototyping: "This is all well and good, yet the tools employed - Axure, Flash, paper mockups - are inherently fake, and therefore fail to test the most important mechanic; how people interact with actual content. Worse still, they are throwaway deliverables; expensive to create, but contributing nothing to the actual development effort required to create the live site."