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This video is a writer's review (rant) of Windows 8 for desktop. It's a long video, but I think he touches on some important UI points starting around 2:25, with the four Cs: control, conveyance, continuity and context.

"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."

Great article advocating for responsive web design. "Again, it's true that responsive design and device-specific experiences can offer us a way around many of these problems. If we can tune the size of a button to a particular environment, then we don't have to accept blunt, across-the-board treatment. But the number of devices we have to support will only increase, and customizing for every possible scenario could quickly become unreasonable. Even if we are able to provide perfectly tailored design at the execution level, there is still value in thinking about tempered, universally accessible design at the conceptual level. Additionally, just because we can tailor design to particular experiences doesn't mean that users will not carry expectations over from one experience to another. The boundaries might blur whether we like it or not."

What are you left with when the color is taken out of your design? Do the areas of focus still hold up, or does contrast between elements? Make sure your original hierarchical decisions still hold up when you take out the color.

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.

If you missed it, Monday's post explored 6 ways to reduce friction in the prove-you-are-human process. Thanks to our wonderful readers, we have 3 more CAPTCHA alternatives to cover: animated NuCaptcha, gamified Vouchsafe and a tip from "Anton" that we could describe as a "honeypot button."

Love this!

From 2007

Smashing's pagination good practices and examples