UX Puppy

Critiques!

The US government web design and usability guidelines - HUGE book in PDF format with many guideline explained in a concise format. It's actually pretty good. I wish it was in a better format - PDF isn't the most... um, whats the word I'm looking for - USABLE format. just sayin

"247 web usability guidelines Although designing usable systems requires far more than simply applying guidelines, guidelines can still make a significant contribution to usability by promoting consistency and good practice. We use this list of guidelines in our consultancy work. For best results, remember to interpret the guideline in context - this requires a bit more thought but ensures you will get a lot more from your review."

an oldie... no, a classic and classics never go out of style.

"Numbers are problematic to the extent that they give the illusion of providing more truth than they actually do. They also favor what is easiest to measure, not what is most important."

Pitfalls to avoid when concerning the love of numbers

digging into Google Analytics and custom segments

by Leanna Gingras

Wanna learn UX?, perhaps we can learn from a Baker. Guild system can teach us about learning a master trade.

Market research group based in the neighborhood - Chapel Hill NC. They set up surveys and data collection but also do online communities.

Great article and primer on IA process

Slides advance every 15. Whole talk lasts 5 minutes. Awesome!

Jeff Gothelf, Director of UX, TheLadders.com. @jboogie Ignite Talk: "How to 'Do' Lean UX in 5 Easy Steps" -- Ignite is a fast-paced presentation style that gives tech entrepreneurs the opportunity to share lessons learned with a room full of drunk entrepreneurs. But there's a catch: presentations are limited to exactly five minutes and twenty slides--and those slides advance automatically every 15 seconds.

UX conference in Isreal!

"Storytelling for User Experience,"

Nice interview with a UX writer and practitioner by Craig Tomlin

"Hey Spool, Mike and Steve, Nice post! Krug's Rocket Surgery book where I learned about developing good tasks. Basically, he says to test the participants interaction with the site not their ability to read. "buy a bookcase" tests the participants ability to read and, in this case search. That's not bad! It gets at the usability / mechanical functionality of a site. But, you don't need to go through the trouble to recruit users to collect this type of data. Anyone hanging around the hallway will do. However, if you want to dig down to the other parts of the experience (findable, desirable, Morville's honeycomb types), then a more authentic, believable, contextual task is important. By changing the directive command - "Find a bookcase" - to a more contextual based question - "How would you do that?" - you were able to get a different and possibly more insightful / actionable result. As a matter of fact, from now on, I'm using this format for all my user tests. Done and Done, Mr. Spool. @Mike - (A/B) test your (user) test? I smell recursion and an out of memory error. :) cheers! newman"

analysis of your twitter account

This is a good way to get a bead on your audience... shhhh, helpful for persona creation.

Tristan Weevers writes about organizing and developing new UX methods and patterns.

User-testing budget considerations

Kris Mausser writes it all down for us.