Jon Hung

Intriguing UX articles from this week

5 second usability test. As designers, we need to manage people’s immediate perceptions. A generation of internet surfers (like the channel surfers of the previous decades) will judge a websites value very rapidly. A great article

Jakob Nielsen on the Twitter phenomenon. A founding father of usability speaks about the new social media trend. Not to be confused with Nielsen & Co (media watchdog and marketer).

Another set of interviews from Jared Spool. Very useful to web designers and devs. One of his interviews is with Dan Brown, author of one of the bests texts on web-design documentation (Communicating Design). I have a copy of his excellent book on my shelf, but I don’t own Da Vinci Code.

Derek Powazek speaks on designing virtual communities. Front and center on A List Apart, this article talks about how designers can create web applications that engage users to interact with one another. I haven’t fully digested the article, but Yahoo’s Luke W has a few things to say about it.

Using verbs as Nouns in an interface. Your words matter, especially when you guide a user through your information design.

Oh, and here’s some pretty stuff

A video of a designer at work, at high speeds. Incredible and inspirational.

Whats in your bag? A look into the tools that designers carry with them. Lots of apple and moleskine (bah)

From around the Web

• IxDA posts videos from a recent conference Very Useful
• Frog Design’s Robert Fabricant: Designers are in the Behavior Business (Design is not just about “making stuff”.)
• WordPress invites users to perform usability testing

Nick Fincks’ top UX books. (link)

I own two books on his list already (Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things & Dan Brown’s Communicating Design).  To Nick’s list I would add two books: Nudge by Thaler & Susstein and Designing for People by Henry Dreyfuss.

From the twitterverse

• Make your commerce website usable by breaking it into three steps.
• Cheapskate’s Guide to Usability
• A 14-point usability checklist. A Tweak a Day Convinces Visitors to Stay

The concept of User Experience is becoming pervasive.  People in all fields are learning how to create better usability. More people are designing websites, and doing a good job at it. Information is ubiquitous, open, and accessible. What’s to motivate people to hire a dedicated UX designer?

A UX pro goes above and beyond what’s listed in these articles. They advocate for usability in the toughest of design environments.  A pro works under the constraints of a tight budget to make quick tweaks, but they can also seamlessly integrate usability through the entire development life-cycle.

When I was obsessed with poker, I visited discussion forums to improve my game.  In this highly competitive environment, giving tips and pointers was frowned upon.  The last thing people want is for someone to help your competition, which they called “teaching the fish”.

In a way they are right: by bringing people’s competencies up, the skill gap narrows and your competitive edge shrinks.  More work and more knowledge is required to eek out profits.  The best thing professionals (in poker or in UX) can do is to read up on what’s now “common knowledge” and stay ahead of the field.  It’s what I do everyday.

I know there’s some incomplete information in the last two blog posts.  They’ll be complete entries by the end of the day.  I just really wanted to stay on schedule.

Also planned for the day:

• reading up on card sorting for researching patients, doctors, and stakeholders at Children’s Hospital Oakland
• Getting ready for 31 day blogging challenge. He suggests a SWOT analysis and getting GOOGLE analytics (is this any better than the stats I get from WP?)
• JAVA homework’s due today… dah!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whU_YrZVhy0]

These are some of the places I look  to drool over eye candy and have a shot at re-creating it.

http://abduzeedo.com – graphics, typography, and illustrations. Fabio Sasso, a brazilian designer, has put together his designs and work of another dozen contributors to create a blog with fresh daily content and instructive tutorials for creating compelling visual awesomeness.

http://www.colourlovers.com – a color and design blog. Great for browsing for web themes; colors are a huge part of design.

http://richditch.wordpress.com – absolutely stunning photography. Though less of a nature photographer than the author, I appreciate how he details his thought process and his approach to photographs in his posts. He is also a Nikon shooter like myself, and usually lists the gear he used for each shot.

Other sites
http://www.designvitality.com/blog
http://www.smashingmagazine.com
http://www.bittbox.com

1) Head nod to Boy in Static who mentioned my photos on their blog. I really dig their website which is full of great color and life. Their music video features a similar theme which makes for a wonderful and adorable narrative. They’ve got an album on iTunes this week – check em out!

2) If you’ve ever wanted to find a sweet bike route in Oakland, or whatever neighborhood you’re in, check out bikely.com. Here’s some rides in Oakland

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A list of interesting articles read in this week. March 1-7, 2009:

- Beautiful Shadow Photography (Courtesy of Smashing Magazine)
- Jakob Nielsen on what it takes to become a usability professional (in 2002). Ten years experience, knowledge of usability methods, and brain power, he says.
- A biography of David Kelley,  IDEO’s founder and an inspiration for design thinkers everywhere. IDEO re-invents products from keyboards to shopping carts, but they do a lot more as well. An interesting story behind a company that shows us that design can create social change.
- Charlie Rose with Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter. I spend a lot of afternoons with Charlie, and with Twitter, so this reunion was a match made in heaven.
- 51 Creative Business Cards. I better come up with something this slick. I figure my last name gives me a lot of creative space.