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)

• 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.

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]

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

3) More gestural user interfaces for ya: A sensor 3d company called Canesta is developing a TV remote without the remote. You can see in the movie that the user waves his hands in motions to change channel, fast forward, and pause a movie as well as flip through channels. No button pressing needed, but it seems a user must climb a bit of a learning curve to get handy at it. Smart SF design firm Kicker Studio did some user testing and they noted that flailing and whining were common responses in people using the device. They got some innovative ideas over there at Kicker (no, seriously – check out their case study on the device here) and I personally would check out Kicker employee Dan Saffer. Dan Saffer’s ideas and work in the field of gestural interface are at his page, odannboy.com.

4) Also, a Brown University-led robotics team created a gesture-controlled robot. mmm… robot

5) From the AdaptivePath blog – tactile illusions. Although gesture and touch interfaces are all the rage, see how our tactile faculties can easily be fooled. Kinda gimmicky (illusions with combs and post-its and such), but nevertheless a thing to consider when programming for faulty human perceptions.

6) Lady, Baroness, and Professor Susan Greenfield says to House of Lords that social media rots kids brains

A stark piece this week shows that one can so easily use science to make claims promote the status quo, and inhibit progress. New media oppositionists have long held games, television and digital media accountable for teen pregnancies, school shootings, and other disintegrations of our youth’s moral standards. Now they tell us… they could be re-wiring kids brains! No way!!!@ This really doesn’t say anything new scientifically, except reaffirms that our brain is a highly malleable organ capable of adjusting to using different tools to reach our social and personal goals. Yes, there’s re-wiring going on.

While I do personally agree that kids should be socializing instead of being on Facebook, this is more old-school pandering about bringing it back to the golden days where we walked to our friends house if we wanted to tell them something. Yeah right. Kids are picking up these new tools which makes our generation better than the last. The kid who made a buck off an iPhone app, or has thousands of people following his blog isn’t one with stunted growth. They’ve got a headup in making their ideas soar.

Some more food for thought came from one comment to the article:

This is all supposition, where are the facts, the research? It doesn’t exist, it’s just people who do not understand children, as children, but see them as statistics, which they are not. The problem today is that in a lot of schools education is boring to children, they are not being taken into consideration by government when it changes direction every day virtually, so teachers are fighting to engaged as they should be. I am a governor of twenty years standing and our school goes out of it’s way to include the children and we don’t seem to have the problems that these supposed specialist go on about. Children have always had a short attention span, this is not new, teaching methods have been designed around just that fact!! I worry that these people are just making these unproved statements to get noticed for funding purposes! You can’t go on the experience of one teacher of 30 years, maybe it’s her ability that has declined! (from Nigel in Sommerset)

Should social media companies be targeting children? No, I think its highly inethical, but digital media is much like other consumer products who market to children who are below the “age of consent”. I might as well be going after Kool-Aid for marketing it as such a kool guy’s drink for kids, when it provides little nutritional value. Susan Greenfield would rather focus on the ills of social media rather than looking at ways to enrich kids lives as students, family members, and important parts of local communities. Children who have to resort to outlets on the internet often have to escape the an environment with no enrichenment opportunities and few interesting sources of interaction –  I’d rather her advocate for more parks in inner cities or something.

- 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.