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)

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.

Last night, a good friend confessed to me she “didn’t get Twitter”, and that she wasn’t going to. Fearing I was going to lose one of my followers, I told her about an upcoming blog post I was writing (this very one) about the virtues of Twitter. She rolled her eyes at the idea,  unimpressed by my efforts. Ten reasons she’s already heard this wasn’t about to change anything.
She’s right, many of these lists make it onto blogs somewhere. Despite these doubts I persisted, and with a different approach, I think I might have caught her attention a bit. I told her about a day in the life using Twitter.

Here’s what I did using twitter, yesterday:

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