My little scratch pad / morgue file for the interesting morsels I find scattered around the intarwebs.
To summarize, in the context of Angry Birds, success is bound up in slowing down that which could be fast, erasing that which is easily renewable, and making visual that which is mysterious and memorable.
— Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience
I’m pretty sure my coffee maker doesn’t NEED apps.
Austin is one smart dood as it is but what I like the most about this document is the way it makes you think as you look to fill in the blanks.
If you’re a UX Designer / IA, this is one for the toolbox.
Reveal unknown barriers to customer acquisition, conversion, and retention. (by Austin Govella)
Design is not concerned with objects, but with the impact that those objects have on people.
via @demadera.
This is awesome. I never thought someone would do a cartoon about what we do for a living.
ILUVUXDESIGN (by lyle)
How to make your shopping cart suck less - The Oatmeal
Usability critique in The Oatmeal’s inimitable style. Make sure to click through to see the whole thing.
Many design teams launch into development without a shared vision of the user experience. Without this shared vision, the team lacks direction, challenge and focus. This article describes how to use the ‘Design the Box’ activity to develop a user experience vision, and then describes three ways of publicising the vision
— Why you need a user experience vision (and how to create and publicise it)
Researchers at EffectiveUI recently underwent a study to see whether or not brand loyalty trumps usability. No surprise here: it doesn’t.
Not sure if I agree with this 100% but Aza does have a point.
The goal of interface design is to get rid of the interface. While interfaces with lots of interaction can look snazzy, you’ll have fewer usability issues when you minimize the amount of work someone has to do to use your product. You know those news sites where the articles are paginated into tiny chunks so that you keep having to hit “next” just to wait for dozens of ads to load? If you are like most people, you hate them and often never finish reading the article. That’s interaction overload at work.
Think long and hard about every little step a person has to do to use your product. Write them out. If you get fatigued, you know you need to simplify.
(Source: azarask.in)
The optimal line length for your body text is considered to be 50-60 characters per line, including spaces (“Typographie”, E. Ruder).
