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UX Movement - Articles on Interface Design

UX Movement - Articles on Interface Design

You’re not a user experience designer if… The UX field is booming. It seems like the number of user experience practitioners has doubled in the last year — from newbies who’ve just entered the workforce, to mid-career changes, to folks who’ve been doing this all along but finally found out what to call themselves. It’s incredibly reassuring to finally see a long overdue interest in user experience practice; after all, that’s what many of us have spent our careers fighting for. I started this blog to give greater insight into how we think, how we work, and how we benefit customers and companies alike. I consider myself lucky to be among many professionals who speak at conferences around the world in an effort to bring UX into the mainstream. There’s just one problem: not everyone calling themselves a user experience designer is actually a user experience designer. But how does a user experience designer demonstrate their user experience designing? You’re not a user experience designer if… You don’t talk to users. Related Posts:

User Interface Engineering More, better, faster: UX design for startups Startups don’t have capital to burn or luxurious schedules for big-design-up-front. But unless your idea is by-and-for-engineers, design isn’t something you want to skip on your way to market. For a startup, design may mean the difference between simply shipping, and taking the market by storm. But with tight budgets, and aggressive timelines, how to include design and get the best value for the investment? Eric Ries proposes a cyclical model for development in a startup: Build > Measure > Learn (repeat). In a recent Lean UX workshop hosted by the fantastic Janice Fraser (Luxr) and Cooper’s own Tim McCoy and Suzy Thompson (also of Cooper) suggested that the cycle was right, but that it begins in the wrong place. I buy it. So we have a cycle of Learn > Build > Measure (repeat). Faster How fast can we run the cycle? Once we get the upfront work of personas and high-level scenarios done, cycles take on a regular pattern. What do we get? More, better Let’s start with the first cycle: Learn

WordPress Fat-Loss Diet to Speed Up & Ease Load Last week we looked at some useful plugins to enhance and protect WordPress, following on with the WordPress topic let’s look at how you can tweak your WordPress install to increase the speed of your site and ease the load on your web servers. We’ll be putting the front end code on a strict diet, while trimming the fat from the database to produce a fast, lean website that doesn’t clog up your server’s resources. Despite its general awesomeness and wide adoption across the web as both a blogging platform and a trusty CMS, it’s no secret that WordPress is a greedy old memory hog. Installing one of the many caching plugins fixes 90% of these server problems, while upgrading your server specs solves the rest. Caching solves 90% of those server problems. My choice goes with W3 Total Cache as it combines not only page caching, but also database caching, browser caching, object caching and minify settings. Instead, link up the pages directly in your theme file:

Ergonomie-web.net Information Architecture 101: Techniques and Best Practices By Cameron Chapman Information architecture (IA) is an often-overlooked area of website design. Too often, as designers, we just let the CMS we’re using dictate how content for a site is organized. And that works fine as long as the site fits perfectly into the narrow content formats most CMSs are designed around. But too often, a website’s content breaks the boundaries of most CMSs. This guide covers the fundamentals of information architecture for organizing website content. Information Architecture Design Patterns There are a number of different IA design patterns[1] for effective organization of website content. Single Page The first pattern is the single page model. Flat Structure This information structure puts all the pages on the same level. Index Page A main page with subpages is probably the most commonly seen website IA pattern. Strict Hierarchy Pattern Some websites use a strict hierarchy of pages for their information design. Co-Existing Hierarchies Pattern Image by Al Abut L.L.

Cone Trees Summary On its login page, Twitter uses JavaScript to set focus on the user name text field so the user can sign in to the account with least effort possible. However, due to the incompleteness and the placement of the JavaScript, there is a possibility that the user’s password may get revealed (in the user name text field of the login form) if the user attempts to enter their account details before the login page completely loads. The description of the usability issue and solution are discussed ahead. Update (Jan 20, 2010): I informed Twitter about it and Anamitra Banerji from Twitter product got back letting me know he has someone working on fixing it. Update (Mar 28, 2010): I noticed today that they (finally, one and a half months later) fixed up the issue. The Issue Setting focus on text field to increase usability In order to make the login form easy to use, the technical team at Twitter uses JavaScript to set focus on the user name text field upon loading of the login page. 1. 2. 3.

User experience consultancy & usability training from Userfocus 6 Ways To Subliminally Tell Users "Don't Come Back" There are many practices that I can't believe are still on the internet. Here are a few ways to tell the user to never come back to your website. Resize The Main Browser Window If you want to make the user open a new window to view your website, fine. Require Login for Non-Unique Content Why do I need a username and password to see your content? Hide the Login Box / Page Link So you do have dynamic/unique content for me? Require Obscure Plugins There's no way I'm going to download "SugarSplitter" plugin to get into your website. Don't Resize / Optimize Images Ugh, there's nothing like a website that uses a WYSIWYG to allow its amateur editors to insert 2MB pictures and resize them down to 100 pixels. Use Unnecessary AJAX There's no reason to use AJAX in your navigation menu.

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