User Experience Lessons From the iPhone

Here’s a nice slideshow from an internal presentation that uses the iPhone’s UX process as an example of what User Experience is, does and can do.

FoldSpy

This is an interesting and useful resource – dynamically view how your design will appear above the fold  in various browsers.  Looks like a good way to check for how content could be viewed.

Form Design

Here’s an interesting article by Luke Wroblewski on Web Application Form Design. 

Usable Forms

One of the projects that I’ve “parachuted” into has been a redesign of a tool that produces forms.  Forms are used for many things, and at PH they are used mostly for data input from nurses, doctors, patients, and more.  Today I ran across a book in progress by Luke Wroblewski called Web Form Design Best Practices. 

The book has its own site http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/, and while checking that out I ran across this slideshow from Aaron Gustafson’s Learning to Love Forms talk at WebVisions 2007: 

Websort

This cool tool should be very useful for doing cardsort testing.  A colleague of mine has used it in usability testing and was very pleased with the results and level of analysis, especially since it’s free if there are under 10 participants per testing round.  I’ve sent the link out to the rest of the UDT and hope to get a chance to use this soon.

 -Miguel

User Testing is Not Entertainment

This article from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox has some good reminders about the how’s and why’s of usability testing, as well as tips on the presentation of usability findings to stakeholders and clients.

It’s short, to the point, and has some great links to older alerts that I’ve missed. It’s well worth the read.

-Miguel

Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content

From User Interface Engineering:

“Many of the design teams we talk to face the same major issue: how to organize the information on their sites. From creating navigation schemes to developing site hierarchies to refining checkout sequences, it’s highly important for design teams to organize information effectively for their users.

Information architects frequently must deal with the problem of managing more and more information. Rarely can they remove information from a site; in most cases, it’s add, add, add. Design teams must make room for this new content in some way, either by incorporating it into the current organizational scheme or by altering the information architecture to allow for it.”

-Miguel

Google Accessible Search for the Visually Impaired

Google Labs have launched an Accessible Search interface.

From the FAQ:

“Accessible Search is an early Google Labs product designed to identify and prioritize search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users. Regular Google search helps you find a set of documents that is most relevant to your tasks. Accessible Search goes one step further by helping you find the most accessible pages in that result set.”

-Miguel

Search 2.0

Nice article from Read/WriteWeb:

Search 2.0 vs Traditional Search

-Miguel

Guild of Accessible Web Designers

From the site:

The Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) is a worldwide association of professional organisations, web designers and developers working together to promote the use and preservation of accessible design standards. “Promoting a vision of the future that assumes accessible web design to be relevant, obtainable, and not at odds with successful business practice or good visual and usable design.”

-Miguel