Tag: ux
Free ‘Getting Real’ book by 37signals
37signals are most well known as the creators of Basecamp. I love their approach to business and highly recommend you buy their book Rework. It’s packed full of really useful business advice that’s incredibly down to earth and makes much more practical sense than any other business book I’ve read.
They’re now giving away free copies of their book, Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application.
On Amazon this book currently retails at £15.89 for the paperback and £6.99 for the Kindle version, so I recommend you download your copy whilst it’s free!
BBC Home page research and redesign
I conducted a quick piece of research on the BBC Home page as part of an event called BBC Connected. Did you know it’s the third most visited home page? Yet only a very small percent of visitors actually use it? As our research discovered, most people bypass the page completely, preferring to use the navigation bar or a direct url (usually saved as a bookmark). Here, we share our findings and a few of our design proposals to improve the user experience of the BBC Home page, in particular under-served audience(s).
How do you use the BBC website? Do you ever look at or click on items on the home page? Have you used it more or less since the last redesign? I’d love to hear about your experience. Share your story using the comment box below.
Research by Keepitusable.com
Nice Predictive Text Entry Method by Blackberry
I started my UX career as a Smartphone Researcher. I remember when we took the plunge to remove the hardware keypad and go full touch. Users complained that they wanted and needed a hard keypad to enter text. They saw T9 as vital to quick text entry – it could be done one handed and even blindly by many users. I admit myself to being able to text without even looking at my phone, it was great for multi-tasking, like shopping whilst texting 😉
But users can adapt to change very quickly despite their initial reservations and look at everyone now using full touch devices to enter text. How far we’ve come! But, there is still the problem of longer text entry times, needing to use two hands and being more prone to errors. So I’m rather impressed by Blackberry’s approach to improving the touchscreen text entry user experience to be faster and more intuitive. Check it out and see what you think…
UX Career Guide (Infographic)
20 FREE eBooks you need to design an outstanding user experience / ux
I’ve put together a must-have list of 20 FREE eBooks that anyone who’s interested in improving their design, user experience, creativity and time management should read. Put together, the whole list is perfect for people looking to improve their user experience design, but individually the books can be applied to many disciplines. Have a look, i’m positive you’ll find at least 2 you just HAVE to download right now! Press the button below which will take you to the list of books. You can then choose which to download.
The magic of mince pies
I stayed up last night to make a batch of my famous luxury mince pies to deliver to our Keepitusable clients today. They really are gorgeous mince pies that take me hours to make! I believe that personal little touches like this are what makes a business (or freelancer) stand out from the rest.
Clients are just people at the end of the day and who doesn’t like to feel that someone has made a special effort for them. We’ve already given our clients Keepitusable christmas cards and big boxes of chocolates earlier this month, so the mince pies are a totally unexpected little extra touch to show that we appreciate their business and care about making them happy.
This is one of the many reasons people enjoy working with us and I thought I’d just take a moment to encourage you to think of your own clients and what you could do to make them love you a little bit more.
11 Free User Experience Books
Thanks to The UX Bookmark for this great list of free online user experience books!
1. Search User Interfaces– by Marti A. Hearst
2. Web Style Guide– by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton
3. Designing Interfaces– by Jenifer Tidwell (Most of the book is available online, not all of it, as pointed out by Amanda)
4. Designing Mobile Interfaces– by Steven Hoober and Eric Berkman
5. The Psychology of Menu Selection: Designing Cognitive Control at the Human/Computer Interface- by Kent L. Norman
6. Mental Models in Human-Computer Interaction: Research Issues About What the User of Software Knows– by John M. Carroll and Judith Reitman Olson (editors)
7. Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design– by Shawn Henry
8. Building accessible websites– by Joe Clark
9. Introduction to Metadata – by Tony Gill, Anne J. Gilliland, Maureen Whalen, and Mary S. Woodley
10. Introduction to Controlled Vocabularies: Terminology for Art, Architecture, and Other Cultural Works– by Patricia Harpring
11. Categories for the Description of Works of Art– by Murtha Baca and Patricia Harpring
50% off the new Steve Krugg book!
Hey everyone!
I am really excited to have just seen on Amazon that Steve Krugg has a new book coming out on December 28th called ‘Rocket Surgery Made Easy‘. Don’t worry, it’s not actually about rocket surgery, rather it continues his usual theme of usability and user experience. As the title suggests, the book is all about making them easy to understand but this time with an emphasis on understanding and being able to conduct your own usability testing. If you haven’t read his book ‘Don’t Make Me Think‘, I would greatly urge you to do so as it’s certainly one of my favourite usability reads. His style is concise, informative and injected with down-to-earth humour and real life examples. The book is also filled with plenty of colourful examples to illustrate his points.
The RRP is £28.99, however on Amazon at the moment, their pre-order price is half that at £14.49. Amazing! Can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.
Lisa Duddington 