Particletree has an amazing post on Visualizing Fitts’ Law. Fitts’ Law is a guiding principal of HCI and understanding this concept is essential if you consider yourself an Interaction Designer or User Experience guru.
This video was making the rounds shortly after Apple announced it’s new iPhone device. It is a quick video where Jeff Han demonstrates his intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen. The computer can be manipulated using gestures made by your fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure. If you haven’t watched this video before, it is really amazing.
UXmatters recently performed an analysis of different Label Placement in Forms. Their study used eyetracking technology to attempt to determine if label placement had any impact on the time it took a user to fill out the form.
Garrett Dimon suggests that The Time is Now for Front-End Architects. In his post he discusses the skills that a front-end architect requires and some of the pitfalls to watch for when designing front-end for our web applications.
Swapnonil Mukherjee offers a good explanation as to Why you should right align form labels. He suggests by showing good examples that you eye must travel a smaller distance to navigate from form field to form field when the labels are right aligned.
One of my favourite web design blogs - Fiftyfour Eleven - has a very good article that may help you Effectively Communicate with Users of your web projects. The article specifially discusses how we can write better error messages that will help users on their journies through our sites.
Boxes and Arrows has an excellent article that discusses user journeys. Web designers often think of web site structure as being a heirarchy. This article introduces user journeys as a method for conceptualising and structuring a website’s content and functionality.
…Answering customer needs is the end point of our journeys through the structure and the starting point of our thinking about the journey itself.
Angela Colter, Kathryn Summers, Cheri Smith from the University of Baltimore’s School of Information Arts and Technologies have authored a great paper titled Exploring User Mental Models of Breadcrumbs in Web Navigation.
Breadcrumbs are a common Web site navigation element, yet little is known about whether users notice, use and understand what they are. We surveyed 4,775 sites to determine how many use breadcrumbs and what conventions exist, then conducted usability tests to explore user mental models of breadcrumbs.
Many developers and information architects find the process of creating user personas to be a valuable part of building a user experience. D. Keith Robinson has a great article titled - Persona Sketching - that explains how to build your own personas for your own projects.
Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content is a great article by Joshua Porter that will introduce you to the concepts, pros and cons of using Folksonomies to categorize content on your sites.
