• Top ten simple design tips for online travel startups | Tnooz
  The commercial internet is not even 20 years old but the opportunities, especially in the travel sector, have never been greater. But unless the design is at your core, even the best business plan and the smartest team will fail.
• Quality Assurance as Applied to User Experience Design | inspireUX - User Experience quotes and articles to inspire and connect the UX community
  Quality Assurance (QA) is a critical part of any web or application development project.  QA helps to verify that a project has met the project’s requirements and technical specifications without bugs or other defects.  The aim is to identify issues prior to product launch.  Most QA initiatives focus on following predefined test cases, which meticulously outline required functionality by stating an input and expected response.  In order for QA to be successful, requirements must be clearly articulated and changes must be communicated effectively.
• A List Apart: Articles: Strategic Content Management
  Trying to fix an organization’s content problems by installing a content management system (CMS) is like trying to save a marriage by booking a holiday. We know that a successful web project needs a content strategy—but when it comes to the CMS, we stop thinking strategically. Despite all the talk about user-centered design, we rarely consider the user experience of the editorial team—the people who implement the content strategy. We don’t design a CMS, we install it.
• benji | ben martineau | art & design
  Below are a handful of design projects I have worked on over the recent years from both client and personal workings. Unfortunately the extent of my works cannot be displayed publicly though I believe those below are indicative of me as a designer. I strive to create simple, minimalistic, grid-based design solutions across all media with the majority being digtal.
• What Makes Them Click » Blog Archive » 100 Things You Should Know About People: #42 — We’ll spend more money if you don’t mention money - Applying Psychology to Understand How People Think, Work, and Relate
  Cassie Mogilner and Jennifer Aaker from the Stanford Graduate School of Business conducted a series of experiments to see whether references to time or references to money would affect whether people stop to buy, how much people are willing to pay, and how satisfied people are with the products they buy. They conducted 5 experiments. The first one was the lemonade stand described above:

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

• 7 Ways to Increase User Participation
  Running a site doesn't only require Web development skills. Any site where the users can add content and communicate with each other requires a great deal of care and attention if it's going to be a success.
• Presentation Zen: Presentation: A few minutes with John Cleese on creativity
  Below is an excellent 10-min video clip from a presentation by John Cleese expressing a few of his ideas on creativity. One of the main problems for many of use today is that we are always in a hurry and our minds are a bit scattered juggling many balls in the air.
• The 5 habits of highly effective field researchers
  You may not get many chances to visit and observe your customers at their place of work, so you want to make the most of the opportunity. But what’s the best way to run a site visit? Highly effective field researchers show 5 specific behaviours. They create a focus question, audio record the sessions, take photographs of the environment, take notes and write up a short summary of the observation immediately
• Three Reasons Why Persuasive Design Isn’t Enough to Influence Change :: UXmatters
  Persuasive design is designing to change people’s behavior, or actions. This design movement fascinates me, and I’m jump-up-and-down thrilled to see it get more attention lately. Forbes recently ran an article about Jon Kolko, creative frontman at Frog Design, and his perspective on persuasive design. Kolko noted:
• Faceted Navigation: SEO and Facets « Experiencing Information
  Faceted navigation, when done well, can help customers find what they are looking for quicker and in a more satisfying way. This is good for business and for the bottom line. After all, customers can’t buy what they can’t find.
• Why mobile is vital for in-destination bookings | Tnooz
  We have always known that activities tend to be the last thing that people book when they go on holidays.<br /> For the most part this is due to two important factors:<br /> <br /> For online travel agency sites that provide airport transfers and activities, these offerings are treated as an add-on at the end of the booking after flight, hotel and car. This makes it very easy to skip during the booking process.<br /> <br /> The majority of in-destination offerings are not available online. The ones that are provided are generally consolidated through multiple aggregators, such as a local destination marketing company and then the OTA.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

• interactions magazine | Solving complex problems through design
  What is it about design that makes it so well suited to solving complex problems? Why is design thinking such a promising avenue for business and government tackling seemingly intractable problems?
• Ten Things Your Employees Wish You Knew About Them | Fast Company
  If you think it's tough being a manager these days, try being an employee. Most are in the position of having to go with the flow because of the current economic conditions. But that doesn't necessarily mean they do so with a smile on their face. Here are ten things your employees wish you knew about them:
• Perception and the design of forms – Part 5: Proximity - Formulate Information Design
  This is the fifth article in our series about visual perception and the design of forms. We're focusing on 6 relevant principles of human perception, namely:<br /> <br /> Characteristics (things that are an aspect of a single object)<br /> Shape<br /> Size<br /> Colour<br /> Relationships (things that are about how multiple objects relate)<br /> Figure/ground<br /> Proximity<br /> Similarity
• Why Users Fill Out Forms Faster With Top Aligned Labels | UXMovement.com
  Imag ine a user who is really excited about your prod uct or ser vice. They’re ready to sign up, so they go to your form page and start fill ing out their infor ma tion. The way you align your labels with your form fields can affect how easy it is for users to fill out the form. Do you want to give users a quick, easy and pain less expe ri ence or do you want to give them a has sle? If you want to make their expe­ri ence quick, easy and pain less, con sider using top aligned labels for your form fields.
• Use the 80-20 Rule to Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness
  80-20 rule proponent and analytics wizard Tim Ferriss has a website optimization case study of how an 80-20-optimized website received a 20%+ higher conversion rate.
• Ocado: Delivering on User Experience | UX Booth
  Good user experience design is about ensuring that at each point of engagement with your product, company, or service, you are crafting positive interactions. It is goal-oriented and outcome-focused because at each stage you are ensuring that users can easily achieve their objectives.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

• Video: The amazing John Cleese shares his wisdom… - (37signals)
  The amazing John Cleese shares his wisdom on writing, creativity, getting in the zone, and interruptions. It’s great to see advice that we hear all the time reaffirmed from outside the tech industry.
• Free Wireframing Kits, UI Design Kits, PDFs and Resources - Smashing Magazine
  To mock-up the user interface of a website, software or any other product, you’ll need some basic UI elements. And this is where wireframing kits and UI design kits come in handy. When you want to create a low-fidelity prototype for your projects, you can use these kits to give your idea a certain shape, keeping it abstract and not losing yourself in details.
• How to Make the Most of a Small Workspace
  
• The Top 5 Qualities of Productive Creatives (And How to Identify Them!) :: Tips :: The 99 Percent
  A recent BusinessWeek article reported that, “According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM's Institute for Business Value, CEOs identify ‘creativity’ as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.” While the study’s results will come as no surprise to hard-working creative professionals, they do raise an important question: How do we identify – and hire for – the qualities that add up to creativity? 
• Evom - Convert and Download Videos to iTunes
  

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

• How Limitations Improve Design | Webdesigner Depot
  We often complain about the multitude of limitations which we’re faced with every day as designers.<br /> From browsers, to screen resolutions, to user interactions, we seem to constantly be struggling to find some way of thinking outside the tiny little box of “best practice” which we’re constrained by.<br /> Limitations are abundant but are they really such a bad thing? Is it possible, even, that they actually produce far better results than if we did not have them?
• The Art and Tradition of Typography - fontblog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
  or over 25 years Microsoft has been very focused on the development of type and type technologies. In order to fully understand the technical foundations of typography in Windows, a brief overview of some of the highlights of “typographic engineering” from the past 500 years can add some useful insight.
• Creating Passionate Users: An Interview with Josh Porter, Part 1 | Perfetti Media
  Social web sites and applications are everywhere: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, Craigslist, and Digg are just a few of the web sites taking advantage of the power of the Social Web. Web sites and applications that incorporate social features are the fastest growing properties on the web for good reason: they connect people, motivate, and engage them.  As a result, they grow very quickly and successfully.
• Improve Your E-Commerce Design With Brilliant Product Photos - Smashing Magazine
  Product photography could well be the single most important design aspect of any e-commerce website. Without the ability to touch, hold, smell, taste or otherwise handle the products they are interested in, potential customers have only images to interact with. Ultimately, the softer, tastier, flashier and more attractive your products look to shoppers, the more confident they’ll feel about purchasing from you and the better your conversion rate will be.
• How Choice Impairs Your Visitors | UX Booth
  Many sites provide an array of methods to interact with their offerings, but excesses in decision-making pressure can render less empowered visitors into a cyclone of stress from the barrage of questions being asked. As an industry, we place a great deal of emphasis on getting visitors to make decisions, but are we turning a straightforward path into a labyrinth with our need to know?
• Emotional Design with A.C.T. - Part 1 - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
  As UX professionals, we strive to design engaging experiences. These experiences help to forge relationships between the products we create and the people who use them. Whether you’re designing a website or a physical product, the formation of a relationship depends on how useful, usable and pleasurable the experience is. Ultimately, we form relationships with products and services for the same reasons we form relationships with people:

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

• Think Vitamin » Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps
  In February 2010 Fred Wilson, a New York based tech investor, spoke at the annual Future of Web Apps Miami conference. His talk, clocking in at just under 30 minutes, looks at his top 10 principles for creating a successful web app. A full transcript is available below.
• Memory Inception: Three Keys To Creating A Great User Experience For Your Product
  Ever read a great book? What do you remember about it? Maybe a few dramatic moments, some wild story twists, and most definitely the ending. Your product is just like a book. You’re telling a story to your customers and they’ll remember only a select few moments from what you tell them. What are these moments? Can you use these moments to plant a memory in a customer’s mind?
• Russia in color, a century ago - The Big Picture - Boston.com
  
• Now that the oil well is capped... - The Big Picture - Boston.com
  
• How the top ten airlines in the world use Facebook | Tnooz
  US-based Delta Airlines secured nothing if only bragging rights last week when it unveiled the world’s first airline booking engine within Facebook.<br /> Obvious questions came over its effectiveness as a marketing tool, value to the consumer, impact on its existing booking channels and integration (or not) with existing social media features on Facebook.<br /> The answers to all of these take nothing away from the fact that Delta is taking Facebook seriously and its move is likely to trigger a wave of similar applications being launched by other airlines.<br /> But what of the other leading airlines around the world?
• disambiguity » Adaptability – Essential Soft Skills for User Experience Practitioners
  As User Experience practitioners, we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the skills we don’t have or have enough of and trying to acquire them.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

• User Experience Books for Beginners | UX Booth
  Through @uxbooks, my twitter feed for all things UX book related, I regularly get asked to recommend books to people, and more often than not its to suggest entry level publications. Normally, when I’m feeling particularly lazy, my default response is to point them in the direction of the seminal book ‘Don’t make me think‘ by Steve Krug.
• Dark Patterns: Black Hat, Anti-Usability Design Patterns
  This pattern library is dedicated to Dark Patterns: user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done.
• SLICE-B Experience Evaluation « Temkin Group
  Temkin Group has created an expert review methodology that can be used to evaluate experiences within and across any channel (Web, IVR, phone, store, etc.). It consistes of 12 criteria across these areas of an interaction:
• jQuery Mobile | jQuery Mobile
  A unified user interface system across all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation. Its lightweight code is built with progressive enhancement, and has a flexible, easily themeable design. Project strategy
• Ignore UX at your peril
  

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

• Information Gathering: A Roundup of UX Applications | UX Booth
  The number of applications available for User Experience professionals is ever-expanding much of this growth happening over the last year! As a consequence, experts are increasingly turning to novel tools in order to collect data and generate reports regards their websites. While some UX designers suggest that local testing is the best way to gather data, we decided to round up these up-and-coming applications and see just what makes them tick.
• Sketching Fundamentals | UX Booth
  
• Gestalt Principles Applied in Design
  Web designers, like other artists and craftsmen, impose structure on the environment. We enforce order and beauty on the formless void that is our blank computer screen.
• Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control? | Blog | design mind
  Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since Henry Chesbrough’s seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003. However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good time to reframe “Open” from a design point of view.
• The Six Elements Of An Experience « Customer Experience Matters
  SLICE-B breaks an experience down into six distinct components:<br /> Start. The extent to which the customer is drawn into the experience.<br /> Locate. The ease in which the customer can find what she needs.<br /> Interact. The ease in which the customer can understand and control the experience.<br /> Complete. The confidence that the customer has that her goal was accomplished.<br /> End. The transition into next steps.<br /> Brand Coherence. The reinforcement of a company’s brand.
• Shortboredsurfer – 11 Principles of Interaction Design explained
  This post isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of interaction design principles, its merely an introduction to the subject. And I’m definitely not going to attempt to enter the lions den of defining what ‘interaction design’ is, that’s for another day!

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!

• Ten simple steps to make global travel websites more engaging | Tnooz
  Ever wonder what the most popular sites do to keep traffic and grow their business? While the specific formula for success is different for each site, there are some things in common that most popular sites do.
• A huge list of Style Guides and UI Guidelines » The UX Bookmark
  If you are a graphic designer or an interaction designer and have ever been tasked with creating a style guide or UI guidelines document (both are different and I’ve had the pleasure to work on both of them creating templates and the actual documents for brands and products), this list should help you out as a consolidated list of references. This list is going to be constantly updated (and will ultimately be a monster list, it’s quite modest for now) of publicly accessible style guides and UI guideline documents on the web. If you find any links not working or would like to suggest one that is not on the list, feel free to comment and let me know.
• 500 Internal Server Error
  500 Internal Server Error
• Twitter: 10 Psychological Insights — PsyBlog
  There are now 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves—double the figure from the previous year (Pew, 2009).<br /> <br /> So who tweets? Why? What are they talking about? And what is so engaging about all those little textual transmissions?
• Stop Designing Aesthetics, Start Designing Emotions | Webdesigner Depot
  Discussing emotion in design is a bit of a hot topic at the moment, it seems to be popping up in more and more blog posts and speaker sessions. In fact I saw at least three different web designers say that it was the subject of the talk which they had recently submitted for next year’s SXSWi.

Please do feel free to suggest other related (and unrelated ones)!