Usability week ending July 3rd

Friday, 1st July, 4:36 PM
#Android "freeloaders" don't believe in paying for content; #Apple customers an "ideal paying demographic": http://j.mp/jrZvWs

Thursday, 30th June, 11:41 AM
Demystifying #Android screen densities, learning fundamentals of Android #design patterns, taking #screenshots: http://j.mp/kHMjcl

Wednesday, 29th June, 1:05 PM
How sausage is made -- a detailed IA, UX, and UI design case study, on designing GitHub for Mac: http://j.mp/iT6key

Tuesday, 28th June, 6:32 PM
The new #Google experience is founded on 3 key #design principles: focus, elasticity and effortlessness: http://j.mp/mE7PYk #ux

Tuesday, 28th June, 6:02 PM
Why we share what interests us -- rethinking real-life sharing for the web at http://plus.google.com -- video: http://j.mp/m7toYf #ux

Tuesday, 28th June, 3:15 PM
#Google Swiffy converts #Flash #SWF files to #HTML5. Repurpose Flash content for devices like iPhone w/o Flash player: http://j.mp/m11zgs

Monday, 27th June, 10:23 PM
Invent your *own* category… "consumers are not interested in form factors that deviate from the benchmark set by Apple": http://j.mp/kbZNjZ

via twitter.com/terretta

Usability week ending June 19th

Saturday, 18th June, 6:44 PM
Why does #Google keep giving me buttons that don’t do anything for me, the user? Serving engineering vs. user experience: http://j.mp/misq8X

Saturday, 18th June, 6:31 PM
Social content discovery is broken, but Instapaper could fix it and save itself from Apple in the process: http://j.mp/jiXpSq #socialweb

Saturday, 18th June, 1:31 PM
The world needs more weird people who know how things work and who love to figure it all out: http://j.mp/iQJjoH

Wednesday, 15th June, 9:44 PM
Look out for big differences between what a study’s aggregate "heatmap" suggests, and what the data really shows: http://j.mp/jALZ0V #ia

Wednesday, 15th June, 6:48 AM
Content discovery on the internet is broken, presuming interest in the same articles “liked” by my “friends”: http://j.mp/jiXpSq

Tuesday, 14th June, 6:52 PM
#Startups should have less features than competitors. If you have more features, you’re probably doing it wrong: http://j.mp/iM1YMx

Monday, 13th June, 7:34 PM
Amazon living by new digital rules, where you satisfy your customer’s need regardless of whose platform they are on: http://j.mp/j6sE34 #ux

via twitter.com/terretta

Usability week ending June 12th

Saturday, 11th June, 10:56 AM
How to find iPad or iPhone device ID (UDID) when stuck on iOS 5 beta update: http://j.mp/lOAF21 #ipad #iphone #guid #udid #beta #ios #tip

Friday, 10th June, 11:17 PM
Why the new task UI in Taskrabbit has great behavioral design: http://j.mp/kH8LO7 #ux #ui #ia

Thursday, 9th June, 6:46 PM
Try "persuasive design" to change attitudes or behaviors of users through #persuasion and social influence: http://j.mp/kV1641 #design #ux

Thursday, 9th June, 5:58 PM
Google adds indexing support for rel="author" HTML tag property, to track and rank content creators: http://j.mp/kMHpuF #google #seo #ia

Wednesday, 8th June, 8:17 PM
You can’t convince a smoker to quit smoking. They need to just decide they’ll do it. It's the same for UX: http://j.mp/lmKhbU #ux

Wednesday, 8th June, 6:55 AM
UI testing suggests ways for #iPad app-makers to make their #apps more intuitive and ergonomic for users: http://j.mp/jPZVoX #ui #ux

Tuesday, 7th June, 5:59 PM
Forget #social... Build a tool which people find useful immediately: http://j.mp/lgZDIc #ux #startup #mvp

Tuesday, 7th June, 8:37 AM
On 1 Aug 2011, #Google will discontinue support for Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3: http://j.mp/l5cY8D #ux #browser

Tuesday, 7th June, 12:05 AM
#Apple has taken a better approach to #cloud #sync by focusing on its fundamental benefit to users--simplicity: http://j.mp/mfeRcW #ux

via twitter.com/terretta

Usability week ending May 15th

Friday, 13th May, 8:09 PM
#Google Music Beta wants to let users access music anywhere, anytime. Sadly, it’s just not that easy: http://j.mp/jZS35N #ux #usability

Thursday, 12th May, 7:44 AM
Jakob Nielsen -- "Mobile screens are so small that it's a sin to waste space": http://j.mp/iTmVJ8 #ui #ux #design

Wednesday, 11th May, 9:32 PM
Great products and services depend on their users having great experiences. #Social #design aims to explain the why: http://j.mp/ielzoy #ux

Monday, 9th May, 10:58 PM
So how does an engineer get from poetic floating seaweed to a building that can withstand a magnitude-9.0 earthquake?: http://j.mp/j1xHrO

via twitter.com/terretta

Usability week ending November 21st

Thursday, 18th November, 5:21 PM
20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web: http://j.mp/aWwEE7 #html5 #google #tutorial

Thursday, 18th November, 11:00 AM
@sugarsock kudos on launch

Wednesday, 17th November, 6:26 PM
The hardest part of software isn’t the process of creating it, it’s changing culture and influencing organizations: http://j.mp/aQyesF

Monday, 15th November, 11:26 AM
#Usability finally showing up in web design tips lists: http://j.mp/aQ9dCF #webdesign

via twitter.com/terretta

Usability week ending November 14th

Thursday, 11th November, 8:12 AM
Samsung Tab a grab bag of neglect, good intentions, and poor execution, merging worst of a tablet and worst of a phone: http://j.mp/9JY6y6

Thursday, 11th November, 7:47 AM
Make sure you use the right #breadcrumbs ( e.g., » > › / • – ) to have hierarchy shown in #Google SERPs: http://j.mp/btRAdk #ia

Wednesday, 10th November, 8:47 AM
“The Main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.” -- a great principle for UX and IA too: http://j.mp/bAwEj6

Wednesday, 10th November, 7:49 AM
Usage is like oxygen for ideas: http://j.mp/90GWaC

Tuesday, 9th November, 10:02 AM
A game design perspective can contribute #usability and functionality even in a non gaming context: http://j.mp/cJB4b0

Monday, 8th November, 12:46 PM
It is the UX and IA architect's business to know things. Train yourself to see detail others overlook: http://j.mp/bl1bco

via twitter.com/terretta

Usability week ending June 13th

Friday, 11th June, 9:57 AM
Publishers, your webpages are hostile to reading. Love your readers and #design for #readability, or die: http://j.mp/a73PgG #ux

Thursday, 10th June, 5:06 PM
#Google takes own advice: "Good #UX isn’t just about good #design. Be open, engaged, surprising, polite" and fast to fix: http://j.mp/djFDN5

Thursday, 10th June, 4:01 PM
The social style guide and why "remove Google background" became a top search term http://post.ly/j61p

Thursday, 10th June, 1:51 PM
“The intention of sketching is to separate design from the process of making.” : http://j.mp/cPj56E #design #ia #ux #wireframe

Thursday, 10th June, 1:49 PM
RT @MSEurope: We've lost a background image, if found please return to bing.com ;)

Wednesday, 9th June, 5:25 PM
In a corporate environment, consensus can be a designer's best friend--if you know when and how to seek it out: http://j.mp/9s2Xhh #design

Tuesday, 8th June, 9:57 AM
Readings on the state of usability art: http://j.mp/terretta

Monday, 7th June, 8:54 AM
User attention is a limited resource and we should heavily optimize to minimize our impact upon it: http://j.mp/94qZTQ #ux #ui #ipad

via twitter.com/terretta

The social style guide and how "remove Google background" became a top search term

Alarm bells went bing! on every computer in America today as users pulled up Google then double-checked the web address they typed. After adding an image personalization feature last week, today Google forced all users to have a background image on their search page.

Unsurprisingly, the experiment got yanked early.

How did Marrisa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, get it so wrong? She forgot to check Google's core principles.

A user at Hacker News complained, "It's strange being an unwitting, unwilling guinea pig for something I use every day" and got the snarky reply, "You're entitled to a full refund." Cute, but the user has "paid" Google with his time, attention, and loyalty, which together enable Google's business model.

There's an implied social contract in the phrase "do no evil", and this background image stunt to "showcase" a new personalization feature broke the top three of Google's core values:

As we keep looking towards the future, these core principles guide our actions.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Since the beginning, we've focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we're designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don't have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

This background image did not serve you. It did not leave the interface clear and simple. The page did not load instantly.

2. It's best to do one thing really, really well.

We do search. With one of the world's largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we've been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we've learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

Google's search page is supposed to be so focused on search, its design is often shown as a march towards minimalism. Famously, a recent design iteration made most navigation elements invisible until the mouse moved, focusing attention on the single search box.

Today's forced "feature" staggered in the opposite direction, making the "one thing" page difficult to read and requiring a user to add a Google Account and sign in if the user wanted to get rid of the visual distraction from search.

3. Fast is better than slow.

We know your time is valuable, so when you're seeking an answer on the web you want it right away – and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we've broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it's a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

There's no question that a desktop sized .jpg image is orders of magnitude slower than no image at all.

Now, after web-wide outcry, the original blog entry at Google has been updated:

We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it—in the form of a link on our homepage. Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today’s series early.

Sure. It was really just a bug.

Google's ten things have helped make the web better, and users appreciate Google for that. It's no coincidence most of Google's so-called missteps in the past year have been violations of one or more of these ten principles.

Users don't like to feel used, so social usability matters even more than typography or information architecture.

Web application user experience managers should keep their implied—or in Google's case, written—social contracts in mind to guide design decisions: a social style guide.

 

Usability week ending May 23rd

Saturday, 22nd May, 8:56 AM
Most clients are good clients, and some #clients are great clients. But some jobs are just never going to work out well: http://j.mp/a62JlZ

Thursday, 20th May, 9:28 AM
#Google Font Directory--free #fonts to be web embedded and used directly--not ready for Firefox, Chrome on Windows: http://j.mp/bEUgrx

Wednesday, 19th May, 11:20 AM
Fixing bad writing costs American corporations as much as $3.1 billion annually: http://j.mp/bFQLKS #grammar #language #usability

Tuesday, 18th May, 6:49 PM
The beauty of #typography--writing systems and #calligraphy of the world can inform #design of international projects: http://j.mp/agDbZv

Monday, 17th May, 9:12 AM
The model for sustaining customer loyalty is reverse engineering user awesomeness: http://j.mp/c68CjM #ux

via twitter.com/terretta

Usability week ending March 7th

Thursday, 4th March, 3:45 PM
The Minimum Feature Set's purpose is getting the first version and vision of your product to early-vangelists fast: http://j.mp/d8gRcX

Wednesday, 3rd March, 9:20 PM
Above-the-fold thinking neglects what happens at the end of an #html page. You need footers that don't stink: http://j.mp/aqfQgb #ia #ux #ui

Tuesday, 2nd March, 10:23 AM
How Lady Gaga builds brand loyalty--Give fans a name, make them bigger, share symbols, treat as rock stars, socialize: http://j.mp/90AEzl

Monday, 1st March, 12:39 PM
Sometimes all that stuff your product does NOT do is exactly why people want it: http://j.mp/bD6OlF #ux #ia #usability #Google #Buzz

Monday, 1st March, 9:19 AM
5 user experience trends for 2010--service as software, #UX analytics, content strategy, mobile web, experience economy: http://j.mp/d16QtB

via twitter.com/terretta