Usability Stories

Stories about usability.

6 Tips for Better Branding with Avatars

“We’re living in a social media world, and, like it or not, our avatar is often the first impression others get about us as we interact virtually on social networks, blogs, microblogs and other online communities. Our avatars are a representation of our brands — our personal brand or our company’s or organization’s brand. But how many of us are thinking strategically about our avatars?” From... 
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Xobni Organizes Your Outlook Email

As a web designer and coder, I collect tons of emails and attachments from clients that have to be carefully tracked and easily found. And many projects have three, four, or more people attached. Often I have to dig out their contact information to make calls. Awhile back, I found Xobni, a software tool with an odd name that should be in every version of any email software. Now they have a Plus version,... 
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UI Pattern Documentation Review

“To date, the most common approach to propagating a single user experience standard is the development of UI guidelines and principles documentation within an organization. Development teams — usually incorporating a user experience specialist — then reference this documentation during implementation and upgrade processes. However, as the numbers of systems grow within an organization, so... 
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Google Voice Launches, Perfect for Small Businesses

Google stepped up its attack on the telecommunications industry on Thursday with a free service called Google Voice that, if successful, could chip away at the revenue of companies big and small, like eBay, which owns Skype, telephone companies and a string of technology start-up firms. Google Voice is an expanded version of a service previously known as GrandCentral, a start-up that Google acquired... 
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10 Steps to the Perfect Portfolio Website

“A personal portfolio website is all about promoting you. You are a brand, and your name is a brand name. No one is going to know about your brand unless you get it out there; and if you’re a Web designer, developer, writer, gamer or any other type of creative, then it’s essential that you have a good portfolio website.” From Smashing Magazine. A basic but thorough list of what should... 
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20 Tips for Better Conference Speaking and Presentations

“I’ll be straight up with you: I don’t profess to be an expert speaker. I’ve had my share of presentations that have been total flops, along with some very successful ones. But if anything, I’ve done quite a bit of speaking over the past four years (see the summary on my LinkedIn public profile), and therefore I’ve learned a few things about speaking along the way. Below are 20 things... 
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Usable Accessibility: Making Web Sites Work Well for People with Disabilities

“Such problems often come from trying to make a Web site accessible without understanding how people with disabilities actually use the Web. The challenge for UX designers is to find ways of including real people with disabilities throughout the design process, starting with initial user research and going all the way through final usability testing. This gets back to the issue of familiarity.... 
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An Overview of Prototyping and Interactive Design

“In the broadest sense, all kinds of design artifacts are prototypes. Pencil sketches, blocks of wood, storyboards, wireframes, foam-core models, pixel-perfect state renderings, clickable demos, and functioning production code are all strategies for representing a thing being designed. However, in the world of interaction design, we usually reserve the term for ways... 
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Anatomy of an Iteration

” Unfortunately, we’ve found that many teams don’t know how to iterate effectively. Good iteration is a deliberate activity, with four important stages: planning, implementing, measuring, and learning. The best teams focus on each stage appropriately, making sure they get the most out of it. While iterations can be very short, (we’ve seen teams that can iterate a dozen times... 
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The Relationship between Creativity and Play

“At the 2008 Serious Play conference, Tim Brown, CEO of the superstar design thinking firm Ideo made a fascinating presentation about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play, which can now be found on YouTube. He begins his talk by covering familiar ground, such as our tendency as adults to want to categorize things immediately (which limits the possibilities that were able... 
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