UX links of the week (4/10/08)

Interaction Design

Designing Office 2007
Jensen Harris, the guy responsible for user experience in the Microsoft Office group, delivers a near-comprehensive talk on how the Office 2007 UI was conceived. A must-see for everyone!

Sign Up Forms Must Die
You load a new web service, eager to dive in and start engaging, and what’s the first thing that greets you? A sign-up form. We can do better, says Luke Wroblewski, author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. Via a technique of "gradual engagement," we can get people using and caring about our web services instead of frustrating them (or sending them to a competitor's site) by forcing them to fill out a sign-up form first.

 

Content Strategy

Placing Value on User Assistance
User assistance writers are often the Rodney Dangerfields of the UX world, bemoaning the fact that we don’t get any respect. I think the real problem is that user assistance folks are not particularly good at communicating the ways in which we add value to an enterprise. This column explores two models that show how user assistance adds value and how we can communicate that value to those who pay our salaries—something I would like to encourage other user assistance writers to do.

 

User Experience Research

Extreme User Research
Clients don’t know a thing about their users, and designers think that if they like it, everyone will. Sound familiar? Daniel Lafreniere's 30-minute "extreme user research" plan comes to the rescue for those of us facing this exact situation. With this practical method, you can generate loads of useful data that will have a real impact on design, thus making the website more effective and profitable.

Usability testing: integrating eye-tracking and mouse clicks
Our usability test lab has a software environment allowing for capture, recording, analysis and full interpretation of observable events during a usability test. Moreover, since we are very interested in user behavior, verbal comments, facial expressions and eye movements, as well as keeping a record of keystrokes and mouse movement, we also use other software.

What Adaptive Path Thinks When It Thinks About Eyetracking
Recently, we had a discussion on an internal mailing list about eyetracking, specifically around why we didn’t use it as a research tool…

 

A little off topic…

I'm Over Twitter
I'm so over Twitter. I haven't wanted to admit it to myself, but a couple of things really tipped the scales for me. The first was a Newsweek article from 1995, which famously called the Internet a passing fad.  The fear of being the guy (or gal) is a big part of what drives the technology hype-machine.  Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt. I feel like it's time to be brave enough to say what I really think.

Design for the Next Billion Customers
Niti Bhan and David Tait, who are specialized on research and strategy for emerging markets, recently collaborated with Experientia on an extensive ethnographic research project in Africa.   Niti and Dave condensed their broader insights in what it means to design for emerging markets in a long article for Core77.