Surgeworks has teamed up with Smashing to release this very useful set of Facebook stensils in PSD format.

The download is free under a creative commons licence.

Every week Anne Holland posts the results of a A/B test of a user interface and poses a question, for example this week: “Do Happy, Smiling People Convince More PPC-Driven Traffic to Stick Around & Shop for Awhile?”.

The best bit for me is the chance to guess the results before viewing them. Despite years of experience designing user interfaces I guess wrong more than I’d like and from the survey results so do the majority of viewers. Test your design intuition by viewing all the past tests

No waffle, just links.

• GEL (Global Experience Language
  by BBC (suggested by Sophie)
• Museum 2.0: Teenagers and Social Participation
  by Nina Simon (suggested by Pat)

I’m trying to reconcile two recent articles Facebook: As Unpopular as Airlines, Cable Companies & the IRS and Facebook Hits New Traffic Record. So Facebook has 500 milion members, 140 milion visitors a month spending 8 billion minutes a day but at the same time reports so poorly on an American Consumer Satisfaction Index?

The report blames “privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commercialization and advertising” for the negative opinion. But while users may have a negative feelings about or emotional response to the service provider (and service?) they keep on using it. Perhaps because Facebook is a lobster trap and their friends are the bait.?

Is it possible to provide a good user experience for a service that people don’t like the idea of?

At the Cooper Journal Jenea Hayes has written a post titled “Combating availability bias“. It’s about the availbility heuristic, which she defines as “the tendency to judge how important or common something is based on how easy it is for us to think of an example”. Her post is the best justification of personas I’ve seen for a while.

As she says:

“A well-crafted, research-based persona is an archetype that smooths out the idiosyncrasies of real individual people while retaining the patterns of needs and behaviors in the target market. At the same time, a persona retains enough human detail to feel like a real person. With practice and dedication, the persona becomes the first example that comes to mind. You still suffer from availability bias, but the bias is in favor of reality.”

No waffle, just links.

• iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds
  by Jakob Nielsen (suggested by Pat)
• How to get your story heard at work
  by Shawn Callahan (suggested by Pat)
• Social Media Monitoring for Market Research – 6 Warnings
  by Randy Hamilton (suggested by Pat)
• Losing To The Social Web: Visualized
  by Aden Hepburn (suggested by Melissa)
• The Real Life Social Network
  by Paul Adams (suggested by Melissa)

Jay Parkinson is a Doctor who is looking to revolutionise the service design process for healthcare in the US (and is now tackling the NHS in the UK too). An interesting talk, with some scary stats in there…

2010/05 Jay Parkinson from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

No waffle, just links.

• [MSNBC.com] A tour of our new and improved pages
  by Ashley Wells (suggested by Angus)
• The Super Technical Guide to GoToMeeting for Remote Usability on a Mac
  by Bolt|Peters (suggested by Manuel)
• Research Lifestreaming
  by Harris Interactive (suggested by Pat)

No waffle, just links.

• Does Your Corporate Reputation Have New Owners?
  by Craig Pearce (suggested by Pat)
• Profiling Australian shoppers in 2050
  by Josette Dunn (suggested by Pat)
• 50 Sketching Resources for User Experience Designers
  by Catriona Cornett (suggested by Manuel)

Ross Dawson has created this interesting infographic: used mobile phones yield 1000 times more gold than gold ore. Really illustrates the point doesn’t it?