For those working in the design research field, check out the Digital Research Tools Wiki.  It’s a very rich resource of tools, predominantly used in academia, but which have application for practioners.  Now, if only there was the ability for users to recrod their evaluation of these tools.

The kid’s view: Giving up my iPod for a Walkman & Twitter is for old people, work experience whiz-kid tells bankers - & a cautionary note that the “The plural of anecdote is not data”

The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for
“It’s a simple statement, really. All it means is that what is happening on your web site or in your web application is a result of the current design you’ve created.” -Interesting discussion in the comments too about whether content is seperate to design & which is responsible for behavior

100 Years of Design Manifestos
30+ design related manifestos from 1909-2009

The Effect of Mobile Communication on our Culture
“When considering how you serve your industry, how you can grab the attention of prospective customers, inspire your staff, or find other ways to solve people’s problems, you need to factor in the ways mobile devices are reshaping our culture. You can’t fight these new behaviors, you can only adapt to turn them into opportunities instead of barriers.”

“Best Bets” functionality for search systems
A discussion of the pros & cons of the Best Bets design pattern

Triumph of the Default
“One of the greatest unappreciated inventions of modern life is the default.”

You Can’t Innovate Like Apple
A good summary of what’s known about how Apple innovates.

Chroma-Hash
“a sexy, non-reversible live visualization of password field input”

Qualitative Research Puts the Human Touch in Digital Out-of-Home Content

In what we hope will become a regular thing, this post lists what we found interesting in the last week or so:

Why Japan’s Cellphones Haven’t Gone Global
Because there’s too much emphasis on the hardware & hardware features, the software is too complex & custom from each manufacturer & Japanese telco’s mobile portals have been too successful meaning their devices are not used to access the open internet, in tandem with PC net access as smartphones are in the rest of the world.

Mobile Paradigms
Transcription of short presentation about different ways of seeing Mobiles & Computers

The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News
“The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story.”

Launch of Social Media Strategy Framework
“Today we launch our Social Media Strategy Framework. This provides guidance and a frame on how organizations can approach engaging with social media…The Framework begins with LEARN, follows two streams of ENGAGEMENT and STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT, and comes together in the ongoing imperative to DEVELOP CAPABILITIES.”

How to make graphs that work
Seth Godin shares four simple rules to not make your graphs put people to sleep.

What’s your five runs?
Think about your product or application. What’s your inflection point from casual to engaged users? My instinct says that it needs to be a simple number so that you can actively drive users to it; you can expend a lot of resource if you know you only need to get them to their fifth run.

If  you are interested in how Agile Development & User Experience design can work together (especially for media organisations) you should follow Leisa Reichelt as she posts about the implementation of Drupal as a Content Management System for the Economist.

She’s already posted about “Sprint One” in which she outlines her very hectic sounding weekly schedule:
- Day One: Research
- Day Two: Planning, Designing & More Research
- Day Three: Design, and setting up next week’s research

Also interesting is the ongoing investigation into whether content editing should occur via a seperate “traditional ‘Admin System’ interface” or via “entirely ‘in place’ editing”.

Just spotted a link to this website on Twitter (thanks @janepyle). Other than to progress beyond the instructions on the first screen (and the startburst interrupt poll) there is no clicking involved, only almost gestural movements of the mouse.

It’s kinda weird at first but you soon get used to it.

What do you think?

It’s a sad day for the USiT team, we’re losing our big toe. Stephen is moving on and whilst this is a great loss to the team, we wish him all the best.

I for one can say I have enjoyed working with, and learning from, Stephen and that his expertise and camaraderie will be sorely missed.