Online Advertising: Factors That Influence Customer Experience
“In this article, I’ll discuss the cognitive elements at the intersection of advertising and human behavior. By taking an approach to advertising that looks at the impact psychological factors have on customer behavior, I’ve learned that customers respond directly to online advertisements, as we can see from their emotions, behavior, and interactions on the Web.”

How to take great notes during user testing sessions
Suze ingram explains her technique

Fluid’s Persona template and analysis of other’s persona templates
“This persona format was created to organize information in the Fluid Personas. The format chosen was based on the competitive analysis of many persona examples”

Writing headlines wrong
“Are there a collection of common mistakes that bloggers and content marketers make with their headlines — mistakes that we can help you overcome?”

The Content Conundrum
“The content that sits inside of our design framework is often the final arbiter of success, yet we sometimes diminish its importance and separate ourselves from it. The more we separate our design activities from content development, the greater the risk of design failure.”

Video Notes from the Field
“So you’re thinking about becoming a designer? If I could tell you only one thing about going into the field, my advice would be ___________ .”

How to create personas your design team will believe in
“Does your organisation use personas to describe users’ characteristics, goals, needs and behaviours? Although they are a popular tool for communicating knowledge about users, many personas are little more than anecdote, hearsay and rumour. These kind of fake personas rapidly fall into disuse. Make sure your own personas get used by validating them against this 7-item checklist”

Anatomy of a feature
“But of course it’s not as simple as just writing a quick script. It’s tempting to think that adding a feature like this is just about adding the functionality — but there’s a bunch more to it than that.”

What the f**k is social media (1 year on)
Marta has since updated her slideshow, which is now called ‘What The F**k Is Social Media: One Year Later’. It is packed full of facts and figures, as well as recommendations, just like the original. Some of the numbers are pretty staggering.

Journalism’s Challenge: Pageview economics
This weekend, the Washington Post’s Ian Shapira detailed in a piece entitled “The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)” how the triumph he felt when Gawker blogged about a story he wrote turned into anger after his boss asked him why he wasn’t angry that his story had been stolen.

Microsoft to European Commission: we’ll let consumers pick a browser
To appease the European Commission in its pending antitrust case over the tying of Internet Explorer and Windows, Microsoft initially planned to release a version of Windows 7 in Europe that would be browser-free. That would ensure that consumers had the ability to choose a browser freely. But a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft reversed course and proposed an alternative solution: a “ballot screen” that would enable consumers in the EU to select their browser of choice.

The WSJ Takes Aim at LinkedIn with WSJ Connect
As newspapers struggle to turn a profit in the digital economy, the Wall Street Journal has had one small advantage in the battle for monetization: people don’t mind subscribing for their content. But The Journal isn’t expecting that to be a silver bullet long term strategy.

How car websites can improve comparison tools
This report looks at car comparison tools, which are supposed to help users to decide which car and model is most suitable for them. Providing a usable comparison tool makes it easier for customers to research their purchase and produce a shortlist of suitable cars.

Last week Josua Porter posted a thought provoking post The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for. It suggested looking at existing designs for the cause of unwanted user behaviour. This made sense to me, but the debate in the comments and some follow up tweets from Joshua reminded me that designers have a tendency to get caught up in the interface/interaction design & neglect the “design” & utility of delivered content or service.

This relisation caused me to take note of some recent posts on the issue of content design & track down some older helpful items.

• Christopher Detzi writes an excellent post on The Content Conundrum, “The content that sits inside of our design framework is often the final arbiter of success, yet we sometimes diminish its importance and separate ourselves from it. The more we separate our design activities from content development, the greater the risk of design failure.” He puts forwars some great ideas for dealing with the problem chief amongs themfor me “(Really) Collaborate with your content partners”
• Karen McGrane has a presentation on SlideShare called Content Strategy: Content is King! “Why do users visit a website? Most likely it’s for the content. Then why is content strategy the most neglected aspect of user experience design?”
• Erin Kissane writes about Content Templates “A content template is a simple document that serves two purposes: it’s a paragraph-level companion to your website’s wireframes (or other IA blueprints), and it’s a simple, effective means of getting useful information from your experts to your writers.”