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

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?

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?

Marketing Mag reports on what could be quite a surprising finding for anyone in the online advertising game:

A study to be published in Marketing Science has found that the combination of matching online ad content to a web page’s content and ensuring that the ad is highly visible (including video or pop-up graphics) may not be the best way of achieving results.

It’s the Boolean AND in this statement that is the interesting bit.

“Usually more is better. If targeting works and visible ads work you’d think visible, targeted ads would work even better – but they don’t. Our results show that privacy matters in something of a subtle way in online advertising. Sometimes privacy violations are fine, sometimes they’re not”, said [one of the researchers]

Almost one month ago – inspired by the Jaan Orvet and Andreas Carlsson’s ‘Quick and (not so) Dirty iPad User Testing’ – we made the promise to create an iPad 3D paper prototype.

The day after, I personally started working on it. I quickly assembled one using random recycling materials that were available in my office. The result is ‘acceptable’. It is not a professional and polish prototype but something really easy to create.

Furthermore it’s cheap (It doesn’t cost you a dollar because you can use what is available around your desk) and quick (less than 10 minutes).

Step 1: Material

I’ve used A4 pages of:

• one printed copy of iPad scanned image;
• one thin cardboard I steal from an old printed report;
• one plastic cover (transparent) from the same report;
• one piece of cardboard I found in the paper recycle bin;
• plus: scissors and common glue.

Step 2: Cut & Paste

That’s very easy and quick.

• Cut the iPad shape from the printed A4;
• Place it on top of all the others A4s (cardboard and plastic sheets) and cut them a little bit bigger than the actual iPad shape;
• Now refine the cut on them singularly, with particular attention to the rounded edges;
• Stick the print (1.) on the thin cardboard (2.) and then the thin cardboard on the thick cardboard (3.);
  
• Now, put some glue on the dark black border of the iPad print and stick the transparent shape (4.) on top of it. This will add more shine to your model (particularly useful to test light reflection issues);
  

Step 3: The Show

That’s it, the iPad 3D paper prototype (5.) is now ready to go public

If you are not proud of your prototype (as I’m not) you can always opt for another – more expensive – solution: buy one. I did it. A friend of mine went to the US and bought me an iPad. A real one. The day after I placed it on my desk and I received lots of compliments about the quality of my prototype :)

Anyway, the model I’ve created – even if pretty simple – has been the starting point for many interesting discussion and reflections around the device physical usability.

If you are still interested in creating a high-fidelity model, this guy’s tutorials are there for you. It’s a ‘step by step’ collection of 10 videos full of tips and detailed suggestions.

Check out freewifiintoronto YouTube Channel and Have fun!

I had the pleasure of participating in the inaugural AIMIA Customer Experience Forum today along with James Breeze (Objective Digital), Stuart Edwards (Profero), Yuri Narciss (Google) and Klaus Kaasgard (Telstra).

As a new group it’s not looking to compete in the same space as the UPA or CHISIG as it’s aimed less at practitioners and more squarely at the broader online business community.

My presentation was on ‘Innovation through Design Research’ which I’ve embeded below.

A few months ago I was invited to present at the UPA (Usability Professionals Association) Sydney’s 2nd anniversary party alongside the excellent Cameron Adams who talked about the design of Google Wave.

Having presented a few case studies ,over the course of the year, I decided to take a different approach to this talk and explore a more blue sky topic. In this case – the progression away from the Direct Manipulation paradigm towards Indirect Manager via Intelligent User Interfaces and the Semantic Web.

I’ve only now got around to posting it here, better late than never!

I was fortunate enough, this year, to be able to present a session at UX Australia.  The aim of the talk was to describe a methodology we applied at NDM to modelling user activities, behaviours and philosophies through the use of a mental model.  This mental model (and other associated artefacts including personas, workflows etc) was generated through the use of cultural probes.  You can find out more about what we did in the presentation below.

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?”