USiT http://www.usit.com.au User Standards and Innovative Technology @ News Digital Media Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:55:39 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Speed Up Facebook Design http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/28/speed-up-facebook-design/ http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/28/speed-up-facebook-design/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:55:39 +0000 Melissa http://www.usit.com.au/?p=1027 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.

Facebook PSD Kit

]]> http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/28/speed-up-facebook-design/feed/ 0 How good is you gut? http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/27/how-good-is-you-gut/ http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/27/how-good-is-you-gut/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:53:34 +0000 Angus Fraser http://www.usit.com.au/?p=1009 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

]]> http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/27/how-good-is-you-gut/feed/ 1 The weekly quick list http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/26/the-weekly-quick-list-3/ http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/26/the-weekly-quick-list-3/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:35:31 +0000 USiT team http://www.usit.com.au/?p=993 No waffle, just links.

]]> http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/26/the-weekly-quick-list-3/feed/ 0 Do you like to Facebook? http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/22/do-you-like-to-facebook/ http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/22/do-you-like-to-facebook/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:27:35 +0000 Angus Fraser http://www.usit.com.au/?p=996 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?

]]> http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/22/do-you-like-to-facebook/feed/ 2 The availability bias and personas http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/21/personas-and-the-availability-bias/ http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/21/personas-and-the-availability-bias/#comments Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:10:16 +0000 Angus Fraser http://www.usit.com.au/?p=986 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.”

]]> http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/21/personas-and-the-availability-bias/feed/ 0 The weekly quicklist http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/14/the-weekly-quicklist/ http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/14/the-weekly-quicklist/#comments Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:26:07 +0000 USiT team http://www.usit.com.au/?p=979 No waffle, just links.

]]> http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/14/the-weekly-quicklist/feed/ 0 Jay Parkinson – The Future Well http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/12/jay-parkinson-the-future-well/ http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/12/jay-parkinson-the-future-well/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:32:35 +0000 Lexi http://www.usit.com.au/?p=976 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.

]]> http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/12/jay-parkinson-the-future-well/feed/ 0 The weekly quick list http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/08/the-weekly-quick-list-2/ http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/08/the-weekly-quick-list-2/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:08:40 +0000 USiT team http://www.usit.com.au/?p=964 No waffle, just links.

]]> http://www.usit.com.au/2010/07/08/the-weekly-quick-list-2/feed/ 0 The weekly quick list http://www.usit.com.au/2010/06/30/the-weekly-quick-list/ http://www.usit.com.au/2010/06/30/the-weekly-quick-list/#comments Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:53:46 +0000 USiT team http://www.usit.com.au/?p=941 No waffle, just links.

]]> http://www.usit.com.au/2010/06/30/the-weekly-quick-list/feed/ 0 Getting gold from old mobile phones http://www.usit.com.au/2010/06/30/getting-gold-from-old-mobile-phones/ http://www.usit.com.au/2010/06/30/getting-gold-from-old-mobile-phones/#comments Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:05:20 +0000 Patrick Kennedy http://www.usit.com.au/?p=953 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?

Recycling scrap vs digging holes

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