Well, it looks like I need to take a closer look at my color palette here on willhavebeen. It turns out I am using some pretty similar colors… I see CSS optimization in my future.
Drag the Colour Bookmark link to your toolbar to find out the colour palette of the website you’re currently on. Then simply: copy, paste and use the colours you choose.
Check your palette using the PANDR Colour Tool. (You can also just enter your URL)
While not a recent article, I really enjoyed Emotional Design with A.C.T. over at BoxesAndArrows. We spend a lot of time trying to “delight” the user; however, get into a discussion about making an emotional connection with the user and your business counter-parts will likely look at you as if you are on crack.
Pleasurable products are attractive and make us feel good. Attractive people can have the same effect. Usable products are easy to interact with and easy to understand. Good conversationalists are the same. Useful products fulfill our needs in a way that leaves us emotionally satisfied in the long term. Long-term relationships can fulfill our physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual needs. -Trevor van Gorp
Bridging behavior with motivation and behavior makes total sense. While a good designer likely does this organically, it is a good read seeing it all broken down.
Being the champion of Qualitative Research is an age old tradition for a User Experience designer… heck, it is a right of passage. Still, the idea that we don’t dig into Quantitative research is pure poppycock. That said, if you are a little metrics-shy, it might be worth heading over to UX Magazine and checking out their article, “Ten Guidelines for Quantitative Measurement of UX” They do a pretty good job of adding the context around a metric. For instance, driving users to a specific page may drive up page-views, but if your end game is a lead-gen click, you’d be better served to find the most efficient way to get the user engaging with your call-to-action. Metric-nerds will, of course, point out that there are monetization opportunities along the way, and we shouldn’t discount them, but you get my point.
Most UX designers use qualitative research—typically in the form of usability tests—to guide their decision-making. However, using quantitative data to measure user experience can be a very different proposition. Over the last two years our UX team at Vanguard has developed some tools and techniques to help us use quantitative data effectively. We’ve had some successes, we’ve had some failures, we’ve laughed, we’ve cried, and we’ve developed ten key guidelines that you might find useful. – Richard Dalton of Vanguard
I live in metrics everyday — it is part of the DNA of how I design and how I guide my team. Even so, it is a pretty good read. Much of it is common sense, but there should be a nugget or two for UX designers at any level.
Me, Make, Meet: How to manage a UX manager’s calendar is a pretty interesting take on getting one’s calendar under control. In ways, it seems to bucket things similarly to how I’ve begun bucketing priorities, tasks, and to-dos — “Fully Engaged,” “Informed,” and “Aware.” (I’ll be posting something on this later.
Every work day, I attempt to maintain 3 time zones: “me time” (get refueled so that you can perform to your potential), “make time” (continuous, uninterrupted time to design), and “meet time” (project team meetings, 1:1s, etc.). –Graham Jenkin
My current issue is that it is unlikely I could shoe-horn meetings into these clean focus-bands. My chaos tends to be spread throughout the day and is largely not driven by me. Perhaps step one is meeting request diligence… we’ll see how that goes.
I’ve done a good bit of research on portfolios, their layout, their content, and the story they tell. I probably visited 200 different portfolio site. Some were for designers, some were for developers, some were for artists, and still others were for, well, they were so poorly designed that I couldn’t tell you what they were trying to say. Interestingly, a big theme that surfaced was that most portfolios tend to suck. They have little information, the collateral is weak, and they seem thrown together.
That said, I’ve decided to take a different approach. I am going to showcase a few things, but dive a little deeper into the work. I want to get at the “why”, “how”, and even “what went wrong” of my designs. I want to offer a little more nutritional value. So, my work will surface a little at a time, but it should give a fairly clear picture of who I am and how I think. We’ll see how it all works out, but I have high hopes.
Funnelbrain is a pretty amazing flashcard site dedicated to learning, connecting and collaborating.
visit funnelbrain.com »
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