I am finishing up a 6 month project with one of my favorite clients. I look forward to sharing some of the Interaction Design experiences from this project when it launches in October 2010. In the mean time, I finally got the time to update my portfolio with projects from 2009 (PDF 6MB). New details on my role as Interaction Design Lead on projects for People.com, InStyle.com and MarthaStewart.com.
I’m loving Jakob Nielsen’s New Book, “Eyetracking Web Usability,” coauthored with Kara Pernice and published just a few weeks ago. It is precisely the great insight I have come to expect from Nielsen over the years.
I have not been in the usability lab for months, and my husband no longer qualifies as the “average user” because I’ve made him my guinea pig too many times. “Eye Tracking Web Usability” really satisfies my need to observe user behavior.
Nielsen and Pernice eloquently describe user behavior with four-hundred-thirty-two pages of eyetracking evidence. Maybe I’m just a sucker for heat maps, but I say – Read it!
In 2008, Entertainment Weekly magazine began efforts spiff up EW.com. Despite this website’s dated look and ad hoc information architecture, readers loyally consume and comment on the snarky writings of EW’s writers. Google likes EW, too – consistently ranking EW among the first natural results for terms like, “American Idol,” and “Twilight.” The challenge was to fix the problems and keep the Google juice. Read the rest of this entry »
As a User Interface Designer, I always crave seeing my designs being used by real people. Ideally, every project I work on would have a user testing sessions before, during and after design. But not all clients have a budget for this kind of research. That’s why I’m keen on some good, ‘ole fashioned usability research from Kansas. Read the rest of this entry »
My new favorite book is The Design of Sites, Second Edition. It covers just about every topic in User Experience Design. And, of course, it is a totally user-friendly book.
My excitement about ELMER 2: Simplified Form Design (PDF – 1 MB) may be due to my Scandinavian roots. But it is probably more likely attributable to the fact that I am a total geek when it comes to documentation. The Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry has written remarkable guidelines on designing simplified web forms. If I’d had something like this when I started out, it would have been my secret weapon.
This document is a very tight example of design documentation. *begin nerd voice* The guidelines are in a tabular format with cross references and clear examples. It also has a glossary of terms used in the document like “inline error” and “standardized text.”
*/end nerd voice*
And don’t forget, as the document footer says… “In case of discrepency, the Norwegian version prevails.” Yahr!
