Product usability and aesthetics are coexistent, but they are not identical. To understand how usability and aesthetics influence reactions to a product, we conducted an experimental lab study with 80 participants. We created four versions of an online clothing shop varying in beauty (high vs. low) and usability (high vs. low). Participants had to find a number of items in one of those shops and buy them. To understand how the factors of beauty and usability influence final users happiness, we measured how they much they liked the shop before and after interaction.

The results showed that the beauty of the interface did not affect how users perceived the usability of the shops: Participants (or Users) were capable of distinguishing if a product was usable or not, no matter how nice it looked. However, the experiment showed that the usability of the shops influenced how users rated the products' beauty. Participants using shops with bad usability rated the shops as less beautiful after using the shops. We showed that poor usability lead to frustration, which put the users in a bad mood and made them rate the product as less beautiful than before interacting with the shop

a must read

"Navflow helps you improve your conversion rates by analysing how people navigate around your websites and applications."

New from Users Know: User Research You Should Be Doing (but probably aren't) #leanstartup #research #prodmgmt

Outstanding list "eight diagrams essential to the understanding of user experience design."

"The Facebook team is 15 product designers, 10 UI engineers, 5 user researchers, 4 communication designers, and one content strategists. How does a team of 35 design for 400 million users? Dive right in and try a lot of things."

tips for

slides from liz danzico

Responsive design emerging as the importance of flexibility increases as screens fragment

really, really good stuff here.

"A couple years ago I signed up for accounts at 87 of the top online retailer sites. I figured it was high time we revisited this topic, since most ecommerce sites use account registration and every sign up process I’ve seen has at least one area it can improve on."

"Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned."

"For 10 years, Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar has been studying choice. For her research paper, “When Choice is Demotivating”, they ran a great test: They set up a free tasting booth in a grocery store, with six different jams. 40% of the customers stopped to taste. 30% of those bought some. A week later, they set up the same booth in the same store, but this time with twenty-four different jams. 60% of the customers stopped to taste. But only 3% bought some!"

'record a screencast of your users' behavior, providing some very interesting feedback on how they are interacting with your site, from simple mouse tracking to complex interactions with AJAX elements."

Usability book: "When we’re creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we’ve organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click. What they actually do most of the time (if we’re lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don’t even look at. We’re thinking “great literature” (or at least “product brochure”), while the user’s reality is much closer to “billboard going by at 60 miles an hour.”

some tips

covers design patterns at yahoo

"The two most important factors that influences how much we remember liking an experience are (1) it’s largest extreme and (2) how it ends. It’s called the peak-end algorithm. It’s why if a concert gets off to a rocky twenty-minute start but ends strong you’ll leave happy, whereas if it starts strong but has a bad final ten minutes you’ll leave disappointed."

"Create software mockups in minutes, Collaborate with your team, Focus on creating your product" Ben likes this, have to look at this sometime

"provides developers with a JavaScript library for doing any number of A/B tests on a site (tweaking CSS, JavaScript, or HTML elements) all trained over time using a Genetic algorithm backend. This means that no matter how many different A/B tests you have on a page the genetic algorithm will adapt to the input (users visiting the page and hopefully achieving some pre-defined goal) and slowly show a more-optimal page layout to the user."

"a reference for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products."

widget that aims to make using an OpenID easier in the logon phase (must be openid enabled already, duh). from JanRain

Proprietary software vendors typically make money by producing software that people want to use. This is a strong incentive to make it more usable.

This six-part, three-hour, BBC TV series aired in 1997. I presented and co-wrote the series; it was directed by James Muncie, with music by Brian Eno. The series was based on my 1994 book, HOW BUILDINGS LEARN: What Happens After They’re Built. (NB: and I

surprisingly doesn't have an rss feed...

Optimize Web pages for 1024x768, but use a liquid layout that stretches well for any resolution, from 800x600 to 1280x1024.

hear, hear! why you should really think about your URL scheme. All praise Last.FM and Flickr!

Every user is time poor. They have no interest or time for attending training sessions. Training is the first and biggest hurdle to adoption of your new system and process. While complexity exists and training is required, users can always reject or work

Somehow, products, services, and systems need to respond to stimuli created by human beings. Those responses need to be meaningful, clearly communicated, and, in many ways, provoke a persuasive and semi-predictable response. They need to behave.

The experience stack is a way of thinking about the different levels at which experience design operates. Experience design can be thought of as… * branding; * service design; * product design; * interaction design; * human factors.

Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.

Good overview/intro to better usability

30 important usability issues, terms, rules and principles which are usually forgotten, ignored or misunderstood

Software, on the other hand, is virtual, boundless. Anything is possible. When anything is possible someone inevitably tries to make something do everything.

"The authors suggest that a user's ability to detect a product's actual ease-of-use is quite limited, and familiarity is ultimately in control of cognitive lock-in."

Keep it simple: present text in a way that is easy to scan on the Web create a simple navigational structure replace useless graphics with useful ones or with white space

Summary of useful eyetracking research

we observed that the upper left corner of a page seems to be the preferred starting point for most online news users. However, the location of key elements -- such as headlines and the flag -- also seem to be powerful forces in determining reader attentio

These basics of creative communication are consistent across art forms: painting, music, dance, acting, poetry, design, and all other artistic endeavors. I divide them into two categories: vocabulary and grammar.

Most websites are crammed with small text that is a pain to read. Why?

Comparing label placement on forms. On top not bold is best by far.

, but it might be to your boss: your prospects are not rational and organized and linear. You can't count on them sitting still and hearing your story from beginning to end. They won't.

Research on how users read on the Web and how authors should write their Web pages.

Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

Welcome to the world of the Error 404 page.

People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page

TargetAlert is an extension for the Firefox web browser that provides visual cues for the destinations of hyperlinks.

But Dvorak designed his layout in the 1930's without the aid of computers. It contains a couple annoying features that lead to common errors in my typing -- namely the placement of Y and B). Could a modern evolutionary algorithm and a huge input sample di