iPhone camera mount for usability testing.

A book that might be useful someday.

Fantastic article from Lukas Mathis on removing features. One hundred percent true.

Looks like a good list to me.

Mozilla's tentative plans to bring easier access to your history and bookmarks in future versions of Firefox.

Big ups to Google for boldly eliminating everything but the essentials on their new homepage. Take note, clients.

«Hoekman makes a number of great points on how to improve usability test, and how usability tests can have other advantages. However, his final conclusion ignores exactly why some of the teams in the comparative usability tests performed so poorly. They performed poorly not because usability testing can’t «identify problems and point a team in the right direction», but because the teams that performed poorly made horrible mistakes in their tests.»

«There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries … and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.»

"All of our new research findings support a single conclusion: designing for mobile is hard. Technical accessibility is very far from providing an acceptable user experience. It's not enough that your site will display on a phone. Even touch phones that offer "full-featured" browsers don't offer PC-level usability in terms of users' ability to actually get things done on a website."

"Ever clicked on a link and had a new window (or tab) unexpectedly open? Me too. It’s a minor frustration that I think adds up over time. And sure — there are plugins and settings which can help manage this process. But the out-of-the box experience seems to be missing something to indicate whether a link will open a new window/tab, rather than simply take you to a new page. A simple solution might be a custom mouseOver cursor indicating links that will result in new tabs/windows."

"The fastest way to improve your interface is to improve your copy-writing."

A potential solution to the headache that is URL-shortening services.

"All you need to remember is this: perceived speed is the only test of speed."

"As we've long known, what people say they want is one thing. How they actually behave when they're on websites is another."

"Accessibility is not a checklist."

"Big, two-dimensional drop-down panels group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain the user's choices."

"When you lower the barrier to entry, people start using simple products for complicated things - and then you end up with crap." Making beautiful, usable, well-designed websites is hard.

Thoughts on mousing, menus, and usability.

"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."

With the OneNote experimental interface, the topic of ZUIs seems relevant.

"So as attention starts to dry up, website owners need to start looking at plugging the holes in their system or risk losing out on business. After all it’s been known for a long time in marketing circles that it’s much cheaper to keep existing customers than it is to find new ones."