• Tara Hornor gets the most out of Effective Minimalism in Experience Design (UX Booth).

• A usability study on how touchscreens are handled: Finger-Friendly Design: Ideal Mobile Touchscreen Target Sizes (Smashing Magazine).

• Helen Walters on 4 Elements That Make A Good User Experience Into Something Great (Co.Design)

• Lukas Mathis describes the things that make webOS better designed for doing work than iOS in Please Steal These webOS Features (Ignorethecode).

• Dereke van Harms made a beautiful HTML presentation on his take on The New Web Design Guidelines

  

Best links this week:

• Read how to make responsive navigation with CSS and HTML on Smashing Magazine Coding

• Trent Walton explains: “To design responsive websites effectively and responsibly, I had to completely redefine the way I view the web”. Go read redefined, it’s great.

Read the rest of this entry »

Best links this week:

• Robin Rendle shines on Smashing Magazine with A Craft Of Consequences: Reader, Writer And Emotional Design.

• Vishal Mehta lays some misconceptions about what usability is to rest in Fact vs. Fiction: What Usability is Not.

• An interesting hypothesis: The bot Google uses to crawl the web is actually Chrome. The article is very technical, but worth it.

• Vicky Teinaki cover the top mistakes UX designers make on Johnny Holland.

• Jeff Atwood says that you must Listen to Your Community, But Don’t Let Them Tell You What to Do

Best links this week:

• Zach Holman explains how Apple commands their words in The Apple Voice.

• Ever wondered why paragraphs always have a clean break when reading words written on the web? Read Islands of Thought in Macrotypography for an interesting perspective.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stuff we liked this week:

• Justin Mifsud shows five signs that indicate website usability problems, and more importantly, how to improve your site should you show one of these symptoms.

• Yiannis Konstantakopoulos tells us what successful products teach us about web design on Smashing Magazine. It’s mostly a strong case for constant iteration. It’s a very good read.

• Joshua Johnson has a look at Pinterest, and tells us why it is so dang amazing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Time again for the best articles we have read last week!

Cameron Koczon shares an eloquent view on how we live in an important time for design. Designers used to only do client-work, which makes it hard for people to see design as something else than a commodity. This is changing with the focus on design by startups. This renewed focus on design gives a lot of opportunity, but also presents a challenge: how do you let design flourish in organization that doesn’t really understand it as a craft, and how can a design team be seen as a partner, rather than a service provider?

Read the rest of this entry »

First up, Jamie Davidson has a nice post for beginning designers. His Resources to Hack Design is a basic but complete list of tutorials, inspiration, and other tips. Might be too basic for you, but can come in handy for friends who are taking their first steps in design.
Read the rest of this entry »

We certainly hope that 2012 will bring as much interesting content on UX and design as 2011 did. Like last year, we will tweet links to everything we think is interesting, and provide you with a digest of the best articles every monday.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our top picks from this week:

• Read how Google designed Gmail’s new left navigation

• Laura Klein educates us on what we euphemistically call “adopting a standard”: The Art of the UX Steal.

• We love sketches at Usabilla, a lot of our walls are covered with them. We are writing an article on how we switch between online and offline media at our office. In the meantime, here is a mighty story on The Messy Art Of UX Sketching by @pbuick.

• Des Traynor sheds his light on The Problem with Data Driven Decisions. In a lot of cases, metrics won’t help you the way talking to your customers does.

• This article on The Golden Age of Design in Startups also got a lot of attention and subsequent discussion. It seems that the designer finally gets to play a star role in the startup discourse. We are happy to see this.

Five picks from the bunch of links we tweeted about this week:

• Ui Parade – User Interface Inspiration — awesome resource

• Google Circles and Path 2.0: How good UI design cannot fix a broken solution — A design critique of two geat apps

• Writing an Interface — Tips by Destraynor from Intercom.io on writing copy for web apps

• The Anatomy of an Experience Map — Lenghty article on Experience Mapping, highly recommended

• Mental Modeling For Content Work — Using Mental Modeling as a generative research technique