This week, we were pleasantly surprised by a slidedeck called Design for developers. It has some solid and no frills advice on interface design.

Don’t know what to ask for the holidays, or want to know what to give a UX geek friend? Check out the extensive Gifts for User Experience Geeks 2011. It’s really good.

Also, check out Easier Is Better Than Better on the paradox of choice, read the article The UX of Learning on A List Apart, and see if you agree with Francisco Inchauste’s statement that UX is 90% Desirability.

A selection of the articles we tweeted about this week:

In the UX Booth article Quantifiable Design: How to Remove Subjectivity from the Process, Stuart Silverstein makes a case for seeing design as “making accurate decisions based on experience and understanding of human beings to help them accomplish a task”. He argues that design discussions shoud be steered from “I don’t like it” to “Does this match our goal”.

Penny Hagen and Natalie Rowland write about Enabling Codesign on Johnny Holland Magazine. “Participants become partners in the design process.”

Furthermore: A crash course in UX, The road to web app success: prototypes and user tests, and Fluidity Of Content And Design: Learning From Where The Wild Things Are. We hope you enjoy these articles as much as we did!

Justin (of the great Usablity Geek) wrote up an extensive guide to web form usability, which can be of great help for your forms.

The article was also published on Smashing UX Design, where it was aptly followed up by an article from the Baymard Institute which sheds light on an elegant way to redesign the country selector.

Further we tweeted links to an excellent story about what designers can learn from the sciences of human understanding, why Angry Birds is so successful and popular, and a piece on Designing Apps for Kids. All good stuff, we hope you enjoy them as much as we did.

Bret Victor is someone who intends to “invent software-based tools that enable people to understand and create in unprecedentedly powerful ways”. We are big fans and think you can learn a lot from him. Have a look at these two articles we tweeted out this week:

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Here are our top five links to external sources we tweeted this week:

• Using the four key principles of visual design for UX – A CRAP way to improve usability
• “A good user experience designer must be able to see both the forest and the trees” – What is UX?
• Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design
• Idiots, Drama Queens and Scammers: Improving Customer Service with UX
• Why insights are better than formulas – The Dangerous Art of the Right Question

Here are our top five links to external sources we tweeted this week:

• The death and rebirth of customer experience
• Design With Dissonance
• How to Pick a Great Designer
• Very nice HTML5 animated clip: Ellie Goulding – Lights
• Read a chapter from the upcoming book ‘Designing for Emotion’ on A List Apart – Personality in Design

Here are our top five links to external sources we tweeted this week:

• First class stuff – Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
• Cennydd Bowles answers a friends question – Why aren’t we converting?
• Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed – an older favorite
• Startup advice – The 10 Mistakes I’ve made…so you don’t have to
• Good finds! – Official Usability, UX & UI Guidelines From Companies

Here are our top five links to external sources we tweeted this week:

• ‘A successful design researcher understands people’s motivation, needs and attitudes’ – on empathy and design

• Good thread on Quora – ‘What’s the difference between UI Design and UX Design?’

• Very thorough and thoughtful advice – Conversation Techniques For Designers

• Designing from the typography-out

• Basic, but well written tips – Designing With Tablets in Mind

Here are our top five links to external sources we tweeted this week:

• A list of tools for creating ideas
• An alternative view on the lean startup model – The Milo Criterion – by @venkat
• About psychologically informed UX research – on @uxmag
• A great checklist of psychological usability heuristics (follow up to the article above on @uxmag)
• Very funny and very true – a product needs a Minimum Viable Personality on @fredwilson ‘s AVC

Here are our top five links to external sources we tweeted this week:

• Clear first, clever second – The language of interfaces by @destraynor on the Contrast blog

• Don’t be fooled by randomness – Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world

• Demystifying Design by @jboogie over at @alistapart

• Banishing Your Inner Critic at @alistapart

• Who Are You? And Why UX is Crucial to the Future of the Cloud at Adaptive Path