World Usability Day: UXcamp Vienna 2011

Hi,

on the 10th of November is the World Usability Day. The Interactiondesign Stammtisch in Vienna is organizing a Barcamp two days later on the 12th of November 2011.

I think most of you know that for a Barcamp it's important that everybody is participating. Of course the participation is free of charge.

Where and When?
Samstag, 12. November 2011 von 9 Uhr bis 18 Uhr
A1 Telekom Austria, Lassallestraße 9 (nähe Praterstern), 1020 Wien

More information:
http://www.barcamp.at/UXcamp_2011

A few of the sessions will be held in english - see more info about that in the "geplante Sessions" section.

Would be happy to see you there.

Br, Claudia

Book Review "Forms that Work"

The book "Forms that Work - Designing Web Forms for Usability" by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney is a must read for all usability experts dealing with business applications and online forms. I would also recommend it for developers interested in these topics.

Like the books by Steve Krug ("Don't make me think" and "Rocket surgery made easy") this book is filled with a lot of great examples and the focus of the content is on the relevant topics.The chapters are dealing with Persuading people to answer or making questions easy to answer to choosing the forms controls and making a form look easy.



A lot of examples with good explanations



More information about this topic and the book can be found on the Forms that Work website.

Have a nice day,
Claudia

Links - "Best of"

Hi,

today I want to share with you three interesting links from the last weeks....

10 Surefire Ways to Screw Up Your iPhone-App 
UX Magazine, 10th of December 2010
An interesting and fun to read article about how to screw up an iPhone-App - from Information Overload to Not Doing Usability Tests.

When is design done?
The Cooper Journal, 3rd of December 2010

Is the design done when it reaches "perfection", when the requirements are met or when time and money runs out...










Need Better Data? Pay more attention to your webforms
UX matters, 6th of December 2010
"Web forms are like the poor relations when it comes to their getting the attention they deserve from the usability community."
This article is a must read for all who are dealing with webforms in their daily business.

Br, Claudia

Difference between male and female designers

Today the Webdesigner depot (WDD) provided a interesting post and infographic about the differences of web-design by gender.

Have a look and find out some interesting numbers about the tendency to use large numbers of typeface colors or the use of straight or rounded lines. (Of couse the numbers are no rules, there are only a rough insight.)

Br, Claudia

Improving design of web pages

Hi,

today I just want to post a short article about improving the design of your web page. Therefore I want to link you to the post of Matt Cronin who collected some ideas about improving factors.

In his article "8 Layout Solutions To Improve Your Designs" he presents 8 different kinds of new web controls to improve designs. Almost all of them are based on new web technologies like AJAX.

The reason why I got aware of this post is the fact, that I am currently having a problem with a menu that takes away a lot of space. Therefore I thought about using a different control to improve the layout and save some space on the page. After doing some paperprototyping I found a good way to layout the menu using the Accordion control.

The following pic shows my paperprototype of this Accordion control.


In his post, Matt Cronin describes Accordin controls as the following:

Accordion menus are based on the same concept as sliders and tabs: it takes a large amount of information and encapsulates it in a smaller area.

So this control is exactly what I need. And he also provides some good examples and links to existing controls and sample sites which reduces the effort of searching for good controls.

So if you need some inspiration to improve your design, check out the 8 layout solutions. Maybe you'll find some nice controls.

Kind regards,
Harald