There’s no doubt that user experience will take much more active role this year. Here is a brief summary of three most important issues UX leaders must focus on doing in 2010, if they want to stay in the game.

I too am a strong advocate of the adage ‘good designers redesign, great designers realign’. With belts being tightened and organisations looking to maximise their return on investment (ROI), its more relevant than ever before.

Usability, User Experience and User Interface Documents, eBooks and PDFs

Emily Pilloton is the founder and executive director of Project H Design. She was recently awarded a $15,000 Adobe Foundation grant to support work on her new book Design Revolution: 100 Projects That Empower People.

Have you ever sat around a large table with a group of people working on a giant jig saw puzzle? Some people are really good at it. They understand the puzzle. Others are content to find border pieces. It takes patience. It brings the group together while they put it all together.

…In aggregate, the people in an organization begin to behave similarly and think similarly. They aspire to the same things, like wanting products to work.

UX people especially aren’t a system administrator where all our job consists of is keeping things running; we’re right in the middle of the business process. We should care.

User Experience is all a user’s touch points with your organisation. UX is both an art and a science.

Drop-down lists are great – when used correctly.

Through @uxbooks, my twitter feed for all things UX book related, I regularly get asked to recommend books to people and more often than not, it’s to suggest entry-level publications.

This post isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of interaction design principles, its merely an introduction to the subject. And I’m definitely not going to attempt to enter the lions den of defining what ‘interaction design’ is, that’s for another day!

Over the last couple of days I’ve been blogging about how external and internal links are placed on guardian.co.uk, following on from Patrick Smith’s debate provoking blog post “Link to the past: why do some news sites STILL not link out in 2010?”.

Over the past couple of months a handful of our clients have been interested in learning more about our creative process and how user experience affects the culture of our organization. So along the way I have compiled a deck of slides and thoughts on what user experience means to Clarity.

Lately, I’ve been preaching about how it’s important for UX designers to understand the technology our designs will be implemented in. I’m going to try to put this gospel into practice by unpacking for you the hidden treasures that HTML5 offers UX designers.

When our company chose to adopt an Agile development process for new products, our User Experience Team took the opportunity to adjust, and consequently improve, our user-centered design (UCD) practices.

If there is one thing constant about the technology industry, it’s the fact that there is always a battle taking place. Whether it’s to dominate a platform or agree on standards, we are always evolving, and often debating over which direction is best. It’s imperative, however, that our focus on user experience not get lost in the crossfire.

As the sudden explosion in UXBookClub’s popularity showed last year, I’m obviously not the only UX professional who likes to read the odd book now and then. I often find it hard to devote time to reading books relating to work and far too easy to make excuses; too tired, too busy, too close to the TV remote, too far from the bookshelf and so on.

Back in November I was approached by Craig Grannell who asked if I’d like to contribute towards the cover article for .net magazine’s December issue. I jumped at the chance and was really pleased to have been given the chance to comment along-side the likes of Leisa Reichelt, Dan Saffer, Andy Budd and Luke Wroblewski.

The following short presentation was put together for our fortnightly ux meetups at Redweb. It covers 11 principles of Interaction Design. It’s not intended as an exhaustive list, simply an introduction to the subject.

In the Firefox 4 nightly builds, and in Firefox 4 Beta 1, we are changing the default tab position so that tabs are on top. This is a preference that users can change by right clicking on any of their toolbars.

In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.

One could argue that “No Manual” needed is the pinnacle of product design but if you’re going to make a “manual” you could do far worse than this. So much nicer to help people experience your product in order to learn rather than just telling them how it works. Just lovely.

Happiness is a topic I’ve been interested in for a while. According to Darrin McMahon, author of Happiness: A History, happiness is a relatively new construct in the history of humanness.

You don’t have to be a UX practitioner to understand that simplicity is a good thing; no one goes around the office saying, “Alright team, let’s make this application really, really complex!”

Many people find it hard to picture a website as more than a bundle of content. This often makes explaining the mixture of languages used and the way everything comes together a difficult task.

You could be selling the best products in the world, at unbelievably low prices, but if shoppers can’t find them or get confused along the way, you’re never going to reach your full potential in terms of sales.

Patternry will be something more than just a collection of design patterns or a design gallery.