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.

Time was when hits and page views were the king of web metrics. But now we have a new metric to focus our energy on: engagement. How engaged are our users, we ask? How often do they visit? Are they really involved in our design, or did they give up on it?

With more development moving to an Agile process, User Experience and Design (UXD) professionals are faced with the task of adapting their activities, deliverables, and even their own role to an Agile development process.

Adobe and WIRED magazine introduce a new digital magazine concept that provides an immersive, interactive content experience for readers and innovative possibilities for advertisers.

The goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to live in a world where information is everywhere.

I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience. Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad, and how to approach the design of iPad applications.

Modeling the Mobile User Experience by Bryan Rieger goes into explaining the parallels between animation (stop motion, 3D, claymation, etc) in the film and video industry and interaction design in the mobile industry.