A lot has happened in the field of User Experience the last couple of weeks. As we’re coming to the end of the month, I went through my tweets, posts and shares to collect the five greatest stories on UX that got my attention.

When carrying out research do we place enough importance on geography? Based on the sparsity of research recruitment agencies outside of London I’m guessing we don’t. There’s certainly an appreciation for regional variation when designing on a global scale, but do we put as much rigor into our approach when the audience is limited to just one country, and do we need to?

The human computer interface helps to define computing at any one time. As computers have become more mainstream the interfaces have become more intimate…

The cornerstone of my book collection on UX: 16 highly recommended books on User Experience by UX professionals.

Tabs, collapsed menus, accordion forms, and the ever popular hover items such as mega menu drop-downs – progressive disclosure is a great way to cut down visual clutter while still offering the user lots of content and features.

Let’s face it, we want more: More readers, more users, more signups, more app downloads, more page views,… more sales. Anticipating which problems users have when they use software may help us to get a step closer to our goals and make our users happier.

Usability is dead (or at best on life-support and not conscious), and I’m sorry to be the one that has to tell you this, but it’s been mortally wounded by UX (aka User Experience).

I have become an enormous fan of the iPhone App store after having used the phone for a couple year now. The quality of interface designs are light-years above what you can find on Windows Mobile and even most Android apps. It’s because of this reason I like to celebrate the best interfaces I can find and share with the design community. This encourages new developers to jump onto these trends and build up a small viral market.

Thinking about UX design as a two-way conversation can be the key to creating smart sites and apps that meet users expectations, because when you begin to think about all design as a conversation, you are able to apply the rules of basic conversation to your design process.

The perfect message for Call to Action buttons is about finding the right emotional triggers for your target audience. I will show you how.

The simplest definition. Design is so many things, executed in many different ways, but the function is always the same. Whether it’s blueprints, a clever UI, a brochure, or a chair – design can help solve a visual or physical problem. 1

Do you know what your website’s conversion rate is? The rate of conversion doesn’t just have to equate to the percentage of visitors that actually buy from you. It could also equate to visitors acting on a different call to action, such as filling out a form, signing up for more information, or emailing you to contact them for an appointment or consultation.

You can’t become an ‘indie’ UX designer until you have proven yourself as a ‘successful’ UX designer and have the portfolio and references to back you up.

Platform product owners must be concerned with assisting developers in accomplishing this if end users are to have a good user experience overall. Attention to these details is called developer experience (DX), and enabling app developers to be successful through better DX will create a more successful UX for the platform product.

Designing for Emotions by Aarron Walter from my point of view is one of the best written books about design process. It has great insights, well explained case studies and good sense of humor embedded in all the pages. Every piece of information in this book comes from real experiences and challenges, and immediately makes you think about ways of improving your own projects or design process.
I encourage you to purchase it, to read it because it will make you a better designer. It has already started to change some of my concepts in my design process.

He said, it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them.

This study examined the effects of line length on reading speed, comprehension, and user satisfaction of online news articles. Twenty college-age students read news articles displayed in 35, 55, 75, or 95 characters per line (cpl) from a computer monitor. Results showed that passages formatted with 95 cpl resulted in faster reading speed. No effects of line length were found for comprehension or satisfaction, however, users indicated a strong preference for either the short or long line lengths.

By using a conversion rate optimization process that tests UX and persuasion hypotheses, you can create pages that are proven to generate more revenue.

Over the years I’ve heard plenty of designers moan about their clients. I’ve also witnessed a recent outburst of complaints against authors and speakers on Twitter. However the group that rarely comes under fire in public, but probably should, are the mass of terrible agencies out there.

In a recent article Mark Cossey shares his thoughts on the importance of transitions in interface design.

Should you say who wrote the content on your site? Sometimes yes (for credibility), sometimes no (for brevity). And rarely in mobile.

HTML5 aims to be developer-friendly and backwards-compatible, with a simpler and more flexible syntax than the XHTML style you may have been writing.