August, 2011

Links for August 31st

LukeW | UX Week: Creating Engagement on Twitter

"In their presentation about Creating Engagement on Twitter presentation at UX Week 2011 Mark Trammell & Jesse James Garrett walked through the concepts underlying the redesign of Twitter's sign up process."

tags:

adaptive-path

user-experience

twitter

Responsive Data Tables | CSS-Tricks

Data tables are still a hard thing to style, but it's important to do it well. Naturally, they're even harder to style if you try to do things in a responsive way. But this is a good start..

tags:

html

css

responsive-design

Why an Apple Fanboy Would Want to Work for Microsoft: Improving the perceived importance of usability within organizations | UX Magazine

"The central thesis of Bill Fulton’s talk was that the perceived value of usability is what needs our attention. Instead of spreading usability department thin trying to fix whatever we can, Fulton recommends focusing our efforts on specific departments, projects, or sub-projects are the most receptive to usability recommendations and thus will produce high-impact results. Teams that actually value usability engineering will develop products that are shining examples that make usability look like key asset that can accomplish great things."

tags:

business

design

user-experience

usability

Links for August 29th

21 top tools for responsive web design | Feature | .net magazine

"To get started with building a responsive site, having a strong toolkit can make a world of difference. Here Denise Jacobs rounds up 21 great tools to aid the process of making your sites responsive."

tags:

javascript

design

css

responsive-design

Subtraction.com: My iPad Magazine Stand

"My opinion about iPad-based magazines is that they run counter to how people use tablets today and, unless something changes, will remain at odds with the way people will use tablets as the medium matures. They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all."

tags:

reading

ipad

design

Subtraction.com: iPad Magazines Go to ’11

"It’s bordering on obstinate to think that something you care so much about can be salvaged by doing more or less the same thing that has failed magazines so consistently until now: continuing to ignore the fundamentals of digital user experience design and how they diverge from analog print design."

tags:

reading

user-experience

design

ipad

Subtraction.com: The Other Kind of iPad Magazines

"There’s a deep reservoir of opportunity here; some of it would be easy to pull off but a lot of it would be difficult to make happen, because it would entail turning these apps from magazines into truly social products that just happen to look like beautifully designed magazines. That’s not an easy task, but someone is sure to do it, and whoever that is — whether it’s Flipboard or TweetMag or someone else entirely — they’ll stand the best chance, in my opinion, of creating a truly new, truly engrossing reading experience."

tags:

ipad

user-experience

reading

design

Button Sluts and Web Actions

I think it's fantastic that folks are starting a conversation to get beyond social media buttons into what people are actually doing. It's important, as the alternative truly is another NASCAR effect on the web, as if we didn't have enough ads.

tags:

design

social-media

Underscores vs. dashes in URLs – YouTube

Matt Cutts definitively explains what happens with underscores and dashes in URLs, from an SEO perspective. In essence, dashes are treated as separators, while underscores are treated as joiners. Starting from scratch? Use dashes.

tags:

video

google

seo

Links for August 28th

Experimental Theology: The Slavery of Death: Part 7, "In this world we are like Jesus."

"In this post I want to go deeper into how the Orthodox view the Fall and salvation. To do this I'll be sharing extensive quotes from Orthodox theologian John Romanides' book Ancestral Sin. Romanides' work will pull together most of the threads of the earlier posts. What you'll find new in this post are first glimpses of the Orthodox view of salvation and the Christian life. "

tags:

orthodox

richard-beck

soteriology

theology

Parable of the talents « Stalin's Moustache

"Is [the parable of the talents] not praise for being an astute manager of money, investing it so that it produces more rather than simply sitting on it and doing nothing?

Not at all."

tags:

jesus

new-testament

bible

theology

economics

Design of baby changing surfaces

August 27th, 2011

As I expected, I've been learning a lot about baby products the past several months, and how they are designed.

Links for August 27th

Information Architects – WIRED on iPad: Just like a Paper Tiger…

"First, the paper magazine was crammed into the little iPad frame. In form of a PNG slide show. To compensate for the lack of interactive logic, this pretty package was provided with a fruity navigation. In the end it was spiced with in-app links, plucked with a couple of movies and salted with audio files ('interactive'). Then it was off to marketing."

tags:

ipad

usability

design

Information Architects – Designing for iPad: Reality Check

Some older, initial impressions of design for the iPad. I'm working to create a collection of these, and am tracking down the ones I didn't save when I first read them.

tags:

typography

usability

ipad

design

Links for August 25th

symbolic actions for confronting the powers: the Prophets

This examines ways that symbolic actions in the vein of the Old Testament prophets could be done today, to confront the violence of captivity and poverty. This is a necessary conversation, as it is hard to think of actions that would be meaningful in our context. I don't think all of these would, but that's not the point – it's a start.

tags:

activism

The Kid Should See This.

"There's just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them… But we don't underestimate kids around here."

tags:

education

parenting

Introduction to Design Studio Methodology | UX Magazine

"The early stages of product innovation can crucially influence the success and direction of any product. Yet these stages tend to be fuzzy, highly politicized, and under-documented. This article is a high-level overview of how teams can use Design Studio to explore opportunities and innovate products to better serve customers needs."

tags:

product-design

user-experience

design

Links for August 24th

A List Apart: Articles: Making up Stories: Perception, Language, and the Web

"Online narrative is about understanding perception. You provide a framework; your readers fill the gaps. If they can create coherence, they’ll convert.

 Our role as storytellers online is the same as it’s always been—to provide the building blocks of the story: the what, when, where, and why of coherence, and the spark that ignites our readers’ imagination."

tags:

writing

story

a-list-apart

“Social Objects are the future of marketing.” | gapingvoid

"The hard currency of the Internet is 'Social Objects'. i.e. Social Objects for people to SHARE MEANINGFULLY with other people. You’re either creating them or you’re not. And if you’re not, you will fail, end of story."

tags:

business

social-media

The Optimism of Uncertainty

"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. "

tags:

activism

Links for August 20th

Kester Brewin » “Now I am become death…” | The Jolly Roger

Kester Brewin continues his theological musings on pirates. "The skull and crossed bones does not mean ‘we are bringing you death’; rather it announces ‘we are the dead.’ We, the shat-on, the abused, the flogged, the ones you treated as less than human, have escaped your power, have slipped away from the identity you foisted onto us. We, the ones who you took for dead, are returning as the dead – and thus totally free of all fear, totally free of all human labels or classifications or ranks."

tags:

theology

pirates

Links for August 18th

Golden Grid System

A grid system for use with responsive layouts.

tags:

css

responsive-design

design

Links for August 15th

A List Apart: Articles: Web Governance: Becoming an Agent of Change

"Becoming a change agent means getting used to doing things that we find scary: challenging assumptions, asking questions about business goals and risks, and facilitating discussions about change. We need to articulate the problem so that our stakeholders will understand it and find it difficult to ignore."

tags:

business

design

content-strategy

a-list-apart

Your customer won’t take a bullet for you | gapingvoid

"The key to understanding (and ultimately benefitting from) true 'customer loyalty' is to recognize and respect that customers–as people– are deeply loyal to themselves and those they love, but not to products and brands. They are loyal to their own values and the (relatively few) people and causes they truly believe in. What looks and feels like loyalty to a product, brand, company, etc. is driven by what that product, service, brand says about who we are and what we value."

tags:

social-media

business

user-experience