What I’ve been reading lately (week 6 and 7)

Published February 19, 2012
  1. Why Personas are Critical for Content Strategy
    “Personas help to bring richness to otherwise statistical data. Unlike traditional target audience segmentation, they provide greater depth and context to generic target audience groups by focusing on one character who embodies the predominant qualities of the larger group.”
  2. Designing Experiences for Young Kids:Child Proofing your Application
    “Kids are curious and eager to explore. They tend to touch everything they see on the screen and notice things adults sometimes miss. For example, they don’t experience banner blindness; for them, a banner is an exciting opportunity to learn what will happen if they touch the screen.”
  3. The Dark Side of Creativity
    “Creative individuals are more likely to be arrogant, good liars, distrustful, dishonest and maybe just a little crazy—OK, let’s say eccentric.”
  4. The State of HTML5 Video
    “HTML5 has entered the online video market, which is both exciting and challenging for developers in the industry. With the HTML5 specification and the various browser implementations in constant flux, we at LongTail Video spend a signficant amount of time understanding the limitations of the technology and optimizing our own products for HTML5.”
  5. Progressive And Responsive Navigation
    “Developing for the Web can be a difficult yet rewarding job. Given the number of browsers across the number of platforms, it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. But if we start coding with a little forethought and apply the principles of progressive enhancement from the beginning and apply some responsive practices at the end, we can easily accommodate for less-capable browsers and reward those with modern browsers in both desktop and mobile environments.”
  6. Mobile Sites vs. Apps: The Coming Strategy Shift
    “Mobile apps currently have better usability than mobile sites, but forthcoming changes will eventually make a mobile site the superior strategy.”
  7. Rapid prototyping for mobile products
  8. A Craft Of Consequences: Reader, Writer And Emotional Design
    “Instead of us asking the question, “How do these things look?” perhaps we should rather be asking, “How do these things feel?””
  9. Our Economy Is Mostly Services. But How Do You Design Great Service Experiences?
    “Service design–choreographing the dynamic interactions between companies and people–cannot only transform a company’s image; it can improve people’s lives. But successful service design is complex and complicated, and many companies get it wrong.”
  10. Structure First. Content Always.
    “We have to start somewhere. Something has to come first.”