What I’ve been reading lately (week 21)

Published May 28, 2012
I’m trying to share a few design related articles I’ve read on a weekly basis or so, and here are 10 of them from last week.
  1. The History Of Usability: From Simplicity To Complexity
    “The story of usability is a perverse journey from simplicity to complexity. That’s right, from simplicity to complexity—not the other way around.”
  2. Content Maintenance: Keeping up appearances
    “Unlike its functionality and design, the content of a website can be changed quickly and easily. Anyone with a CMS login and an idea has the keys to the castle. When web content is developed and maintained effectively, it’s a huge asset to the user experience, but poor content maintenance is the quickest way to wreck the whole thing.”
  3. Great UX Starts with Respect
    “In order to combat that I wanted to discuss a method gleaned from the wide world of sports that can help you to evangelize UX and your ideas both within your organization as well as with your clients.”
  4. Repurposing vs. Optimized Design (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
    “It’s cheap but degrading to reuse content and design across diverging media forms like print vs. online or desktop vs. mobile. Superior UX requires tight platform integration.”
  5. Signs UX Research Is Making an Impact
    “The number one reason organizations do user research is because they want to learn about what their customers want and make the changes necessary to satisfy their customers’ needs.” For a UX professional, one of the hardest things to measure is how much stakeholders and clients have bought into UX research. There is no clear, quantifiable answer to this question. Nevertheless, there are several signs that indicate stakeholder engagement, uptake, and buy-in.”
  6. There Is No Such Thing as UX Strategy
    “Just because there is a UX Strategy group on LinkedIn…, that doesn’t make UX strategy real in the same way that other disciplines and roles—for example, information architecture—are real.”
  7. Design pattern: A hood to look under
    “Technology is getting better at doing things on behalf of its users. “Don’t worry about that,” it says, “Tell me what you want, and I’ll do the rest.”"
  8. Stop Redesigning And Start Tuning Your Site Instead
    “In my nearly two decades as an information architect, I’ve seen my clients flush away millions upon millions of dollars on worthless, pointless, “fix it once and for all” website redesigns.”
  9. Taking Mobile Global:Tips for Aligning Mobile and Global Web Strategies
    “With more than 55 million iPads in use around the world and more than 400 million smartphones sold in 2011, companies are increasingly thinking “mobile first” when developing their web and mobile app strategies.”
  10. Designing in the browser
    “Designer and developer Edward O’Riordan explains why you should design in the browser and why clients should be shown HTML and CSS mockups.”