A short, weekly summary of links to design stuff I read last week.
- How Many Test Users in a Usability Study? (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
The answer is 5, except when it’s not. Most arguments for using more test participants are wrong, but some tests should be bigger and some smaller. - Design Process In The Responsive Age
You cannot plan for and design a responsive, content-focused, mobile-first website the same way you’ve been creating websites for years—you just can’t. If your goal is to produce something that is not fixed-width and serves smaller devices just the styles they require, why would you use a dated process that contradicts those goals? - MUD: Minimum Usable Design
No matter what stage of a design I am in, I am always halfway there. This is why you might find yourself always saying that you need two more weeks to finish up all the details. It will always be two more weeks no matter what, because all you did was get halfway from where you were to where you are trying to go. Using this mentality can wear you down, but if you twist it around a bit, it can be used as motivation to achieve a successful design. - 10 pro tips for updating your web designs
Interaction designers are being faced with multiple new challenges in keeping their designs fresh. Matthew Smith of Squared Eye offers his advice in how to meet them. - There is no such thing as ‘designing’ in the browser | Opinion | .net magazine
Design is not about techie tools, it’s about human imagination, argues Robert Rawlins. - Personality:The fourth essential of a customer-centric business
We use web browsers every day and don’t really think about them until something goes wrong. Google Chrome crashed on me the other day and I got the iconic “Aw, Snap!” page with the unhappy folder icon. Instead of being cross at the error, it made me smile, and I was more forgiving of the browser for crashing. This is an example of how personality can engage customers’ emotions and help them build a stronger relationship with your brand. - How to Keep Designers from Defaulting
At the end of a workshop I taught in Silicon Valley in April 2011, where I had emphasized the difference between evaluative and generative research, a participant asked, “So I’m still not sure how I would research why people decide to buy an iPhone or an Android or a Win7 phone.”
