I'm Chris

Great usability post over on Six Revisions, this is pretty much a textbook blog post as far as examples and links to other resources that support the specific topics.

Some may say this doesn’t have much to do with design. I beg to differ. Design is about achieving goals, not decorating elements for the sake of making them pretty.Web design is about influencing the behavior of your visitors, structuring every element on the website around an overall goal, typically selling a product or having visitors sign-up for something. You use design as a tool to achieve and maximize the ultimate strategic goal of your site: to turn visitors into customers.

Really enjoyed this post, people don’t go to websites to look at them anymore, they go there to use them. Even if the goal is to look at stuff, how that activity is facilitated through the site’s structural design as well as the experience of the activity was designed, is what creates conversions.

The car analogy was especially resonant, the concept of looking at design as the process of optimizing goal achievement vs. making something pretty or eye-catching is an important one to learn to get results on today’s web. 

Nice read with some great links to other articles/work on the subject

For one thing, employees, who are facing an increasingly hybridized work/life proposition, are eager to do what they are passionate about, and they will increasingly find the digital spaces and tools that allow them to do this most effectively without having to ask anyone for permission.

Wow, this is a heavy read that really made me think about the impact current technology is having on the enterprise workforce. 

I found myself agreeing with most of this, things are changing so fast now and we can’t waste too much time trying to control it all. 

I work for a 20 person company, my wife’s is well over 1,000, and despite such a wide headcount gap we both have noticed an almost unconditional sense of entitlement by our co-workers when it comes to working on stuff they want to work on vs. what they need to work on (and incidentally been directed to work on by their manager).

This is a long read that’s definitely worth it, and the author gets bonus points for using that badass Simpsons image. 

“Designing a website to be usable is like baking a cake to be edible. It’s simply not enough. A usable website should be the minimum requirement, it should go without saying that a website should be absolutely usable. It’s time to look beyond that.”    

Spent a fair amount of what could have been billable time working through how to merge our content, design and usability for our site’s re-design. We want to incorporate a grid for the inner pages so our content can grow and scale over time, and from a usability standpoint it’s intuitive structure will handle user-based issues and goals. 

That leaves design, and after researching several grid-based layouts we like (many of which were premium tumblr themes), we’re confident the direction we want to go will get us where we need to be. 

This article points out a noticeable shift in how the design process is evolving as we learn more about the medium we create in, good stuff to keep in mind.

* found the link to this post on Six Revisions’ twitter feed

How will content live and flow in a dynamic system that changes over time? More importantly, how will users engage with this content and derive value from it?

Great read on UXmag, we’re in the early phases of re-designing our website and this time around we’re trying to confine the gap between the content (both curated and aggregated) and visual design. Honestly, it’s been a tough exercise but one I think that will pay off in the long run. 

More importantly, I think that this approach helps foster a more sustainable project if the growth and change rates for both design and content run parallel vs. diverging off as trends and styles change over time.

I really enjoyed reading this post by Whitney Hess on communicating with clients when they suggest questionable design/usability ideas.

It’s interesting to think of framing the process of pushing back on a client around the concept of assertion rather than confrontation, great read for anyone that works closely with clients (or an internal design committee at their own organization). 

Great post by Six Revisions on intentionally making certain UI features difficult to find and use. And any usability blog post that has an area dedicated to the User Experience offered by the toilet paper in public restrooms is worth a read in my book.

Great UX Booth post, really insightful look at designing creatively with the user in mind.