Review of fresh materials, August 2010

This material continues a series of monthly reviews of fresh articles on the topic of interfaces, new tools and collections of patterns, interesting cases and historical stories. Of the tapes of several hundred thematic subscriptions, approximately 5% of the worthwhile publications are selected that are interesting to share. Previous materials: April , May-June , July .

Methods and practices

In Defense of A / B Testing
Paras Chopra has written an excellent article in defense of the A / B testing method, which has recently been criticized by designers and designers. He refutes the three main claims, which relate primarily to a looping on not the most effective changes.

Guidelines for Designing Data Tables
Connie Malamed, author of the book Visual Language for Designers, gives a series of tips for styling tables. It describes the mental process of working with the table and tells how to simplify the user to walk on it.
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Making User Interface Elements
Article Jacob Gube, in which he talks about the intentional complication of the interface in cases where data loss and other unpleasant consequences.

Making the Deal - Supporting Product Demos with User Assistance
IBM's Mike Hughes describes the process of optimizing the interface of product demos. He describes 4 characteristics in which the demonstration should be especially good - the value of the product and its visual demonstration, attention to the existing problems of the user, competitive advantages.

User Interface Stack Exchange
A new question and answer service dedicated to the practical issues of interface design. Here are collected popular questions and answers of practitioners to them.

Good Help is Hard to Find
The Lyle Mullican article describes several ways to provide reference information in web services. He divides aid into two types - integrated into the overall process and shown separately.

Guidelines for user friendly URI Design
A good reminder about creating understandable and readable URLs from Jacob Gillespie. The article tells about the general principles and gives a series of useful tips.

Instruments

Free Wireframing Kits, UI Design Kits, PDFs and Resources
One of the most extensive collections of templates and stencils for the design and design of web services and mobile applications. Although there are more and more such collections lately, this article from Smashing Magazine is one of the most detailed and well-developed.

20 Free Web UI Element Kits and Stencils
Another collection of patterns and stencils for design and design. Not so much new, but may be useful.

Patterns

Liquid Information Navigation - A New Paradigm?
James Kalbach from LexisNexis describes a gradually evolving trend in web interfaces - an analogue of the context menu of desktop applications. Although such menus have been found periodically for several years now, the article brings together a selection of such examples.

Dark Patterns - Black Hat, Anti-Usability Design Patterns
A collection of anti-design patterns that collect examples of how to do it. There are not so many examples so far, but the author of the site Harry Brignull is actively published in the professional community and is unlikely to abandon an interesting undertaking.

Process

All Look Same? A Comparison of Experience Design and Service Design
Jodi Forlizzi compares user experience design and service design in order to understand how close these disciplines are. The article makes references to their history and general process.

Learning from Our Challenge Piles
Excellent article by Michelle Gilmore, in which she shares her experience in solving problems that arise when working with a customer on design and design works. She describes 4 typical situations from her practice and talks about how a solution was found.

Cases

Case study for a travel company
The story of how the website of the travel agency Sunshine Travel was redone and how it helped significantly increase conversion. The article describes the main changes and the process of working on the project.

Designing a Persuasive Video Game
Nicely described the case, telling about the process of creating an educational game. John Ferrara writes about the game mechanics principles used and what they wanted to achieve using them.

Migrating a Corporate Intranet to SharePoint - A Case Study
Jen Hocko describes the process of transferring a corporate intranet site to the SharePoint platform and the tasks that the designer solved in this process.

Theory

Emotional Design with ACT
The most interesting series of publications is Trevor van Gorp, in which he describes the psychological foundations of the interfaces involved. He explores emotionally challenging design and how to create it.

Updating Our Understanding of Perception and Cognition
An excerpt from Jeff Johnson's book Designing with the Mind in Mind, in which he describes the processes of perception and cognition. Extremely useful reading, which allows you to understand how it works and what the eye sees, how the process of reading and recognizing objects occurs. The second part of the article is www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/08/updating-our-understanding-of-perception-and-cognition-part-ii.php .

Story

What is a device?
An excerpt from Dan Saffer's future book, Designing Devices, in which he describes a brief history of devices. And this is very useful for understanding how the interfaces evolved.

Trends

5 Creepy Ways Video Games
A detailed description of the 5 common principles of game mechanics from David Wong, which are used in many hit games. The article is especially good because it contains a lot of examples and references to research.

Fresh links can also be tracked in the Friendfeed User Experience ribbon .