UX Tidbits – May

I’ve been writing a lot and publishing a little lately as I’ve been working on fine tuning some ideas. In the mean time, I’ve also been reading a lot and decided to start sharing some of the tidbits that I find interesting. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading\watching lately:

• Designing for Emotion by Aaron Walter: I came by a conference video of Aarron Walter the other day that was pretty well done. If you haven’t read his book yet and want to get up to speed on Designing for Emotion I recommend it.
• I’m always a big fan of User Focus and in their April newsletter I found it a wonderful reminder of the practical level of knowledge to expect from general users. My favorite quote from this issue is “There’s an old rule in marketing that says you don’t tell people about features, you tell them about benefits” because it helped me to write some more usable copy for a project I’m working on.
• Speaking of copy. Another great article I recently came by is Writing Microcopy by Joshua Porter. A nice reminder that the little details even in copy can make a big difference in the overall conversation a user has with your website or application.
• I’ve also been exploring inspiration websites like Behance, Dribble and Pinterest for inspiration with a project I’m working on. I’m loving the way Behance shows portfolio work in a vertical scrolling image list similar to an infographic. I think this is a great way to market not only the product, but the UX process behind it. Dribble is fantastic for inspiration, but I found their “bucket” adding feature a bit kludgy compared to Pinterest. I’ve officially become addicted to Pinterest, aside from my normal personal boards I’ve now added 8 or so UX boards and counting like UX – General, UX – Wires and Prototypes, and UX – Design Inspiration.
• One bit of inspiration I found that helped with a drag and drop interaction specification and some edit interactions was Bill Scott’s Designing for Interesting Moments presentation on Slideshare. I particularly enjoyed slides 40, and 43 where he brings light to methods of detailing interaction specifications and interface discoverability.
• Finally, I’m seriously digging the new Facebook feature that adds emotions, and what you are doing. I did a similar design with social emotions for a client a couple years ago, unfortunately it never went to market 🙁 Alas, so cool to see the idea taken on by such a major player. Hopefully this will help kick off the trend of designing more emotion into our applications and websites.

As always, if you want to be totally overwhelmed with UX happenings in the industry feel free to check out my UX feed board on Netvibes.