New YouTube design leaked
Business Review USA has taken screenshots of what looks like a leak of Google’s new design for YouTube.
Art Director Freddie Pierce noticed the updates, which point towards an enhanced social media experience throughout.
Understanding user experience within customer centricity
This article is the first in a series of extracts taken from Econsultancy's new Internet Marketing Strategy Briefing. The free-to-download report covers the most important online trends in digital marketing that we are witnessing.
This extract, written by Econsultancy's Research Director, Linus Gregoriadis, will focus on the user experience aspect of customer centricity, although other topics covered within the document include channel diversification, data, social media and content strategy.
30 user experience quotes to warm your soul
Is design a science or an art? I reckon that, as far as the web is concerned, it’s a bit of both.
I searched on Google for an answer to the question and while I didn’t quite find one, I did spot a rather lovely Venn diagram created by The Imaginary Foundation. Try replacing the word ‘wonder’ with ‘design’, and we’re pretty much there…
Designing a wonderful user experience is a key part of trying to create an amazing customer experience, which is much broader, anchored as it is in products, service, process, fulfilment and so on. This is something we’re all – presumably – trying to do.
I’m not a big fan of inspirational quotes, much less those awful posters, but sometimes a smart soundbite or pithy observation can help us to spot the wood from the trees. As such I’ve compiled a bunch of my favourite quotes relating to the user experience and design. Hat tip to this thread on Quora and uxquotes.com.
The world’s best team-focused 'about' pages
All websites should have an ‘about’ page, containing information on the company’s history, news and people. Some firms create a dedicated area to display team members, and I’ve spotted a few that are doing this remarkably well.
These pages are clean, creative and compelling. Some of them prove beyond doubt that a clever idea doesn't mean that you need to use sluggish technology.
The first example is genius…
Are Google's SERPs getting too messy?
Google might as well have been called Simple. Back when Google was a new entrant in the search engine market and larger competitors were cluttering up their homepages with as much content as could be aggregated on a single page, Google took a different approach and offered internet users an alternative: a clean, if not sparse, homepage that focused on one thing -- search.
Relatively-speaking, that homepage hasn't changed much in the past decade. But what has changed: Google's SERPs.
Thinking outside the box and other bad advice
Earlier this month I opened CREATE 2009, a forum for academics and practitioners to share creative and innovative ideas for human computer interaction (HCI).
The conference's theme was ‘Creative inventions and innovations for everyday HCI’ so to start things off I outlined my four step approach to help designers find more creative solutions to their problems.
Six 'I's' to help you create ingenious digital marketing campaigns
To loosely follow on from a previous post, it’s not necessarily advisable to ignore innovation and creativity under the current global economic conditions. However, when faced with this kind of negative environment, thinking up imaginative ways to engage with users through existing channels can sometimes become a bit stale.
Here, I’ve compiled a few different examples of relatively recent online campaigns that caught my attention through their resourcefulness and that follow six identifiable 'I's'.
Six rousing user experience presentations
User experience is a complex subject as it crosses various digital disciplines. Here, to accompany the release of Econsultancy’s User Experience Buyer’s Guide, we’ve rooted out six thought-provoking and inspirational slideshare presentations that approach this wide subject from different perspectives.
The inside-out guide to designing a website
When starting out on a new web project it is tempting to begin the wireframing process at the homepage, which is surely the most important page on your website.
But I’ve found that this approach doesn’t work for me. And for that matter I don’t believe that the homepage is the single most important page either!
Starting with the homepage is a little bit like drawing the cover of your novel, before you start writing the first chapter. It’s the story that counts, and until you know more about the story – the content – then how can you decide what to draw? You know what they say about judging books by their covers, perhaps because illustrators don’t read them before they get to work.
It’s the same with websites… isn’t it better to consider what’s contained within before working out how the homepage might look?
26 inspiring resources for typography junkies
As a boy I used to love two types of shops: toy stores, especially those with vast stocks of Lego, and stationery retailers, in which I could lose myself for hours. The latter remains a weird affliction that I don’t yet know the name for.
While I’m not a designer by trade I’ve always loved a good font and appreciate great typography. In an online environment it is often the difference between a good site and a great site, since it is a major part of a website’s visual appeal.
Some say that web design is 95% typography. I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but I do believe that it can help improve the user experience, that it can help persuade visitors to interact and take action, and that as such you should ask yourself whether your site needs a makeover in this department?
I’ve been working on a new website and have done a lot of research in this area. It is so hard to get wrong, and I’m not yet sure that I’ll get it right, but I’ve collated this list from a bunch of my recent bookmarks and thought it would be a good idea to aggregate and share them.
