A new report from German researchers reveals the five main ways people are organizing the applications on their smartphones. Despite the somewhat esoteric focus of a study like this, the resulting analysis has a broader impact on our digital lives.
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Marisa Chiulli's insight:
A new report from German researchers reveals the five main ways people are organizing the applications on their smartphones. Despite the somewhat esoteric focus of a study like this, the resulting analysis has a broader impact on our digital lives. The content found in mobile app stores is growing at an exponential rate. There are over 800,000 iOS applications, just under that on Android, and app downloads are nearing the point where they’re double that of songs. Songs!
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You cannot plan for and design a responsive, content-focused, mobile-first website the same way you’ve been creating websites for years.
Marisa Chiulli's insight:
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?
I’d like to walk you through some problems caused by using old processes with responsive design. Let’s look into an evolving design process we’ve 2 been using with some promising new deliverables and tools. This should provide a starting point for you to freshen up your own process and bring it into the responsive age. The Problem The issues caused when trying to force new results from an old process are significant yet, strangely enough, not immediately obvious. We’ve all just gotten used to them, like the annoying quirk we didn’t realize we had, until someone points it out. And from that point forward, it drives you crazy. For example, when we create a desktop-sized, fixed-width site layout in Photoshop and hand it to a developer to interpret into HTML/CSS, we are asking the developer to make a lot of design decisions—possibly without even realizing it. Below is just a small sample:
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User Experience (UX) Statistics and Metrics that are useful in order to ensure that your product and/or service improves the experience of your users
Marisa Chiulli's insight:
Numbers, feedback, trends and other statistics coming from several areas which lie within and outside an organisation are factored so deeply in User Experience (UX) that they make their gathering, evaluation and the setting of action points an intricate science in and of itself. Indeed, the depth that is involved in the field of User Experience and its growing prevalence that spans through a wide range of industries can make it a daunting task to even decide which statistics are worth gathering and analyzing let alone how to analyse them and decide on what corrective measures to take based on their analysis.
The difficulty lies not only in the ability to cull the important statistics from the more superfluous ones but also on deciding how much is necessary. This is the headache that User Experience experts, and those in other related fields, must contend with on a regular basis. And to make it even worse, there are no set of rules that specifically state which statistics you need to pay attention to. We can depend upon nothing but the learned experience and wisdom of User Experience professionals who have seen enough success and failure in their careers to know what they are talking about.
What pearls of wisdom have these sages to impart, then? What statistics have they time and again seen to matter the most?
Frequently, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) seems to be one of the biggest source of statistics that contains useful values which are closely related to User Experience. More specifically, CRM is composed of at least three statistics – all of which are important for User Experience. This makes Customer Relationship Management the primary factor to watch. The three factors that comprise CRM are the:
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Marisa Chiulli's insight:
I’ve had many discussions this year with web designers and developers concerning user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) and what the differences are. For ecommerce merchants, it’s important to know the difference if you are planning any type of redesign of your online store.
One of the most critical components of your online store is the user experience. Regardless of how elegant your website looks, if you fail to deliver the type of user experience your buyers are looking for, they will leave your site and shop elsewhere. Because there are so many well-designed stores today, shoppers demand that type of experience from all sites.
This article explores the difference between UI and UX and why you need to the right resources on your team when you redesign your website. Defining a User Experience
Here are some of the elements that impact the user experience of your online store.
Margaret Doyle's curator insight,
February 4, 11:56 AM
Great read for anyone in the digital space creating experiences. Delete the scoop?
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Testing the right things when usability testing means you get great results that will improve your site or app. Read on for great advice on why & what to test.
Marisa Chiulli's insight:
When you have decided that you want to usability test, one of the first things you have to consider is what you are going to usability test. Although this may sound like a very straightforward question, there are a number of facets you need to consider to make your test successful and to ensure you are testing the right things.
Of course, what you are trying to test can vary a lot depending on the product or service you are working on, but there are some simple rules that you can follow to ensure you get the best, most effective results you can from your testing process. What to consider when usability testing:
Do you know what your users do when they come to your site or are using your service? How do they get from place to place? What sort of information are they trying to find? Do they follow the path that you’d imagine?
There a number of different ways you can work this out, but one of the easiest is looking at your analytics data. Not using analytics? Check out Clicky (which has free and premium options) for a great, user friendly analytics experience.
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Generating a shared vision for the UX design work. Getting early input from different disciplines such as visual designers and developers. Delete the scoop?
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Vodka, pickled cucumbers and Pope John Paul II might spring to mind when someone mentions Poland. Obviously there's more to Poland than that.
Ryan's insight:
Check out some innovative and inspiring web design from Poland. Great ideas to help get your creative juices flowing for your latest project! Delete the scoop?
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A leading Engineering and Project Management company that provides services to the mining industry 
Ryan's curator insight,
January 9, 1:23 PM
A really cool, nicely designed site using a grid design for the homepage. Check it out! Delete the scoop?
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Attendees at Ayantek's Executive IT Conference learned how Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) technologies are changing the game. Download the content to Learn from our expert panelists about the tools you need to invest in to help drive productivity gains within your organization. Learn how to select the right partners within your ecosystem and the trends/concepts that will influence how your business can leverage these technologies to position and compete in the future
The Ayantek Team's insight:
Turned out to be a great event! Check out out landing page for information on how you can get access to all the content from the day's events. 
The Ayantek Team's curator insight,
January 7, 4:39 PM
Going to be a great event. Speakers are top notch and looks like there's going to be great networking opportunities. Delete the scoop?
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Etsy tried to add infinite scroll to their search results but found it had a negative effect. Why is that? Delete the scoop?
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As 2012 is officially over and we've now welcomed in another year, we reached out to a few industry professionals to see what their thoughts are for the year ahead. Via Alex Butler 
gillkelley's curator insight,
January 3, 8:20 AM
How is mobile evolving - another view from Econsultancy 
Martin (Marty) Smith's curator insight,
January 4, 5:30 AM
I don't usually like these single paragraph round up of experts. This time I do like it because of the ability to look across this group of mobile experts and see what ideas they share such as:
* The undeniably of mobile. * The importance of tablets. * Responsive Design is not enough. * Mobile is different.
There are many coded messages here such as we don't know what we don't know and it scares us a little. A little fear in the Internet marketing space is not a bad thing (lol). Delete the scoop?
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What if you could move a cursor on your TV with just your eyes? Or turn the page of an ebook without using your hands? Delete the scoop?
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One of the most exciting changes in website design has been the introduction of responsive design, a mechanism that allows a website to react to the size of the users screen and to adapt to the best fit.
This is used to allow websites to fit the varied screen sizes that users have on desktop or laptops, but the real benefit has been its use for creating mobile friendly sites. Using responsive design to build a mobile site takes less time than creating a stand-alone mobile site, it’s easier for the client to manage and maintain, and the user has a seamless experience without need for redirection. Whatever the screen size of the user they’ll be served from the same database and same page, meaning that you have one solution to fit all devices. It’s the best solution for a client, agency, user and the search engines. Let’s rewind and look at how search engines work, using Google as an example: • The search engine (SE) finds out about a new website, most likely because a third party website links to it. • The SE analyses the site and over a period of time it visits every page and stores information on it. • If the pages are appropriate the SE puts the pages of the site into its index, the collection of databases that store websites and attributes on them. • When a visitor to Google caries out a search the SE returns the website in the results pages, based on how valuable the SE believes the site is for that keyword search. Delete the scoop?
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Marisa Chiulli's insight:
Mind maps are diagrams that visually illustrate how words, phrases, ideas, or concepts relate to a central key word or phrase. They are a visual thinking tool that helps to structure information and identify connections between items.
To create a mind map, you simply start with a central idea, and branch out from that idea with each branch representing a topic related to that idea. Sub topics can be made in an infinite number of levels building off of each branch. It’s typically best to use colors and imagery in a mind map to help link together ideas in a way that’s easy to understand and remember.
Mind maps are powerful tools for User Experience professionals. In part 1 of this post series, I’ll explain how you can use mind maps to create “sketch maps.” What are sketch maps? Sketch maps are mind maps of, well, sketches. They are diagrams that organize ideas in a tree-based structure where sketches are used as the way to illustrate those concepts. Others have used similar approaches under different terms (sketchboarding, storyboarding, or simply just mind mapping that happens to include sketches). I’m using the term “sketch map” to emphasize the use of the mind mapping technique. Whatever term you want to use, the idea is to make connections, generate new ideas, and identify gaps by leveraging the benefits that come from sketching: exploring and refining ideas quickly and visually.
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Marisa Chiulli's insight:
One of the best things about user experience design is that the consumer products and services it helps to crystallize are always evolving. With that level of change comes all sorts of speculation about the future.
Speculating is fun. Looking back on 2012 we saw a year brimming with innovations and ideas that set the stage for what we are likely to see in 2013. With that, here are some trends and concepts that we see setting the stage for this year’s coming advancements in user experience.
Downsampling
The Onion hit it spot-on when they joked that 90% of our waking lives are spent staring at glowing rectangles. Along with more screens in our lives, the volume and intensity of information that passes through these rectangles has also been increasing: more widgets, more animations, more feeds, more dimensions, more data. In 2013 we envision a counterbalancing trend towards digital abstractions—a compressive reduction of dense information sets into radically simplified communications and visualizations.
Little Printer skims headlines from your online feeds and spits them out as low-fi ticker tape for your bedside. Robotify.me creates a personalized avatar that morphs based on the quantity, quality, and content of your aggregated social media activity. And the lovably crude, Etch A Sketch-esque PopSlate case uses e-ink to display simplified content pulled from your smartphone on the backside of the device. This year, look for technology that pares down functionality and operates at the edge, rather than the center of your attention
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In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss what is the best approach to designing tablet apps.
Ryan's insight:
Great overview on how to start designing a mobile app. Delete the scoop?
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Marisa Chiulli's insight:
We all know the business case for doing user experience (UX) work: Investing upfront in making products easy to use really pays off. It reduces project risk, cost, and time while improving, efficiency, effectiveness, and end user satisfaction.
(Don’t know the business case? Read this or this. Or this.) But what if you’re investing in UX and not getting results?
There can be many factors behind an under-performing user experience effort. First, rule out the obvious: Your UX folks are jerks, they don’t communicate well, they don’t understand business, they aren’t team players, they have such terrible body odor people stay 10 feet away …
There can be many factors behind an under-performing user experience effort. First, rule out the obvious: Your UX folks are jerks, they don’t communicate well, they don’t understand business, they aren’t team players, they have such terrible body odor people stay 10 feet away …
1. You Hired the Wrong People
User experience design is getting a lot of attention lately, and UX is a buzzword many want to add to their resumes. But the field has been around for several years (although under different names) and is fairly mature. Until a person has done full-time UX work—not as an aspect of their job, but as their job—for at least two or three years, they are generally not at a professional level.
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Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you're working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key.
Marisa Chiulli's insight:
Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites.
1. Form Labels Work Best Above The Field
A study by UX Matters 1 found that the ideal position for labels in forms is above the fields. On many forms, labels are put to the left of the fields, creating a two-column layout; while this looks good, it’s not the easiest layout to use. Why is that? Because forms are generally vertically oriented; i.e. users fill the form from top to bottom. Users scan the form downwards as they go along. And following the label to the field below is easier than finding the field to the right of the label.
Positioning labels on the left also poses another problem: do you left-align or right-align the labels? Left-aligning makes the form scannable but disconnects the labels from the fields, making it difficult to see which label applies to which field. Right-aligning does the reverses: it makes for a good-looking but less scannable form. Labels above fields work best in most circumstances. The study also found that labels should not be bold, although this recommendation is not conclusive.
2. Users Focus On Faces
People instinctively notice other people right away when they come into view. On Web pages, we tend to focus on people’s faces and eyes, which gives marketers a good technique for attracting attention. But our attraction to people’s faces and eyes is only the beginning; it turns out we actually glance in the direction the person in the image is looking in.
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David Everly reveals his top Photoshop web design tips for being more efficient when creating website graphics.
Ryan's insight:
Some really useful tips! The workaround for creating a text wrap in photoshop will certainly save me time on my next project. Delete the scoop?
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In our new UX Design Q&A column, each month, we'll pick a handful of popular questions asked by our readers around good practices in designing smart and usable experiences.
Ryan's insight:
Christian Holst discusses “In which kinds of sites/projects is it better to use an adaptive layout (fixed break points)? In which kinds of sites is it better to use a responsive layout (fluid grids)?” He gives pros and cons to each approach. Delete the scoop?
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A leading Engineering and Project Management company that provides services to the mining industry
Ryan's insight:
A really cool, nicely designed site using a grid design for the homepage. Check it out! Delete the scoop?
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Both design communities I’ve been involved in (graphic design and user experience design) spend an inordinate amount of energy bemoaning the lack of respect designers get and how misunderstood our value is. Perhaps you’ve heard or even uttered statements like this: I always include user research in my proposals, but clients never want to pay for it. Nobody in our company understands what we do. They think we’re just here to build wireframes and make things look pretty. If I could convince management how important design is, they’d involve us earlier in the process and we could have more influence on the direction of the product. Not surprisingly, there is no shortage of articles and blog posts about how to communicate the value of UX. We’re told to learn how to speak to business people in terms they understand, like ROI and customer retention. We’re told to point to case studies like Jared Spool’s $300 million button in an effort to convince project managers that UX up front will save time and resources later due to fewer specification changes and faster implementation.
The Ayantek Team's insight:
Getting UX a seat at the table... Delete the scoop?
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People are increasingly using their smartphones as a replacement for desktop computers, even for activities such as shopping and purchasing. And as more people move away from the desktop and onto mobile-optimized websites to shop for products and services, website creators can use established design patterns to help kickstart a mobile e-commerce project. Having a good mobile e-commerce experience matters a lot. In fact, recent research has found that people are 67% more likely to make a purchase if a website they’ve reached on their phone is smartphone-friendly. The power of design patterns is that they show you how other designers have solved similar problems so that you are not always reinventing the wheel. They also enable you to design your website in a way that meets the expectations that people develop from the other websites they’ve used, and they encourage you to consider design approaches that you would not have thought of on your own. In this article, which focuses on smartphones, not tablets, we’ll look at design patterns and approaches used for mobile e-commerce functionality, including the following:
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How users organize their apps: I fall into the second group: by relatedness. Great insight on how we can use established user habits in shaping our applications and designs.