A must read article on UXMAG: Cognition & the Intrinsic User Experience by @thejordanrules
The decline of web safe colors
Web safe colors specific are a palette of 216 colors which can be displayed without shifting or dithering on an 8 bit display.
Back in the day, designers needed to use web safe colors since most people only had 8 bit video display cards. Of course these days, most monitors display millions of colors so in the majority of cases, web safe colors are no longer relevant.
Feedback loops & creative gamification in social apps
The premise of a feedback loop is simple: Provide people with information about their actions in real time, then give them a chance to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors.
via constantx:
A great article by Wired.com about feedback loops and related applications in engineering, social feedback and gamification.
A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage. Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead. And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.
(via coooh)
Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb
The Facets of User Experience: Useful, Usable, Desirable, Findable, Accessible, Credible and Valuable.
user experience design: Parallax Scrolling in Web Design
Parallax is a difference in the in the apparent position of an object viewed along different lines of sight. The term derives from the Greek word parallaxis, meaning alteration. In web design, the parallax effect is a relatively new trend. The effect itself has been around for a while, but…
(via ryanhuber)
Transience in Design (UXMag)
Full article by Joshua Allen on UXMag
“User interfaces are normally designed to be durable and predictable. People don’t like surprises, and they want to be able to repeat the same actions to get the same positive results. But judicious use of transience can make product experiences even more effective. As strange as it seems, creating some positive results that can’t be repeated can be a very good design strategy.”
Read more
Usability 101 (Nielsen)
Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. Usability is defined by 5 quality components:
- Learnability
- Efficiency
- Memorability
- Errors
- Satisfaction
