“The partnership with LinkedIn affirms Twitter’s role as a network for professional conversation.”

This quote from a New York Times article on the partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter stood out for me.

Twitter is often written off (by those who don’t use it) as a personal tool, a way to socialise with friends and mainly for the young kids. I’m 33, married with 2 kids and I use it predominantly as a professional tool. Sure I use it socially as well (who doesn’t want to know where to get the best coffee or a good cheap meal) but I predominantly use it to stay up-to-date on industry news, to ask my colleagues questions and to hear about what they are working on, struggling with etc.

I’m a huge advocate of user-centered design approaches and techniques and have been ever since I was introduced to them at The Hiser Group. So the recent article Discount Usability by the guru himself Jacob Nielson I think is timely reminder about some of these user centered design approaches and the value they offer. In the article Jacob reflects on the last 20 years in usability and design and how far it has come. Some quotes from it that I find particularly relevant in my day to day work include:

• “Simple user testing with 5 participants, paper prototyping, and heuristic evaluation offer a cheap, fast, and early focus on usability, as well as many rounds of iterative design.”
• “Discount usability often gives better results than deluxe usability because its methods drive an emphasis on early and rapid iteration with frequent usability input.”
• “Most design teams still don’t believe in paper prototyping, preferring instead to spend considerable time creating elaborate design representations before they start collecting user feedback.”
  I can’t emphasise enough how valuable it will be.

I found the labels on the tabs in the options screen of Google Chrome amusing. It’s nice to see personality in an interface.

No mice or keyboards. No controllers at all for that matter. Voice, gesture and object recognition – the future of interaction design sure looks exciting!

I just visited the website for the magazine Interfaces and they have the same navigation items listed at the top as they have down the side. The kicker though is that they have labeled the side navigation “Primary navigation”. Do you really need to label it and is “Primary navigation” the most user friendly title you’ve heard? I didn’t go past the homepage.

I recently became a casualty of that lovely three letter acronym the GFC – http://tinyurl.com/c38e9c. So this is a call out for anyone in need of design and usability services to get in touch. I’m ultimately looking for a full time position in Melbourne but any contract or freelance work in the meantime would be of interest.

me: we are being recorded by this that and the other.
(married) user: ok
me: so what websites do you regularly use
user: like most men I search for porn
me: ah…ok…are there any sites you dislike
user: I hate all the flashing ads and the popup windows…