This week, I’m delighted to have O’Reily author Laura Klein guest curate her must read links on user research. Is there a UX related topic or guest curator you want to see in a future issue? Let me know on Twitter. If you haven’t already, enter the November giveaway for a chance to win a free Rosenfeld Media book. Have a great weekend.
— Kenny
Articles
Eliminating Taps with Fluid Touch Gestures
A demo of how fluid touch can be used to reduce the number of taps. While this is a nice gesture-based “shortcut”, you should still have a tap based method for commonly used tasks and only offer fluid touch gestures as an optional enhancement.
Progressive Reduction: Evolving the Experience for Your Most Frequent Users
How do you maximize usability for the first time user versus your power users? Dan Birman, a UX Designer at Digital Telepathy, writes about how to adapt interfaces over time as users become more acquainted with applications.
Google’s Quest to Write the Rulebook for Interactive Design
Google is aiming to establish best practices for interactive design with their new material design language. After reviewing their guide and playing with some of their updated apps, I’m a believer.
Design Spiking
Spiking lets us explore good ideas and bad ones without putting any other value on them except the little time it took to put them on paper. If there is one thing to get out of this article: always be sketching.
User Experience and Credit Card Payment Forms
How do you design a usable payment form? This article has a lot of useful tips to maximize usability during checkout.
The Proper Way of Handling Notifications
Some quick, helpful tips on giving users well-informed and clear notifications.
Designers Code Differently
Designer and coder, Meng To, tries to answer the question about why don’t more designers learn to code by explaining how designers work.
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User Research – Quantitative & Qualitative by Laura Klein
What Type of Lean Startup Experiment Should I Run?
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in startups is wanting to do “research” without having any idea about what they want to learn or how to go about learning it. This post by Tristan Kromer goes over some of the many different types of lean startup experiments you can run and explains when they’re useful.
The Right Way to Do Lean Research
Doing research right is just as important as doing the right kind of research. In this article on Boxes and Arrows I give some tips for doing better research.
Combining Qualitative & Quantitative Research
Too many startups think they don’t need to do qualitative research because they have metrics. In this post, I explain why that’s stupid and teach you when to use qualitative research methods and when to use quantitative ones.
3 Better Questions to Ask in User Interviews
It’s almost overwhelmingly tempting to ask users what they want, but it’s always a bad idea. In this post, Charles Liu gives you three better questions to ask.
Five principles for generating usable user research
Never “test users” again! In this post, Cat Macaulay gives 5 great principles for bringing better user research into your organization.
The 14 Most Common Hypothesis Testing Mistakes Product Teams Make (And How to Avoid Them)
Forming and testing a hypothesis may seem easy, but it’s even easier to get wrong. Teresa Torres talks about 14 common mistakes people make when doing Lean Product testing.
Tomer Sharon Video Interviews
If you have a little extra time, this is an amazing series of video interviews by Tomer Sharon. In it, he talks to dozens of industry veterans about the importance of user research and how to get it right.
Laura Klein is the author of popular design blog, Users Know, and of the book, UX for Lean Startups from the O’Reilly Lean Series. During the day, she’s the VP of Product at Hint Health where she’s trying to make great healthcare affordable and available to everybody. On the weekends she pretends she has enough time to write another book.
Tools & Resources
InVision App
Quickly turn your web & mobile designs into clickable prototypes and present them to clients & stakeholders for feedback. An awesome deal for UX Design Weekly readers: get a Starter Plan (3 projects) free for 6 months!
10 Great UX/UI Design Cheat Sheets
Some popular design cheat sheets for personas, UX terminology, color psychology, and more.
Media
Free Ebook: Experience Design – A Curated Collection of Chapters from the O’Reilly Design Library
Free PDF of over 270 pages from selected chapters of 8 published and forthcoming UX books.
From the Front Lines of Multi-Device Web Design
Watch Luke Wroblewski talk about lessons learned designing products that attempt to embrace simultaneous and sequential multi-device use.
FORM 2014 Videos
FORM was a wide-angle examination of the intersection between design and technology hosted by Google this week. Not all videos are up yet but you can check out a fireside chat with Matias Duarte, VP of Design at Google.
Portfolios
Michael Nino Everson
While there’s only one project, Michael Nino Everson provides an amazingly detailed case study outlining the process behind designing SoundCloud’s iPhone app.
LaiYee Lori
LaiYee Lori, Digital Product Designer at Wink, uses Behance to show her sketchs, wireframes, information architecture, and more to illustrate her whole process in designing a complete user experirence.
Jobs
User Interface Designer at Medialets (New York, NY)
Medialets, a startup that builds enterprise level ad serving software for many of the largest and most influential ad agencies in the world, is seeking a full-time user interface designer to join their team in its Chelsea office.
Last But Not Least
FORM Type Maker
Want your name (or any word) in an animated GIF in the Google FORM type? Check it out.
“The best products don’t focus on features, they focus on clarity.”
— Jon Bolt
