I've recently traded a series of interesting emails on the evolution of social products and how the things that worked years ago- importing addressbooks and blasting out invites, no longer work today. A friend of mine, Sangeet, wrote up a longer analysis on the topic and I wanted to share that with you today. Enjoy! ...

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Via: Andrew Chen Blog Written by Sangeet Paul C Exploring the disruption caused by online and mobile platfor

I tend to get one particular question over and over. It is some variant on "How is the UX for my product/site?" In order to get in touch with some of your users, I'd recommend that you do the following: Figure out exactly what you are concerned about with your site or product. ...

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Via: Users Know Written by Laura Klein Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J

In 1906 Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, observed that wealth was unequally distributed in Italy. He noted that 80% of the land and wealth was owned by 20% of the people. A similar relationship can be observed in the wealth and income across most countries. It turns out what Pareto observed isn't limited to wealth and income. ...

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Via: Measuring Usability Written by Jeff Sauro Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used.

We can break down how users interact with a product into two stages. At the first stage, a user has yet to use the product. Getting people to start using a product has greater business impact, but designers often expend too little effort at this stage. At the second stage, the user is actually using the product, and that is when usability plays a critical role. Let's look at a few examples to illu ...

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Via: UXmatters Written by Frank Guo A respected user experience strategist and architect, Frank

Everyone can tell you that building a big web project, one that's going to handle millions of users, withstand the force of a thousand monkeys with typewriters and look damn sexy doing it requires a cacophony of small (but efficient) services. ...

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Via: Fruit Business Written by Swizec A geek with a hat

Alert: Are you sure you want to proceed? In his seminal book, The Humane Interface, the late Jef Raskin, one of the original Apple Designers, described inefficient interfaces as those that required user input but provided nothing in return. He provided as an example a Mac dialogue box from over 12 years ago (shown below) which had an efficiency rating of 0 (effort in and nothing out). ...

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Via: Measuring Usability Written by Jeff Sauro Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used.

You will (probably) learn: Is it usable? Can people figure out how to navigate through your product? You will not learn: Is it useful? Would they bother if you weren't there in the room watching them? Are your calls-to-action compelling? Will people actually click them? ...

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Via: Cindy Alvarez Written by Cindy Alvarez Making people more awesome through building better software.

There has been a lot of discussion in the design world recently about "change aversion." Most of the articles about it seem to be targeting the new Google redesign, but I've certainly seen this same discussion happen at many companies when big changes aren't universally embraced by users. ...

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Via: Users Know Written by Laura Klein Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J

We live in a fast-paced, time-strapped, multi-tasking world. Most Web users are lazy; they want instant gratification with minimal effort. For startups, it is a challenging landscape because they may only get a single, short-lived shot to attract a potential user. Even if your product is useful, interesting or valuable, it also has to be immediately captivating. ...

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Via: Mark Evans Tech Written by Mark Evans Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad,

Power users are your evangelists, your backup QA testers, and your visionaries. They're also by far the easiest to get in touch with (just try to avoid them - they'll find you.) It would be stupid to blindly ignore their feedback. It's also really hard to tell sometimes: is this an issue that only affects the power users? Or is it a universal thing, and they were just the first to detect it? ...

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Via: Cindy Alvarez Written by Cindy Alvarez Making people more awesome through building better software.

There are many reasons why usability professionals don't use statistics and I've heard most of them. Many of the reasons are based on misconceptions about what you can and can't do with statistics and the advantage they provide in reducing uncertainly and clarifying our recommendations.  Checkout the nine of the more common misconceptions. ...

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Via: Measuring Usability Written by Jeff Sauro Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used.

If you've considered using unmoderated remote usability testing with video here are answers to several questions you might have. I hosted a live webinar sponsored by the folks at Userzoom and Usertesting.com.  The topic was best practices for remote unmoderated usability testing and in it I walked through the results of a comparative usability benchmark analysis ...

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Via: Measuring Usability Written by Jeff Sauro Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used.