Great Resources

A short list of online resources I find interesting and useful for UX, design, research, and more…

Informative Websites

UX Matters: UXmatters provides insights and inspiration to both professionals working in all aspects of user experience (UX)—at every stage in their career—and students who are just beginning their journey in user experience.
Boxes and Arrows: Boxes and Arrows is devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design; including graphic design, interaction design, information architecture and the design of business.
UseIt.com: Jakob Nielsen’s website.
UsabilityFirst.com: Interesting section on methods.
User Interface Engineering: Jared M. Spool and his team of researchers oversee a variety of events and publications.
Connecting Series: Short films exploring trends in interaction and experience design
UX Booth: shares stories by and for those practicing user-centered design.
Ghost in the Pixel: Uday Gajendar’s musings on interaction design (lots of interesting ideas and suggestions)

Publications

The User Experience Daily: Daily aggregator of of other blogs and publications.
Interact is a quick-read one-page quarterly window on what’s going on in the world of product usability, behavioral research, innovation and other interesting stuff (from BluePrint Usability).

Management & Strategy

Culture Eats Strategy
Envisioning Experience Outcomes
15 Ways to Identify Bad Leaders (or, how not to be one)
6 Mistakes preventing UX teams from having boardroom influences

Tools and Methods

100 User Experience (UX) Design and Evaluation Methods for Your Toolkit.
Einstein’s Secret to Amazing Problem Solving (and 10 Specific Ways You Can Use It): before jumping right into solving a problem, we should step back and invest time and effort to improve our understanding of it. Here are 10 strategies you can use to see problems from many different perspectives and master what is the most important step in problem solving: clearly defining the problem in the first place!
Alignment Diagrams: Describe a class of documents that reveal the touchpoints between a customer and a business. These touchpoints are organized and visually aligned in a single graphical overview. Illustrating these touchpoints helps a company shift its inherently inward-focusing perspectives outward. Alignment diagrams make the value creation chain visible from both sides of the fence, and let us tell the story of value creation.
Design Games: game-like activities that help teams gain insight, understanding, and clarity while avoiding dry and often unproductive meetings.
Nine rules for running productive design critiques
Ethnographic frameworks to help with your note-taking during field studies.
Experience Maps to communicate and inspire ideation.
Design Principles
- UI Design Principles written to be understood by anyone.
- How to Craft the Perfect Design Principles for Your Project
- Creating Great Design Principles: 6 Counter-intuitive Tests
Leveraging the Kano Model for Optimal Results to help understand product feature prioritization