In a field like Experience Design, there are some basic concepts that don’t change. However, there are many things that change very quickly. Fortunately, there are some fantastic people who write and share their insights. I learn something new every day. One of the best ways I have found to keep up is to subscribe to a few blogs. Here are a few suggestions of the ones I have found to be the most interesting and useful.
UIE Brain Sparks is written by Jared Spool and the other talented people at User Interface Engineering. Jared has consistently delivered great insights for many years. A recent example is Designing Great Experiences – The Gap Between Activities. This article compares different theme parks and cab rides as a way to better understand UI design rather than experience design.
UX Booth has a wide variety of content related to experience design from information architecture to accessibility to research, there is a nice variety here. I appreciate the insights gained when we can learn from another field. For example, Oleg Mokhov posted an interesting article Design Lessons from Electronic Music Production.
UX Magazine is a great site. Articles from a variety of authors cover Technology, Design, and Strategy. A recent example is Treating Users as Customers: Designing the End to End by Steve Workman. The article encourages designers to think about the complete experience a person has completing a task.
Some of the key origins for the practice of experience design was Psychology, Research, and Statistics. The Measuring Usability site provides great coverage of these areas. A recent article on 5 Second Usability Tests provided great insight into how effective the technique can be. This is a site done by one author, Jeff Sauro, who clearly has passion for the topic.
Another blog written by one passionate author is disambiguity written by Leisa Reichelt. I just started following Leisa, but he blog looks promising. One recent example is an article Empathy – Essential Soft Skills for User Experience Practitioners. This is a nice reminder as to why many of us joined this field – to make things better for people.
Content Strategy and Social Media are areas I am beginning to follow. One of the more interesting authors in this space is Tristan Bishop who writes at KnowledgeBishop. Tristan recently wrote a great article Nurturing Advocacy discussing how Petco has engaged its customers using social media.
I hope you find these useful. What blogs do you follow? I would love to find more useful places to learn and connect.
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