Do you want to find out what those words are? Start by asking them. Visiting your users in their natural environments is probably the best way to start.

Jarred’s team found that personas are a great way to communicate trigger words to everyone on the design team. A persona is a detailed description of a user the team wants to ensure is successful on the site. Listing, within the persona, the trigger words that person would use helps us, the designers, understand how the users’ own language will impact the final design.

According to Jarred, his team never conducted a usability test that didn’t yield tremendous insight into how users react to the links the team is using. It becomes obvious immediately when links are missing the clues the users need to go forward.

This powerful trio — field studies, personas, and usability testing — are a great way to start identifying the trigger words that work for your users.

• Illustrations
• Printed paper
• Realism
• Imageless & typography-focused
• Minimalism
• Vintage look
• Large images & photo backgrounds
• Rich & slick user interfaces

While many designers seem to be very against trends and already popular styles, one must understand that these certain styles are popular for a reason. That reason is that there is already something about them that works, whether it be efficiency, viewer-connection, or interesting visual appeal. The goal is to always view popular styles from an intuitive standpoint, and take from them what works best. This is the only way to learn and gain experience as a web designer, even when developing one’s own particular style.

1. Responsive and intuitive page elements
2. Branding and consistency of theme.

Focusing on these two things will give every pixel in a design a purpose and will contribute to the website’s overall usability. Sure, eye candy is important, but it isn’t everything, and that for a design to be truly beautiful, it has to be functional, have purpose and contribute in some way to the website’s intuitiveness, usefulness and branding. All of these things contribute to the overall effect of a design.

Tufte’s initial work will be on the recovery.gov website, which is the primary way the board will conduct business transparently to the American public.

Wonder if he brought his own litter of kittens, or will be borrowing them from DC shelters…?

Checkout the story of redesign of the ubiquitous prescription bottle led by Deborah Adler

I really enjoyed the article’s approach to guiding the reader through the process, and the result is stunning…Just far enough out of the box to be a real improvement, but not so unfamiliar as to make it un-marketable.

I don’t see a mention of this in the article, but judging from the bottles’ shape they can be packed more tightly to save shipping space and costs, as well.

You can see Debora Adler speak at Microsoft Mixx 09 Day 2 Keynote. (fast forward to 30:30)

Log-In on the Homepage: Before and after

This article takes a detailed look at the design, layout and usability of Craigslist and point out some areas where the author feel change and improvement are possible. This is only one opinion of what could be done to improve the site. The goal was to demonstrate the process of evaluating a website in certain areas and determining specific improvements that can be made.