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.

From the book The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.

I think rules #4 “Make your site’s goal obvious”, #5 “Navigation should be easy to figure out”, #7 “Don’t put animation in the way of your content” and #9 “Don’t have a splash/landing page” can be broken for personal portfolio or some entertainment sites, where a more creative approach might be appropriate, but not so much for e-commerce, news or corporate sites.

#6 “Use different colors for the text and background” should be “Use Contrast between Text and Background”, not different colors. Most of the examples here use variations of the base color, and use contrast to make the text readable, just like it supposed to be.

#8 “Stick to web-safe fonts”: I’m getting into using Cufon and Typeface.js (I used it for 2 projects), they offer a great solution in terms of progressive enhancement (better than sIFR), and think this is one area where the old rules no longer apply.

I also liked the tables joke and the tone it sets to encourage designers not to be so serious all the time!

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)

1. Design awareness can and ideally should be something that every employee of a company makes their best effort to acquire. I would say exactly the same thing about technology awareness. In the corporate culture I dream about, there would be a balance between the two—along with a healthy respect for best business practices—in every employee.
2. Design literacy is also something that can be acquired with a bit more effort by any employee, regardless of background. If your company has employees who suffer from “Apple (AAPL) envy” in terms of the nature of the products that they produce, building such literacy is a very real and useful step in helping combat that particular affliction. Designers need technological literacy, too, and both need an equal dose of business acumen. Without this, none of us has any right to complain about not being understood by those in other disciplines. We all need to be able to handle multiple directions.
3. Design thinking is something that takes even more of an investment, requiring a level of competence that—with dedication and practice—can be acquired by anyone, to a reasonable degree. Cognitive science makes it clear that the strategies designers use in approaching problems or questions are different (not “better”) than those employed by those trained in engineering disciplines. Both strategies are complementary. Given the complexity of the problems that confront us, it seems to me that expanding our collective arsenal of techniques is something we could all benefit from.
4. Design practice, however, is not something available to everyone. This is a full-time job for highly trained professionals. It requires people who have invested just as much to acquire their set of skills as the computer scientists have put in for theirs. Yes, there are exceptions. There always are on both sides of the table. But it is risky, if not foolhardy, to generalize from the exception.

• Determine what a product should do and how it should behave.
• Communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other designers.
• Build consensus and commitment to the design.
• Measure the design’s effectiveness.
• Contribute to other product-related efforts such as marketing and sales plans.”

I came across this new website from Adobe called INSPIRE, an online publication of the Adobe Experience Design Team, which will easily attract anyone into software, web & graphic design.

The Adobe team shares valuable, real-life experiences both written & via videos.

Here are some interesting content:

• Adobe and the future of multitouch (really cool!)
• Collecting User Feedback: You’re Doing It Wrong
• Icons In Space