Design and Usability principles from the google team

By: Nelly Yusupova
Posted: June 5, 2008
Topics: Marketing, Usability, Design, Technology
Tags: goggle, user experience

Design, usability, functionality, and optimization…that is what we who work on the Web should be about…lets check out what the Google team has to say about it.

Here is a list of principles that all Google website designers use as a guide. This list came from Google’s User Experience (UX) group that is responsible for Google’s user interface design, visual design, user research, web development, and user interface writing.

1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Go to Google’s website to read the explanation of each item.

I often talk on the subject of website usability and the importance of designing your web pages with your user in mind.  Check out my recent blog post about tools to help you improve your website’s usability.

Virtually Attend the 2008 IA (Information Architechture) Summit

By: Kristin Vincent
Posted: May 14, 2008
Topics: Design, Usability, Work-Life Balance, Events, Career, Technology
Tags: IA Summit, information architecture, usability, user experience

Those of us who focus on the user experience try to stay up to date with the latest trends in information architecture, but many of us weren’t able to hop down to Miami in April to attend the 2008 IA Summit. Fear not, fellow IAers. Maybe it’s too late to get that Miami tan, but you can still catch up on the conference from your home computer and chime in at the next IA cocktail party.

The IA Summit’s website does an excellent job laying out the different sessions. You can search:

• By conference schedule
• Alphabetically

While many post-conference sites agree to share the slides with non-attendees, the IA Summit is kind enough to share videos of several of the slideshows accompanied by audio from the actual event.

Here’s an image of slide from James Robertson’s presentation What do innovative intranets look like? The player on the conference website allows you to paginate to a particular slide and jump to that section of the audio as well. Some presentations are even available for download.

The conference boasts a wide range of topics such as:

• Creating career paths for UX professionals
• How to be a user experience team of one
• Inspiration from the edge: New patterns for interface design

Another great resource is Boxes and Arrows, which recently posted a nice summary of Day 1 at the conference with embedded audio for each one. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before summaries of the subsequent days are there as well.