Caution: actual thought may be required when reading this book. It is an academic text, somewhat reminiscent of a PHD thesis literature review. Don’t expect any top-ten tips.

(via @konigi)

I’m not familiar enough with it to give it a fair review, so I’m not going to even try in this post. Instead I’ve just taken a few screengrabs that should give you a rough feel for the app. Here they are:

As you can see, Fever needs a lot of screen estate. Although there is an iPhone UI, the full version does not sit well on small laptop screens.

The help tip for the ‘Hot’ area reads: Links from all of your feeds are weighted by frequency and disposition of the linking feed, then ordered by temperature using the normal body temperature of 37° as a base.

The ‘Kindling’ area provides an alphabetical filter and scroller that are nicely implemented.

The help tip for the ‘kindling’ area reads: Sparks are inessential feeds that increase the temperature of links in the Hot view. Their unread items will never appear in the Kindling supergroup or in any of your custom groups. Link blogs and sites that frequently repost content are excellent candidates for Sparks.

The ‘hot’ area can be filtered by recency (days or week), as shown here.

This is the app’s main menu. All the obvious stuff is located in here.

This is the preferences menu. If you want your installation to refresh the feeds automatically, you have to set up a cron job. This is fairly easy, but it constitutes “yet another configuration step”. If Fever runs slowly for you, you only have your own cheap hosting to blame. I installed Fever on a cheap Dreamhost account, and sluggishness is occasionally evident.

You can blacklist certain sites if you want to prevent them from appearing in your hot area.

Loads of keyboard shortcuts. All different from Google Reader, but probably not too hard to relearn.

The search results view. Here I’ve searched for “usability” and it’s returned the matching articles in the middle column.

Footnote: I misspelled Shaun’s name as Sean in the original post. Thanks to Ryan for pointing this out -I’ve now corrected it. Sorry Shaun!

Why do people do this? This email is the final step of an otherwise great marketing campaign. I’m not singling these guys out, it’s a common mistake that everyone seems to make. This email template relies entirely on images, but since most email clients have images turned off by default, the email falls flat. What’s enticing about the email shown above? What would drive a user to do turn the images on? Not much.

The lesson here is a simple one: images in email should be treated as progressive enhancements. In other words, emails should be perfectly readable and enticing with the images turned off – and they should be even better with them turned on. Simple, really.

On the day she manages to find the offices in the center of town and presses the buzzer. A garbled voice invites her onto the second floor, and she finds herself sitting in a waiting room. “This reminds me of a job interview” she thinks to herself. “I can’t believe I’m feeling so nervous.” The receptionist tells her she’ll have to wait 5 minutes because the researcher needs to finish their current test session. “Researcher? Test? This is getting weird.”

Finally she is invited through by a tired looking man. It’s a small room with one table and two chairs. This is not what she expected. “Um, where are the other people for the focus group?” Joan asks timidly. The man gives her a quizzical look and explains it’s a one-to-one depth interview. She notices that one of the walls has a big mirror on it. A bit like in those police dramas. In fact, just like in those police dramas.

The researcher starts droning through a script. She feels like she’s having her rights read to her. He gestures for her to sign some kind of contract. This does not feel right. Not one bit. Joan starts to rationalise. “£50 for an hour. I can do this. Just answer the man’s questions. Almost a pound a minute. Just act normal and it’ll be over soon…”

When you’re used to running the show, it’s easy to forget what it’s like to be a research participant. It’s also easy to create a stressful situation, where the participant can’t concentrate and their only real care is to get through the session, get paid and get out.

At a company I worked at a few years ago, one of the Directors stored a load of their belongings in one of the labs while they were moving house. We ended up with well worn sofa, coffee table, stereo, rug, books, and even a pile of logs next to the fireplace. It was only meant to be temporary, but it turned out to be so inviting, we kept it like that. I admit, refurbishing your own lab might not be possible, so here are some practical tips for relaxed lab sessions:

• Spend the first few minutes building rapport. Don’t even refer to the session or the paperwork.
• Don’t use labs with two-way mirrors unless the research requires it. If you must, cover the mirrors with curtains when not in use.
• Make the lab feel homely. Put up some art. Remove any unused cameras or microphones. Use discrete kit if possible.
• Never say “This is not a test” or “We are not testing you”. It sounds like doublespeak. Also, don’t mention the word “task”, say “activity” instead, it’s less threatening.
• If you are compelled to use an awkward research technique (e.g. eye tracking or timed tasks), then spend 5 minutes doing a dummy task to warm up. Be honest and admit that it might feel a little awkward at first.
• Tell the participant they are considered an ideal customer by your client who wants to design their product to perfect for them. Mention that right now, it’s a little rough around the edges.
• Take a leaf out of the ethnography book: dress in a similar manner to your participants.
• Sessions should not be rushed, otherwise you will be continuously interrupting them and telling them to move on – another source of stress. Reduce the number of tasks if possible
• You become less friendly when you’re tired, so don’t schedule too many tests in one day. 4 x 90 minute sessions in one day should be your maximum.

Have you got any other tips you’d like to share? Add them in the comments, maybe together we can come up with an über-list!

Amendment: thanks for all the comments and advice here, on twitter and on the BNM mailing list. Looks like all the interest caused the shop to change their mind and offer me a refund.

I’m taking a break from my usual UX related stuff to ask for some advice in this post.

Last night I walked into Solutions inc in Brighton and bought a Macbook Pro. Or so I thought.

Having got the laptop home and started it up, I realized I’d been given a old model. I can understand how they made the mistake as it looks almost identical, is priced almost identically, and has almost identical packaging. The receipt shows that I bought the old model – but still, it was the store’s fault, as I clearly asked for the newer Pro model. So I went straight back in there and asked to swap it for the newer model and pay the small excess (only £50 or so).

Sounds reasonable? They wouldn’t take it back. They are saying they don’t legally have to take it back as I have opened the box, but in this case they will charge me a restocking fee (£50), plus the excess (approx £50) to give me the newer Macbook Pro. (Note: they aren’t offering me a refund, period).

They are also being really unpleasant, saying that if I take them to court they will win because “They’ve never lost a case at small claims court”. The manager, Daniel, wouldn’t even give me his surname. He also refused to give me the firstname or surname of the sales assistant who sold me the laptop (I suspect it may have been the sales assistant’s first day or something because he was having trouble with the till and didn’t know much about the stock).

So, my question is to you, dear readers, what do I do now? Do I take it back and pay the restocking fee (etc)? Or do I hang onto a computer that I don’t want, and go through the tiresome process of taking them to small claims court?

“…I was just trying to solve a development problem we had. Brand new hardware, brand new software, you’re testing the stuff out – it would hang up all the time! The only solution you had was to turn the power off, wait for a few seconds, turn the power back on, wait for it to go through the power-on self test, and I said – I’m writing all this code for the keyboard, let’s just shortcut it! I originally intended for it to be [...] just something we were using in development. [...] It was a five minute job. I didn’t realize I was going to create a cultural icon when I did it. But I have to share the credit. I invented it, but I think Bill made it famous. [Bill Gates pulls a bemused face, crowd laughs] … When you used it for NT logon! That’s what I meant! Okay… Oh boy!”"

Can’t see the youtube video above?

It’s interesting that Ctrl-Alt-Delete is an annoyance that was never quite annoying enough to warrant being killed off in its youth. As a result, it’s become so entrenched that it’s here for good – a vestigial feature, like the human appendix. Useless, but part of the DNA.

Most good design processes take inspiration from evolution. In other words, a bunch of designs are tried out, the worst performers are killed off, and the best performers are bred. In real life, animals evolve through the process of mutation, sex and death. In the world of human-driven design, we don’t have this luxury, so we have to track the performance of our creations and do the breeding and the culling ourselves.

This begs the question, are you doing enough mutation, sex and death in your own design process?

If you’ve never seen the ins and outs of a real life UX research project, check out this report. They’ve even included some highlight videos from the sessions. It’s a bit dry, but it’s a nice case study for newcomers to the field. They’re also inviting input from the community, in a similar way to Leisa Reichelt et al’s activities for Drupal. Good stuff!

One of the common ways to reduce your initial outlay is to opt for free or low cost software if you can get away with it. For example, maybe you’d consider using a bug tracker like Sifter or Jira, but you’d finally opt for Bugzilla. It’s not pretty, but it’s free – and it has all the features you need.

With a cluttered, unintuitive UI, Bugzilla has a learning curve – but it’s not insurmountable. Plenty of companies use it.

Next on the list for your company is mobile phones. iPhones would be nice, but they’re too expensive. Better to opt for last year’s Windows Mobile handsets, the ones that come free with the contract. You can’t argue with free.

Older versions of Windows Mobile have been widely criticised for poor usability and “toothpick” interaction style, but what the hell – lots of people have learned to live with it. It packs a lot of features in for the price, that’s for sure.

What’s next on the list, then? What about a wiki? Knowledge management is, after all, pretty important. Maybe you could use Confluence or PBworks – they are nicely crafted packages, and not too expensive either. But hey, there are plenty of free solutions out there, like Mediawiki.

Mediawiki may have an interface that only its mother could love, but if it’s good enough for Wikipedia, it’s got to be doing something right.

But let’s stop and think for a moment. Everyone in your company will spend most of their days looking at this software. They’ll probably spend more time looking at these UIs than they spend looking at the faces of their loved ones. Without realising it, you’ve set a standard. You’ve taught everyone in your company that UIs like this are ‘normal’, and are the right way of doing things. When someone needs to design a new advanced search UI, what do they think of immediately? Why, Bugzilla of course. That’s a typical advanced search UI – everyone knows how to use it, right?

Wrong. That’s the classic egocentric fallacy in action, the lynchpin of all bad design: “Other people see the world how I see it, and think how I think. Therefore if I find it easy to use, everyone should be able to.” According to Piaget, humans grow out of this phase at age 7. If only that were true!

You can’t expect all of your staff to be great UI designers. But if you surround them with great UIs, you improve their ability to discern quality, to recognise bad design, and to point the finger and say ‘this doesn’t seem right’.

There are lots of good reasons to use free software, and many more reasons to use open source. Raising the bar for your own UI design is rarely one of them.

What do consumers expect when they buy a bundle of services like Internet, Telephone and TV from a converged provider? Is there a gap between their expectations and what they actually get? And what can the providers do about it?

Using a feedreader and can’t see the slides?

Many thanks to Filip and Ian for all their great insights, to all the other UX Brighton organisers, particularly Danny Hope, for making the event happen, and to The Werks for providing the venue.

UX Brighton is a free event that happens on the second tuesday of every month. The next one is a film night at The Eagle. Coming up this year we also have Human Factors International, Bunnyfoot, CX Partners, We are: London and various others pencilled in. If you want to be on that list, get in touch!

So, you’d expect most successful web businesses to be totally on top of their analytics. You’d think that they’d all have their own special procedures and internal systems. You’d think they’d know everything about their users’ behaviour and the impact of every tiny design tweak they implement on their sites.

But the fact is, most businesses suck at analytics. Big time. They are staring at the default reports thinking “well, this is nice… but how does it help me make decisions?”

So how do they respond? They pay UX consultancies thousands of dollars a day to come in and run qualitative research, to give them insights about their customers’ behaviour by looking at tiny numbers of people carry out tasks in awkward, artificial lab settings. All the while they are sitting on a huge pile of solid quantitative data telling them exactly how their real customers are behaving, right now.

What a mess!

The next big innovation in analytics isn’t going to be about the technology. It’s going to be about the UI. Smart reporting tools that answer questions and directly aid decision making – that’s what the world needs. In the meantime, UX specialists have got to get a whole lot better at analytics. Why not get started by reading this presentation by Louis Rosenfeld?

Using a feed reader and can’t see the slides?

“[...] Google has conducted internal tests, according to people familiar with them, in which the company put its logo and treatment on another engine’s search results. Users still prefer the results with the Google logo, even if they’re not Google results.” (Abbey Klaassen; May 25, 2009)

→ Read full article: ‘Is the new Microsoft Search ready to rumble?’

This gem was mentioned in Henry Petroski’s “Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design“.

In 1662 William Grey of Pittendrum built a house for himself in Edinburgh (pictured above). He was concerned about the problem of burglary and intruders entering his house while he slept, so he came up with a devious solution: he designed his staircase to have uneven steps. While he was able to learn the pattern, any night-time intruders would stumble on them, causing a noise. This would wake him and presumably elicit a loud stream of Scottish expletives. This response would then cause the intruder to flee, which, as the final part of his design, would cause them to stumble again but this time fall down the entire flight of stairs. Problem solved!

In the book ‘Small Things Considered’, Petroski then goes on to discuss the dangers of staircase design (5000 people a year are killed in the US by falling down stairs), the ergonomics of staircase usage (descending stairs is harder than ascending on steps with overhangs, due to the shape of our feet), cultural differences in the people wear out wide staircases (Americans prefer the right and taking inside corners because they drive on the right), and the ancient Greek specifications for staircase design in temples. To get an idea of what the rest of Petroski’s book is like, picture this sort of meandering but logical analysis proceeding through all kinds of things from cups to luggage, glasses, supermarket floorplans, toothbrushes, paper bags and non-stick pans… that’s basically his book in a nutshell. Not everybody’s ideal bedtime reading, but a really pleasant book to flick through from time to time.

On User Interfaces:

On User Training:

On Information Architecture:

On Social Media:

On Security:

On the Recession:

On Aging User Groups:

On Rebates:

In this article I interview Maya Middlemiss, MD of Saros Research, who talks about the ins and outs of recruitment for user research, and among other things, how to avoid getting people like the dude in the photo from turning up to your research sessions.

INTRODUCTION

One of the most common questions I get asked by research newbies is “Where do you get your users from?”. My response is simple – I outsource my participant recruitment.

If you choose to do-it-yourself, recruiting participants for your user research can turn into a nightmare. You’ve got to track down the right people, screen them, interview them, give them appointments, make sure they turn up in the right place on time, cope with cancellations and misrecruits, arrange payment, and that’s before the research has even started. Aside from it being a massive time drain, if anything goes wrong (like having the dude in the photo turning up to one of your sessions), you’re the one accountable. This is why I work with recruitment partners who I can rely on to get the job done properly.

INTERVIEW WITH MAYA MIDDLEMISS

HB: Maya, I need to run a research project in exactly two weeks, and I need 10 niche users turn up at my office on a specific timetable. Can you help me?

MM: The short answer is yes! That’s one of the primary services that we provide at Saros. All you have to do is email me the specification of what kind of participants you need and what your schedule is. We then devise a screening questionnaire with you. Following that, Saros will pre-screen a demographically eligible sample from our database (circa 160k UK consumers) and invite a selection them to complete your screener online. Those who pass will be telephone interviewed, and finally, we’ll arrange appointments to fit into your timetable. This means you can relax and rest assured that on the day, the right kind of people will turn up at the right time. We deal with all the admin and logistics so you don’t have to.

HB: How much of your business involves sourcing participants for user experience & usability research? What other areas do you service?

MM: Our clients these days are probably about 50/50 usability & user experience, vs . ‘traditional’ market research – (e.g. advertising focus groups). We also have a number of design and innovation clients who sit somewhere in between the two and use a variety of methodologies.

HB: What’s a typical price when recruiting users for a run-of-the-mill usability study?

MM: Well it’s hard to name a ‘typical’ project, but entry level for usability is probably around £75 per head – it all depends on how hard the people are to find / how niche it’s going to get. “Must be a Vodafone user” = easy; “Must have a Blackberry Bold on Vodafone business plan taken out in past 3 months and not reject the i-phone, born in a month with an ‘r’ in it…” let’s just say, samples can suffer from overdesign sometimes!

Of course respondents also need compensating, and a 90 minute one-on-one usability session is actually very demanding to take part in – makes a group discussion about shampoo look like a walk in the park! For anything over an hour we advise an incentive of £50, and for B2B it can obviously get a lot higher.

HB: Some companies aren’t set up to pay respondents in cash, and prefer to pay by giving freebies like mouse mats and t-shirts. What’s your stance on this?

MM: Anything branded by the end client is not acceptable to be given to respondents as incentives, under Market Research Society regulations re the problem of selling under the guise of research – this regulation was tightened up in 2008 and a lot of people still aren’t aware of it. It really has got to be cash – you do get what you pay for, and we know you have a great deal more invested in the session than that £50 in any case, far more to lose if someone drops out last minute or fails to show up.

If you don’t want to handle/prepare the cash yourselves we can can arrange the cash and have it couriered it to your venue. Some researchers like to pay their participants electronically after the event, but good old fashioned cash is the best possible motivator and guarantor of good turnout! The only exception is under 16s, if they are taking part their adult chaperone should receive a small cash payment for travel expenses but we feel it’s better to give kids non-branded vouchers rather than a ‘brown envelope’.

HB: The most annoying thing when you are doing depth research is to realise half-way through a session that you’ve got a dud user on your hands who is giving you bogus data. It’s unavoidable that duds will slip through the net occasionally – But what does Saros do to minimise this kind of problem?

MM: These people are small in number but disproportionately problematic in our industry. Our database currently numbers over 160,000 members, and I would guess a couple hundred are maybe in this category –we advertise for members and they’d be crazy not to register with us. Of course any research activity they take part in with us we control and track rigidly, but we have to rely on their declarations regarding ‘other’ research… Many of them we have tagged – we always ask for feedback from our clients, and log every comment received. We also run regular de-duplication routines to catch the multiple applicants – at one point we had 14 women in Leeds who apparently shared a set of initials and a mobile phone number, she had set up different email accounts, profiles etc. – unbelievable! It’s actually very hard to track down the *very* small minority who lie constantly and consistently – we continue to root them out, but we believe our best possible defence against their damage to our business is to continually recruit fresh new genuine people to replace them, and there are thousands of them for every liar/dud.

We try very hard to design screening processes that are robust and watertight, but occasionally someone successfully lies their way into research for which they are blatantly ineligible. We word our confirmation and joining letter to respondents very carefully to indicate that our client has NO obligation to pay them anything, if it emerges that their responses to screening questions was ‘inconsistent’, though we completely appreciate that it’s very challenging on a number of levels to say to someone ‘you’re clearly a lying little ****** aren’t you, get outta here!’. Obviously you are going to try and limp onwards and salvage some kind of insight from the session however bad they are… Whenever anything like this happens, we will work with you to try and put it right – and if we have misunderstood or misapplied a screening criteria, or sent you an outright con artist, that will be at our expense!

A particular problem for one-on-one research is when your participants don’t turn up for the session. At least with group research, the session can still go on – with usability testing, you have to cancel the session. There are various safeguards you can use, depending on your schedule and your needs on the day., For example, we can recruit an additional session at the end of the day, and if you don’t need them, we can cancel and pay them off by phone. Alternatively, you can pay a participant to be a “floater” and sit in the lobby all day, to take the place of a no-show if needed. as If you have mission critical project, you can even double book all your sessions – but this is pretty expensive. If you tell us your situation, we can work out the best way of addressing your needs.

HB: What can I do to avoid getting users who are monosyllabic and basically unhelpful?

I would hate to reinforce any unfortunate stereotypes about early adopters and techies being shy inarticulate and geeky, so we won’t even go there! Let’s just say that EVERY research participant, whatever the project, needs to check out on a number of criteria beyond meeting the spec, and our interviewers are looking for a number of softer qualities that we hope add up to a ‘good’ respondent… Do they clearly have good spoken English? A strong but understandable accent is fine, but can they comprehend your conversation clearly and respond articulately and helpfully? Are their answers consistent and unhesitant? Are they genuinely enthusiastic about taking part and wanting to pass the selection process?

We also like to ask one or two completely unrelated ‘imagination’ questions at the end of the phone interview, to test that they do have some conversation and ability to free associate etc. If you can share details of the methodologies you will be using, we can tailor this appropriately. For example, in a project looking at packaging prototypes and designs, we might ask people about things you could do with a brick rather than build with it, or if it’s all about using a visual interface we can ask about associations with colours etc… or sheer fantasy stuff about who from fiction/history they’d like to meet or superpowers they’d choose!

Maya Middlemiss is Managing Director at Saros Research Ltd. Feel free to get in touch with Maya regarding your participant recruitment needs in the UK.

Using a feed reader and can’t see the video?

The DVD is available on amazon.

I really like the idea of FiveSecondTest – it’s a lightweight, free webapp for gathering user feedback on your site designs, particularly suited to people who have zero budget and little time for user research.

The original version had fairly basic functionality, and this is something they are trying to address with their new beta. They are looking for UX people to try it out and give feedback. With your input, fivesecondtest has the potential to become something really valuable. Go try it out.

→ http://beta.fivesecondtest.com

“By using a Google Streetview-like camera, a system with six lenses, not as a photo but as a video camera, an all-encompassing picture is captured. [...] From the point where the images were recorded, the viewer can look in any direction, let his eyes wander through the crowd, or stare at the ground or the air, which makes viewing a video an experience without boundaries.” – Yellow Bird press release

Using a feed reader and can’t see the video above?

Ever wondered what it’s like to be trapped in a crowd of 600,000 Dutch clubbers? Now you know… Oh, and did you notice the bonus pole dancer?

Thanks to @delarge for the link.

Example: youtube.com

Problem: the user fills in the registration form, but makes a few errors. Upon submitting, they not only get an error message but also find their chosen password has been wiped out. So they have to enter it again, and perhaps even a third time if they are unlucky. They get pissed off and a small but notable proportion of them give up.

Solution: where possible, use JavaScript validation to ensure fields have been completed correctly – this avoids the password fields being wiped out. Another common mistake is to forget the user’s email address between the log-in and ‘forgotten password’ page. It’s rude to make users repeat themselves, whatever the context.

Example: Archive.org

Problem: when a new user finds a video that they want to comment on, they are required to register. Upon completion of the registration process, where do you think the site drops them off? At the video they wanted to comment on? No – instead the user is taken back to the home page, so if they want to add their comment they then need to search for the video by hand. By this time, a proportion of users will have lost interest or forgotten what they set out to do. It isn’t a catastrophic failure – but it’s a failure all the same, and if you make this mistake for revenue-critical user journeys, you will pay the price.

Solution: always keep track of any activity the user sets out to do, and pipeline them back into it when they complete log-in or registration. This keeps them focused and will reduce drop out.

Example: Vimeo.com

Problem: users sometimes attempt to register without realising they already have an account with your site. It’s easiest for developers to just give them an error message, and leave the user to make their own way to the correct form. Vimeo, for example, does exactly this. Again, this isn’t a catastrophic failure. but it’s careless and shows little consideration for your users.

Solution: it’s unkind to leave them in a dead end with only an error message for guidance – it’s much more helpful to reroute them automatically, or at least give them a prominent link through to the log-in area. (Caveat: some large sites are attacked so relentlessly that they will not divulge whether a username is valid, since this is useful information for attackers. However, the risk is mitigated through the use of failed log-in throttling).

Problem: the user has difficulty reading the text in the CAPTCHA. They often have to try more than once, causing frustration and increasing the drop out rate. For example, Sampa.com reported that they achieved a 10% uplift in conversion rates by removing CAPTCHAs. That’s money on the table.

Solution: a CAPTCHA should be a last resort, having tried other alternatives. For example you can use a honeypot technique, that uses a form field that’s invisible to a user but visible to a bot – if it gets filled in, you know it’s not from a human. Or you can experiment with softer CAPTCHAs like riddles or simple math problems. The best tactic is to start as soft as possible, and only ramp up if bots become a real problem.

Problem: an email verification barrier is a way of confirming that the user attempting to register does in fact own the email address they are registering with. It works by sending the user an email containing a link, that they must then click. On many sites, if the user does not do this, they aren’t allowed to log in, and are left standing out in the cold. Some users can’t find the message in their inbox, and others get side-tracked when they see other unread emails. By encouraging them to leave your site, you open the door for many uncontrollable factors.

Solution: the real question you should consider is whether you really need an email verification step, and if you do, where it needs to live. Although I’ve named myspace as an offender, they do have to deal with epic proportions of spam, so they at least have an excuse. Hi5, though, being the underdog, are working far harder to build their userbase.It is rarely necessary to lock your users out completely. It’s far more effective to let them in, but block them from doing the one or two things that genuinely need email verification. For example, let them log in, but don’t start sending them loads of emails until they’ve verified that they do indeed own that email address (this ensures your email server doesn’t get a punitive spam score). Similarly, if you have any private information about that email address, don’t reveal it to them until you are sure they are who they claim to be.

Lazy Registration
It almost goes without saying, but one approach that often delivers an excellent user experience is to remove the registration barrier entirely and opt for a lazy registration model. You can find out more about this in the lazy registration demo that I posted last month.

Security vs. User Experience
I have to finish this post with a big caveat about security. There’s always going to be a tension between security and usability – in fact, when you notice a UX antipattern somewhere, it’s probably the result of an enthusiastic security policy. If you’re lucky enough to have a very successful site, you may find it becomes the target of specific and sustained attacks. If that happens, you may have to batten down the hatches and ignore some of the recommendations in this post, such as adding CAPTCHAs regardless of the usability implications. However, if you’re really smart, you’ll find a way to deal with bots and provide a great user experience at the same time.

Other resources:

• Registration design patterns on Konigi.
• Sign up and ramp up design patterns from Adaptive Path.
• Sign up forms must die – Luke Wrobleski’s ALA article
• Lazy Registration Demo Screencast of the Madgex Job Board platform

Anyway, the friends shared items functionality is awesome and I can’t get enough of it. Please add me as your friend! I don’t care if you’re a complete stranger – if you’re into UX, then we’ve got something to talk about. Here’s how:

First, from within Gmail, you’ll see the Google chat area in the left hand column:

Enter my email address – harrybr@gmail.com – as shown below. You have to ‘invite me to chat’. Conceptually this makes no sense whatsoever, but this is what you have to do to become friends on Google Reader.

Later on, when you log in to Google Reader, you’ll see I’m there in your friend list. Now we can share links and comments. Hooray, now we can enter an endless cycle of semi-work-related group procrastination!

Book now – only 21 places left!

• Impress your prospective clients by developing your repertoire of elitist acronyms and ISO standards
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• Apply the rainmaking scam to UX – when your first round of consultancy doesn’t have any measurable effect on their website, convince them they just need to hire you for yet more projects!
• How to write proposals using the zero accountability methodology ®
• Tips on how to coin your own terminology, then spend next year’s conference season doing public speaking gigs around the world!

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