BUX – Bentley Human Factors & Information Design Organization

“At its core, accessible design is transformative, flexible, intuitive and customizable, making lives better and tasks easier—core design principles, no matter the audience. While it’s not always easy to understand what accessibility means, there are simple steps that designers can take to start thinking with accessibility in mind.” Read the full article on UX Magazine.

“Several layout patterns are often recommended to take advantage of how people scan or read through a design. [Three] of the more common are the Gutenberg [D]iagram, the [Z-P]attern layout, and the [F-P]attern layout.

Each offers advice for where to place important information, but…these patterns are often misunderstood and followed without thought to what they really describe.

[Let's] walk through the what and why of each pattern and then offer something else that gives you as a designer more control over where your viewer’s eye moves across your design.”

Read the full article on Van SEO Design.

“Buttons are hardly newfangled or glamorous; they’re just an ordinary, every-day element of interaction design. Despite this, because buttons are a vital element in creating a smooth conversational flow in Web, form, and survey experiences, it’s worth paying attention to these basic best practices for buttons.” Read the full article on UXmatters.

“It is all too easy to create UX deliverables that are not visually pleasing. But UX expertise encompasses Web design, graphic design, and branding, so why should we be satisfied with mediocre design in our deliverables? When we present our personas, sitemaps, user flows, wireframes, and other design deliverables to our clients and stakeholders, it is our duty and responsibility to create well-designed deliverables.” Read the full article on UXmatters.

“Assistive technology (AT) includes devices and software used by those with impairments of one type or another.  This section lists sources for assistive technology as well as agencies that help set the standards for evaluation of AT, agencies that are helping to bring AT to a wider audience, and information about AT in general.”

Read the full listing at the Perkins School for the Blind.

“Tommy Edison has been blind since birth and is now producing videos online that reveal a glimpse into his life and the funny challenges that he faces daily. Tommy has shown us what it’s like for someone who is blind to use an ATM machine for the first time. ”

View this video and more at The Tommy Edison Experience.

“In web marketing, there is a push towards ever more granular data. One manifestation of this is the trend towards personalization. Whether it’s behavioral ad re-targeting, or dynamic content-serving based on past purchases or other data, marketers are better able to act on customer information than ever before. Another trend has been the development of personas and marketing segmentation based on the general preferences of user types defined demographic data such as age, sex, economic grouping, and so on.”

Read the full article at UX Magazine.

“What we think we understand about Hick’s Law as it pertains to Web design is oversimplified and incomplete. We need to more deeply investigate what Hick’s Law can do for Web design. In the end, we will see why this design principle is undervalued, and we will see how we have been designing incorrectly for the user’s decision-making process. In order to get there, we need to look at our current approach to Hick’s Law and why it’s wrong.”

Read the full article at Smashing Magazine.

“A new mouse-free interface, Tobii Gaze, attempts to revolutionize the way we interact with devices. The gesture-based system incorporates eye-tracking to direct an on-screen pointer and works in conjunction with touch pad input for fine-tuning.”

Watch it in action at engadget.

“The country selector. It’s there when you create an account for a new Web service, check out of an e-commerce store or sign up for a conference. The normal design? A drop-down list with all of the available countries.

However, when conducting a large session of user testing on check-out usability, we consistently found usability issues with the massive country selector drop-downs. Jakob Nielsen reported similar issues as far back as 2000 and 2007 when testing drop-downs with a large number of options, such as state and country lists.

So, this past summer we set out to redesign the country selector. This article focuses on the four design iterations we went through before arriving at the solution (free jQuery plugin included).”

View the usability problems of traditional drop-down country selectors at Smashing Magazine.

Do you see what I see?

Check out this neat two-minute video demonstrating why some typefaces are easier for dyslexics to read than others. The video is meant is a commercial for a specific font, but it also efficiently demonstrates how dyslexics view letters differently. For anyone interested in accessibility, this is an interesting demo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLtYFcHx7ec

I just discovered this incredible Martin Wattenberg visualization of a the shape of a song. Repeated sections of music are shown with the arcs. You can actually visualize any song you want, as long as you can find it as a midi file.

The image shown here is Madonna’s Like a Virgin

Interesting story over at Wired about a study that seemingly shows the difference between adult and infant color processing. Specifically, it appears that the adult mind perceives colors through verbal processing centers while infants have a “more pure” experience, experiencing it through the pre-linguistic right hemisphere.

The question is whether that means that the experience is different between adults with developed language and infants; do infants “see” color differently? It probably doesn’t mean that babies can see infra-red, but does add another layer to the concept of color naming.