UIEye

This article by Anthony Colfelt should be required reading for anyone developing and designing software in the modern world.

Even if you are not following an Agile process it places a fantastic point on how the design of your product can be impacted by the artificial constraints put forth by many practitioners of the process.

I have been there and dealt with the problems too and for the starting phases of a project I can only agree that Agile doesn’t provide the best framework to capture all the successes UCD could bring to a project.

A really interesting study on form design.

http://www.cxpartners.co.uk/thoughts/web_forms_design_guidelines_an_eyetracking_study.htm

Realism in UI Design:

The thing on the left is a house. The thing on the right means
‘home’. Somewhere between the two, the meaning switches from ‘a
specific house’ to ‘home as a concept’.

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/01/21/realism_in_ui_design/

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Recent U.I. Progress for Firefox 4.0 on Windows: “

Longtime Firefox user interface designer Stephen Horlander offers an update on his continuing work on the browser’s next Windows version. It’s a fascinating peek behind the scenes at how an intensively scrutinized design project balances platform evolution, user feedback, team input and new ideas. It’s well worth a read, as is this wiki page that more formally documents how the user interface is changing with upcoming releases.

(Via Subtraction.)

I heartily agree with what Keith Lang has written over at Think Vitamin with his top 10 UX myth list:

1. The Design Has to be Original
2. People Read
3. People Know What They Like
4. Design Always with Implementation in Mind
5. Can’t Decide? Make it a Preference
6. If you Have Great Search, You Don’t Need Great Information Architecture
7. UX Design Stops at the Edges of the Product
8. Design to Avoid Clicks
9. People Don’t Change
10. If the Design is a Good One, You Don’t Need to Test It

Go and read the full article, no matter what you design and build it is full of excellent examples:

http://carsonified.com/blog/design/top-10-ux-myths/

Interesting little post on the evolution of gmail label:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/evolution-of-gmail-labels.html

Hope Google keeps up with the interesting UI related posts.

Excellent and indepth look at the changes made to the UI of Windows 7 between Windows 7 beta to Windows 7 release candidate over at arstechnica.

Windows 7

I must say that these UI reviews by arstechnica are quite complete.

Nice little story over at ArsTechnica showing the Office 2010 technical preview screenshots that have been leaked.

They mention one of the biggest changes being the blue orb is no longer a menu, it opens up a dialogue. It seems that they have finally gone for greater consistency throughout the suite of products but considering their Microsofts poor reputation for consistent interfaces I will not be holding my breath.

I love infographics as much as the next guy, and sixrevisions have put together some awesome examples.

Have also found some interesting resources here:

• http://www.wallstats.com/
• http://www.catalogtree.net/projects/graph

The article also points to these resources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_graphics
• http://coolinfographics.blogspot.com/
• http://www.good.is/
• http://www.flickr.com/groups/diagrams/
• http://flowingdata.com/

Really interesting article about not only the future but the past of wireframes: http://www.madebymany.co.uk/the-future-of-wireframes-00991.

Its talks a lot about website wire framing, but they are such a general resource that it is worth taking the time to take a look at this article.