Usability, Design, Navigation, Interfaces, Information Architecture, Accessibility.

Both a conversation this morning and one of Rae’s posts had me thinking about the relationship between working hard and making money. A friend was trying to convince me he could make easy money, and I must admit, my first instinct is to say no. I don’t believe in easy money.

Maybe that leaves me in the cold for some opportunity whereby I could make millions just by sitting still. But the reality is, I don’t sit still. Life for me is about self development and constant learning, so I suppose even if I am missing the millions, I am living the life I want by working hard. Given that unlimited dream money I would either be busy running my own business or doing university full time to obtain several different interesting degrees. Money is simply the tool I can use to work more, because work is play. That’s what I strive for.

Now I work full-time, raise my boys, and take three courses. I have a dozen books from the library on the go, always. I feel a strange sense of calm and pleasure from being surrounded by knowledge and especially knowledgeable people, and some of my favourite friends are those that constantly challenge me intellectually. If they’re smarter than me, I want to know them. If there’s more to know and a better way to do it, I want to be there.

As Rae points out, playing hard comes after working hard. Certainly playing hard is on my list too, although the reality is working hard IS playing hard for me. The trick is to avoid playing soft – wasting time and brain power on mindlessly watching tv or sitting on the couch in some vain effort to avoid hard work. Make work hard, play hard two key elements, each with their own ambitious fuel to move you.

Recognize you make that choice to sit back and wait to be served or grab life by the horns. If you want to sit back and wait for that so-called easy money, don’t look for me. I’ll be working my ass off and earning all that money you keep dreaming of.

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Success in UX design is driven by a particular personality. UX requires straddling so many elements, and includes a wide range of experience and expertise, rather than allowing one to become comfortable doing the same ol’ same ol’. Not only are user needs met first and foremost, there is an ongoing feeling of growth and development required to keep all these needs managed. In these days where it seems crucial to balance Ajax, JavaScript, CSS, Flex, and more, we are reminded that all these technologies must most importantly be leveraged by a particular personality.

I recently read and enjoyed the job description for a UX Specialist at Viget Labs. This listing summarizes many of the soft skills and personality elements that are crucial to UX.

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Unless I am missing something very vital, so far I have been unimpressed with Thesis. With some tweaks I was able to fix the fact that I needed to horizontally scroll in this default layout, and not sure I’ll stay with the fixed width provided either. Although there was a rotating image box in the default layout (since removed), otherwise all the graphics you see here are all the graphics provided. I’m not sure exactly what was being sold here for this price, apart from a layout I could’ve pretty easily coded myself or grabbed from an existing CSS framework.

The sidebars you see at right were, as well, the only thing provided in this layout, and I’ll need to manually add category listings and other widgets later, along with actually developing the entire colour scheme and logo.

Unfortunately I need to go to bed since I’m getting up with two toddlers first thing in the a.m., so I have to leave the theme like this. At least it’s working without the horizontal scroll now, although obviously it’s bland as hell.

I’m wondering what others have seen in this theme that they found worthy of raving about.

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I have recently been learning several interesting things about website optimization, and will be making some changes around here as a result. To my two readers (hah) I offer a friendly note that my site may be wonky off and on – I’ve never been good at migrating to new themes and formats carefully. I’ve recently purchased the Thesis Wordpress theme and hope to integrate some new elements such as a “popular posts” listing and “related posts” listing as well. Although I wavered on investing Thesis initially, I realized that it would be to my great advantage to finally admit that I won’t have the time to really develop a nice theme and layout that is usable, standards-compliant, beautiful, and optimized for search engines and other methods of bringing some traffic in. So Thesis is a better solution from people who have done an excellent job already.

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Well, I’ve done it – I’ve gone and started learning about online marketing. More books to add to the shelves along with those on CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, PHP, and designing websites, graphics, navigation, information architecture, and effective user experiences. Design, development, and now marketing too.

My new books are

- ProBlogger – rather obvious what the topic is here I’m sure

- Web Design for ROI – as mentioned in the previous post, it discusses optimum web design for enhancing financial returns and competitive advantage

- Building Findable Websites – subtitled “Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond”, this one is written to help readers create more findable website and content to encourage return visits, covering such subjects as standards, accessibility, Ajax, APIs, Flash, and microformats

I’m considering now whether I should start blogging here about online marketing or set up a separate blog on the subject. As this site is my place to discuss usability and the user experience,  wonder if it wouldn’t be more useful to separate strategy and marketing concepts out to another weblog. I suppose we shall see.

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I have recently noticed a new breed of web design books that focus on strategy and users rather than specific programming languages or applications.

Designing The Moment is subtitled Web Interface Design Concepts in Action, and offers “over 30 stories that illustrate how to put good design principles to work on real-world web application interfaces”, with the intention of focusing on user experiences.

Designing For The Social Web looks at designing sites to encourage user participation, along with user behaviours surrounding their psychology, such as sign-up and the usage cycle.

Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide is targeted towards execs and entrepreneurs concerned with the profitability of designing for user participation.

I’m currently reading Web Design For ROI online, and it discusses “Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads”. Design guidelines are offered along with tips to “increase web sales/leads by 10%-50% or more”.

When I first began designing websites about a decade ago, the roles were simple – developers coded applications, and designers made nice graphics than put them together using a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver. When I worked with a designer, they did the layout in their graphics software, then exported it to an editor wherein I cleaned up the code and added server-side programming or simply JavaScript to create the functionality of the site.

I find it fascinating to continue watching web roles change – now not only is design and development considered, but even business strategy, along with usability, human-computer interaction, and information architecture. We have evolved past the “should we pay someone to do a website” and even past “let’s just throw a contact page online” to in-depth discussions of how websites can be used to maximize profitability and engage customers in an ongoing relationship. Niche positions that span from writing content through to writing code along with illustrating and graphics design open up as businesses realize the power of the web.

I like to believe that we have moved past the boom and bust and are now striving to a more mature, valuable internet.

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I absolutely adore Colour Lovers for colour inspiration and ideas. Perhaps the most inspirational part is the blog. I especially like the mushroom-inspired entry. Finally, the trends page gives me some exciting ideas.

You might also like the Color Palette Generator, which generates a palette from an uploaded graphic, and Color Blender which allows you to freely and easily generate palettes of matching colours. 

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This is the list of my most loved interface and web design books to date, as re-posted from a thread at the Web Designer Forum.

In terms of publishers of web design/development books I adore Sitepoint, Friends of Ed, New Riders, and O’Reilly. If I want to learn a new language, I grab an O’Reilly or Sitepoint book first. Friends of Ed and New Riders have some great gems too though.

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Designing Web Navigation is subtitled “Optimizing the User Experience”, and therefore drew my attention immediately. Written by James Kalbach, and published by O’Reilly, this book is also elegeantly designed and in full-colour with examples throughout. Once again the book itself conveys it’s own message – that user experience is holistic and that products must not only be readable and useful, but enjoyable.

In Part I of Designing Web Navigation, Kalbach begins by explaining web navigation through discussing how users behave and navigate throughout the web, including their behaviours and typical mechanisms used. Types of navigation and labeling are considered.

In Part II, Kalbach offers a framework for navigation design, from evaluation through analysis of business goals, content, technology, and user research. He continues by discussing architecture and information structures along with organizational schemes, once again merging user needs with content and context. Layout from visual logic through page templates and wireframes are considered, along with presentation in terms of information design, interacting with navigation, and graphic design.

Finally, in Part III, Kalbach puts navigation in “special contexts” such as prior to or after search, within faceted browsing and social tagging systems, and finally when used within rich internet applications.

As the world wide web evolves and rich internet applications continue to be designed and developed, Designing Web Navigation offers a thorough look at designing navigation effectively. Along with Designing Interfaces, this book is one that occupies an honoured place on my shelf, and is another must-read for any user experience designer. The techniques used here can be applied on the web or anywhere interface navigation is used.

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