Userfocus Usability Newsletter, January 2014

Happy new year and welcome to the January edition of the Userfocus usability and user experience newsletter!

• Message from the Editor
• Feature article: The missing role in your design team
• 2013: Our Greatest Hits
• What we're reading
• Upcoming training courses
• User experience quotation of the month

Message from the Editor

This month, we have an article on a role you might be missing in your design team and we have a list of our most popular articles from 2013.

And if your new year's resolution is to get formal training in user experience, why not attend our 2-day immersion seminar in London in January? There are 3 places left and you'll find more information at the end of the newsletter. Later on in 2014, we have courses planned on expert reviews, design thinking, software usability, usability testing, contextual inquiry and user interface prototyping. I hope to see you on one of them.

I hope you have a happy and prosperous 2014.

— David Travis

Feature article: The missing role in your design team

Design teams often experience a common set of growing pains. They design for themselves; don't know how to choose between design alternatives; accept poor quality design research; prioritise what users say over what users do; and focus on usability and not on the user experience. Adding an experimental psychologist to your team can help fix these problems Read the article in full: The missing role in your design team.

2013: Our Greatest Hits

Seth Godin has cautioned us that the most popular articles aren't necessarily the best, so think of this as a crowdsourced list of our greatest user experience hits. Read the article in full: 2013: Our Greatest Hits.

What we’re reading

Some interesting usability-related articles that got our attention over the last month:

• No overlap between the '11 most exciting UX ideas' and the '10 best design trends' of 2013.
• UI Cheat Sheet - iOS Edition.
• Why 'simple' websites are scientifically better.
• The Lazy Information Architect's guide to organising content.
• A collection of official UI Style Guidelines from heavyweights like Apple, Google and Adobe.

Like these? Want more? Follow us on Twitter.

Usability Training: Now Booking

Web Usability: An Introduction to User Experience, Jan 20-21, London. 3 PLACES LEFT.

A fast-paced, 2-day immersion seminar that shows delegates how to boost sales and conversion rates, increase usage and improve customer satisfaction. More information about this training course: Web Usability: An Introduction to User Experience.

User Experience quotation of the month

“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” — Albert Einstein.

Hungry for more?

Read previous newsletters.