Anonymous Cowards, Avatars, and the Zeitgeist: Personal Identity in Flux: Part I
By Joe Lamantia Published: November 2, 2009 “We rely on our identity to make sense of almost all the experiences we have in life—digital and otherwise. And yet, experience designers rarely consider personal identity—either as an aspect of design or a factor affecting design.” Our identity—our sense of who we are, in all the various contexts we negotiate, from personal to professional, from public to private, from individual to collective—is one of the most fundamental elements of our experience and awareness. We rely on our identity to make sense of almost all the experiences we have in life—digital and otherwise. And yet, experience designers rarely consider personal iden

Participate in the 2009 UXmatters Reader Survey
By Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Publisher & Editor in Chief Published: November 2, 2009 To take the survey, please click this link now: 2009 UXmatters Reader Survey This month, we’re celebrating the fourth anniversity of UXmatters, which launched in November 2005. UXmatters is thriving. Since our launch we’ve published 290 articles on a great diversity of topics. Our community of readers is growing. Over the last year, almost 260,000 UX professionals have read UXmatters. Because our goal at UXmatters is to produce a Web magazine that fulfills the information needs of UX professionals worldwide, we want to hear from you! Therefore, we are now conducting our fourth annual reader sur

Make More Money: Best Practices for Ads in Search Results: Part 2
By Greg Nudelman and Frank Guo Published: November 2, 2009 In this installment of Search Matters, we’ll continue our discussion of ads in search results. If you missed it, read Part 1, which covered these best practices: Integrate your ads’ appearance with the rest of your site. Make sure customers can easily distinguish ads from content. Keep ads relevant and appropriate. Understand how your customers interact with ads. In Part 2, we’ll discuss the following best practices: Understand what makes a good ad. Limit cannibalization. Provide ads for internal merchandise instead of third-party advertising. Pay special attention to ads on pages that appear if there are no sear

Using Expression Blend to Explore, Demonstrate, and Document Design Solutions
By Kevin Silver Published: November 2, 2009 “As an interaction designer, I had to wonder, Do I really want to create production-ready code?” For the last 6 months, I have been using Microsoft Expression Blend as my primary design tool. Blend, shown in Figure 1, is quickly becoming a powerful product. Its new Sketchflow module had me at hello. Like any new tool, Blend requires some ramp up time. Plus, I had to consider how to use Blend within the design and development process where I work, because Blend is much more than a simple prototyping tool. Blend is a GUI development tool that can easily produce deployable code for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight platfo

Communities of Practice: Optimizing Internal Knowledge Sharing
By Michael Hawley Published: November 2, 2009 “An intranet has the potential to unify a corporate culture, emphasize core company values, and develop a sense of community among employees.” An intranet has the potential to unify a corporate culture, emphasize core company values, and develop a sense of community among employees, in addition to its basic function of providing access to documents and procedural information. Unfortunately, some intranets have simply grown organically, as collections of disjointed Web sites for different departments or document repositories for particular workgroups. The key to intranet success is to provide value to employees and give them a reason to visi