4 Reasons Your UX Investment Isn’t Paying Off

We all know the business case for doing user experience (UX) work: Investing upfront in making products easy to use really pays off. It reduces project risk, cost, and time while improving, efficiency, effectiveness, and end user satisfaction. By Mashable

Follow Customers as They Actually Behave

Poor Elias St. Elmo Lewis. When he first described the sales funnel more than 100 years ago, he was trying to map the path a single customer took to a single purchase. Little did he know how badly we'd one day abuse his model. By Ad Age

Redesigning Google

How Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution. The new Google way is weird, but it's working. Read the article by Wired

Interactive Mailbox Project Shares Text-Message Secrets

Hello Lamp Post! is a new public art project that will let you communicate with post boxes and lamp posts without anyone questioning your mental health. By Wired

Micro Apartments

New York's first prefab apartment tower will rise in 2015. Its 55 units will be very, very small. By Fast Company

Solving Problems The Square Way

Not long ago, Square CEO Jack Dorsey challenged his team to create a solution for accepting payments at Starbucks, which the mobile-payments company had partnered with in August. When an engineer worked out a solution (using QR codes within the Square Wallet app that could tap into Starbucks' preexisting system), Dorsey was so giddy that he grabbed a high-end bottle of scotch off his desk and gave it to the engineer as a reward. The only catch? By Fast Company

8 Insights About The Coming Era Of Interactive Design

  Additional information here

The New Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit

This toolkit supports teachers in using design thinking tools to become agents of change in their classrooms, schools, and communities by designing more effective curriculum, spaces, tools, and systems. By Tim Brown

Life Straw

A Time Magazine Invention of the Year winner, the LifeStraw removes a minimum of 99.9999% of waterborne bacteria and filters up to 1000L of contaminated water. By Time Magazine

Explore the Urban Jungle in Style

The Urban Pod has all the bells and whistles you’d expect from such a futuristic-looking design- radar for collision warning/parking, tire pressure sensors,...By Yanko Design

The foolproof lock

My bike got stolen! Been there, done that; so the focus has to be on how do we stop these bicycle thieves from getting creative at picking locks? Simple, let’s make it a foolproof locking system. By Yanko Design

AD App Guide: Morpholio Trace

ArchDaily’s Architecture App Guide will introduce you to web and mobile apps that can help you as an architect: productivity, inspiration, drafting, and more. By Arch Daily

What women want from smartphone design

Pink phones for Mother's Day, purple phones for spring, bedazzled phones to accessorize our bling. If you listen to most marketers, one would assume that smartphone shopping for women comes down to a preference for pretty pastels and shiny objects. But it cannot be that simple, right? By Wired UK

Netherlands highways will glow in the dark from mid-2013

A smart road design that features glow in the dark tarmac and illuminated weather indicators will be installed in the Netherlands from mid-2013. By Wired UK

Skip the subway, take a ski lift to work instead

The future of mass transit will come with sweeping views, private cars, and schedule-free travel if a proposed gondola-based system takes off from sketchpads at a design firm, which stands a shot at occurring in fast-growing Texas. By NBC News

Scaling Your UX Strategy

In business today, "user experience" (or UX) has come to represent all of the qualities of a product or service that make it relevant or meaningful to an end-user — everything from its look and feel to how it responds when users interact with it, to the way it fits into people's daily lives. By Harvard Business Review

Plair

A Dongle For Streaming Videos From Your Phone To TV. By Fast Company

Zaha Hadid Races To Finish A Building

A group of Chinese developers are copy-and-pasting a replica of a Zaha Hadid shopping complex that hasn't even been completed yet. By Fast Company

Bjarke Ingels, Architect

Bjarke Ingels, Architect
Bjarke Ingels is a Danish architect who heads the Bjarke Ingels Group. He is committed to ‘pragmatic utopian architecture’ and views his work as a way to give back to society and re-imagine the future. His designs can be seen around the world from Asia to the Manhattan skyline.

Steve Jobs Remembered

Facebook – New Design and Concept by Fred Nerby

Facebook, as one of the biggest online social network has been a part of people’s lives for the past years and for more years to come. That is why every single change on the site from now and then will either freak us out or praise Facebook for making things cooler and easier. By You the Designer

20 Technology Trends for 2013

2013 Tech Trends from frog

Well Timed Closure

The Subway Signal Light is a digital sand timer that intuitively changes color from green, to amber to red, informing the passenger through passive visual clues, that the doors to the train are about to close. By Yanko Design

Yanko Design Top 50 – Best Of 2012

Here is a look at the Top 50 Designs that made their mark thanks to their empowering fortitude. By Yanko Design

Interview with David Kelly, Professor of Design, Stanford University

David Kelley on Designing Curious Employees

Design thinking is a process of empathizing with the end user. Its principal guru is David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (otherwise known as the d.school), who takes a similar approach to managing people. He believes leadership is a matter of empathizing with employees. By Fast Company

David Kelley: The future of design is human-centered

IDEOs David Kelley says that product design has become much less about the hardware and more about the user experience. He shows video of this new, broader approach, including footage from the Prada store in New York. This was done in February of 2002.

5 Ways to Begin Designing Your Life in 2013

Great designers don’t just do design, they live design. Like them, we can learn how to practice design thinking principles both at work and at home. By Tim Brown

The Future of the Book | IDEO

OpenIDEO: Connecting Communities Challenge

IDEO: How to design breakthrough inventions

How to Shop Target Like a Pro

Shopping at Target...like a pro. By BusinessWeek

3 Principles For The Future Of Gaming

John Hanke, the man at the helm of Google's experimental game, Ingress, charts the course for the future of mobile gaming. By Fast Company

NASA’s New Space Suit Lets Astronauts Dress In Seconds

If you stepped into the vacuum of space in whatever you’re wearing now, you actually might be okay. You won’t pass out. Your blood won’t boil, nor would it instantly freeze. By Fast Company

Alarm Clock App With A Slick Gestural UI

Gestural interfaces are hot, but they're still difficult to get right. Rise actually pulls it off. By Fast Company

Top 10 user resources from 2012

Ready or not, 2013 is on its way! To get you all jazzed up for the new year, here are 10 UX resources of 2012. From emerging trends to industry best practices, you’ll find some great ideas to inspire you in the coming year. From Userzoom

A Perfect Use for Personas

Personas of people who likely would benefit from things like recommendations, entertainment while waiting, a more efficient order process, and a faster way to pay. By Users Know

Raising the bar on mobile

One of the primary challenges of designing for mobile devices is that screen real estate is often in limited supply. By 24 Ways

Andy Budd

User Experience Designer and CEO of Clearleft, Andy is the author of CSS Mastery, curates the dConstruct and UX London events and is responsible for Silverbackapp, a low cost usability testing application for the Mac. Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences and was named one of the 100 most influential people in the UK digital sector by Wired Magazine. By Andy Budd

Agile Problems, UX solutions, Part 2

UX professionals sometimes misuse the terms pattern and pattern language—using them in an interchangeable manner. Indeed, even Web sites specializing in patterns and pattern languages sometimes confuse these terms! By UX Matters

Agile Problems, UX Solutions, Part 1

This is the first installment of a two-part article about how intelligent UX strategies can solve certain problems that are characteristic of agile development, as well intrinsically benefit our UX design work. By UX Matters

The Top 5 Website UX Trends of 2012

User interface techniques continued to evolve in 2012, often blurring the lines between design, usability, and technology in positive ways to create an overall experience that has been both useful and pleasurable. By UX Magazine