(CNET) — Google may have reached the limits of what it can learn from dog food.
Ask almost any technology company what products and services they use within their own organizations, and most will enthusiastically admit to “dog-fooding” their own products. It’s both a show of support for their own technology and [...]

In a private meeting with the press, Mr. Deng took the time to explain the new Facebook (Facebook) redesign and all of its new features in-depth. While he didn’t reveal many new details, he did provide a very useful overview that made Facebook design and its plan much easier to understand.

via: Masable

Configure your Page’s “Settings” to allow more participation.
The new Facebook Pages that launched in March 2009 were designed to encourage more action and participation by your fans. The old design had very little wall posts or discussions. People became a “fan” and sporadically read “Updates” and that was it. The new Pages have demonstrated to [...]

This article focuses on providing new members with an effective join/signup process. Although some of these principles may seem obvious, I’ve gone through plenty of membership signup forms that still suck. So hence the post.

4 elements of an effective online community signup process
1. Easy to use web form design
As Luke Wroblewski put it in Web [...]

Know Your Typefaces! Semantic Differential Presentation of 40 Onscreen Typefaces
Dawn Shaikh* – User Experience Researcher (Seattle/Kirkland UX Team)
Summary. This article presents results from a study investigating the personality of typefaces. Participants were asked to rate 40 typefaces (from [...]

The new brand logo comes with a changing background and replaces the letters AOL with Aol. – complete with a period

AOL just released its new branding look—one consistent typography showing “Aol” with different literally hundreds of “reveals” from various artists. We’re only seeing a snapshot; the new identity fully debuts when [...]

Back in 2001, to give people a new, quicker way to find images, we launched Image Search. When you do a search for [eiffel tower] you’ll find an array of images of the tower in the daytime, in black and white, at sunset and more. With Similar Images, which recently graduated from Google Labs, you [...]

Here’s the deal. Designers should not accept every project that crosses their eyes. For five years, I was stuck in the mentality that every potential project was a chariot of gold ready to bring me unimaginable riches.
Wrong. I discovered through a series of poor projects that accepting everything is not a profitable strategy. I began [...]

via youtube.com
Telling the story of Google Chrome and how it inspired an operating system. Produced by Epipheo Studios.

Posted via web from Focus After

Usability
Form Design And The Fallacy Of The Required Field

I was on a mailing list today, and this came across:
“Use red asterisks — they’re the standard for showing required fields.”

Standards are wonderful, but if I asked my mom with is the international symbol for a required field, she would look at me like I was on [...]