Dana Chisnell has done some research into what happiness is and how to design happiness into user experiences. According to Dana, there are three levels of happy user experiences:

- Mindfulness: The feeling of being paid attention to, that the designer is being considerate of our needs and wants.

- Flow: The feeling being of fully focused in a task to the point where we loose track of time.

- Meaning: The feeling of fellowship, making a difference and being involved in something bigger than yourself.

In the article, Dana gives example of sites that have accomplished to build these types of happiness into their designs.

Links:

• Beyond Frustration: Three levels of happy design 

Henrik Olsen - June 22, 2010

See also: Emotional design (9) 

In this article, Jared Spool looks at how four businesses made their products more fun and engaging by adding elements of play to the user experience.

Links:

• Designing with the Elements of Play 

Henrik Olsen - April 19, 2010

See also: Persuasive design (21)  Emotional design (9)  Cases and Examples (28) 

Over at UX Matters, Michael Hawley writes about a quite interesting take on how to measure the viability of an visual design: Ask people to describe their experience of a design by selecting adjectives such as "busy", "fresh", "clear" and "trustworthy" from a predefined list. Then asses how these adjectives align with the goals you have set for the design.

Links:

• Rapid Desirability Testing: A Case Study 

Henrik Olsen - February 22, 2010

See also: Visual design (19) 

According to Jared Spool, research by his company UIE shows that well-done navigation and content graphics help users. Ornamental graphics, on the other side, doesn't prove to benefit the user experinece. In their research, they can't find any evidence that they help users trust a site or make it seem more professional or friendly. On the contratry, ornamental graphics can be distracting and annoying to users.

Jared recommends that teams focus on delivering helpful navigation and content graphics and resist the temptation for ornamental graphics.

Links:

• Deciding When Graphics Will Help (and When They Won't) 

Henrik Olsen - December 06, 2009

See also: Visual design (19)  Research (128) 

With a little help from his twitter friends, Keith Lang has complied a list of top 10 User Experience Design myths:

- If the Design is a Good One, You Don't Need to Test It
- People Don't Change
- Design to Avoid Clicks
- UX Design Stops at the Edges of the Product
- If you Have Great Search, You Don't Need Great Information Architecture
- Can't Decide? Make it a Preference
- Design Always with Implementation in Mind
- People Know What They Like
- People Read
- The Design Has to be Original

Links:

• Top UX Myths 

Henrik Olsen - August 26, 2009

See also: Simplicity vs. capability (7)  Information architecture (15)  Usability testing (68) 

According to Jakob Nielsen, web usability has taken hold in recent years. His tests show that success rates have increased 15% from 2004 to 2009. But people still can find their way around websites. From 2004 to 2009, user failures cased by bad information architecture has only decreased by 4%.

Links:

• IA Task Failures Remain Costly 

Henrik Olsen - April 20, 2009

See also: Navigation (63)  Information architecture (15)  Research (128) 

Donald Norman is always worth listening to. Here, he gives a short talk on how design can make us happy.

Links:

• Don Norman: The three ways that good design makes you happy 

Henrik Olsen - March 21, 2009

See also: Emotional design (9)  Talks and presentations (18) 

In this article, Jared Spool tells a story of how his company helped an e-commerce site increase purchases by 45%.

The site lost lots of purchases because the required customer registration frustrated people. Usability tests showed that they resented having to register and repeat customers couldn't remember their account login.

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button and made customer registration optional. With an increased sale of $300,000,000 the first year, the client was happy.

Links:

• The $300 Million Button 

Henrik Olsen - January 15, 2009

See also: Cases and Examples (28)  E-commerce (26)  Shopping Carts (9)  Forms (30)  Cost-justification and ROI (27)  Usability testing (68) 

Ryan from 37signals has written an interesting post on the trade-off between populating interfaces with many features to improve efficiency versus distributing them over more screens to make them easier to digest.

Referring to Edward Tufte, Ryan explains the dilemma as a question of having information displayed adjacent in space or stacked in time. He concludes that while screens with low complexity gives the eye less to filter through, separating elements onto different screens reduces the need for navigation and makes it easier to move attention from one element to another.

Links:

• Learning from "bad" UI 
• My article on balancing visual and structural complexity in interface design 

Henrik Olsen - September 01, 2008

See also: Web page design (39)  Simplicity vs. capability (7) 

According to Jakob Nielsen, these are the 10 most common usability violations found in web applications:

1. Non-standard interface controls, such as home-grown scrollbars
2. Inconsistency in the way things work, appear and are labelled across the app
3. No providing proper affordances that give people visual clues about what they can do with an object (e.g. that they can drag-and-drop an object)
4. Not giving proper feedback about what is happening
5. Bad error messages that don't tell what went wrong and how to fix it
6. Asking for the same information twice
7. Not providing defaults (e.g. in a list of radio buttons)
8. Dumping users into the app without giving them an idea of how it works
9. Not indicating how collected information will be used
10. Offering system-centric features that reflect the system's internal view rather than the users

And generous as Jakob is, he also has a bonus mistake: Reset buttons on web forms.

Links:

• Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes 

Henrik Olsen - February 20, 2008

See also: Web applications (6)  Error handling (7)  Guidelines and Standards (15)