Here are some useful examples:

20 Fantastic Resources For User Experience Know How:
http://www.inspiredm.com/2009/05/15/ux-madness-20-fantastic-resources-for-user-experience-know-how/

50 iPhone Apps for Web Designers and Developers
http://mac.appstorm.net/roundups/iphone-roundups/50-iphone-apps-for-web-designers-developers/

20 Tools to Make the life of a Web Developer Easier
http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/20-tools-to-make-the-life-of-a-web-developer-easier/

25 Most Useful Blogs for web design and development
http://www.webappers.com/2009/04/06/25-most-useful-blogs-for-web-design-development/

50 Great Examples of Data Visualizations
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/

5 impressive Mashups of Twitter and Flickr
http://mashable.com/2009/05/11/twitter-flickr-mashups/

30 days to become a freelancer
http://www.skelliewag.org/30-days-to-become-a-freelancer-961.htm

Trend spotting a fashion that is beginning to get irritating.

Amazon gets 11th spot for most innovative for its customer experience by Business week: 50 Most Innovative Companies.

Exccccuuuuse me. But – um, recommendation engines were really amazing years ago. Since then we’ve continued to benefit from them and we’ve continued to be really unsatisfied with amazons illogical shopping cart.

I’m so blinded by this right now I can’t even comment on the other awards. Eh. These things are really just advertising anyway… clearly.

And I’m not the only one who thinks so…

Twitter: #amazonfail

User Interface Concepts

• Graphics are really helpful for supporting an idea by aiding comprehension.
• Animated images may make a page unusable to the dyslexic viewer because they are very distracting on the eye.  (Possibly allow users to control the animation)
• Consider breaking complex pages down into a few pages to avoid information overload.
• Simple navigation which includes a home page (back to the start) item is important to aid easy navigation. Many dyslexics have a poor sense of direction.

Design & text attributes

• Ensure that foreground and background colour combos provide sufficient contrast.
• Larger text is easier to read.
• Shorter text length and narrower text columns make reading easier
• Increasing line-height to 1.3em makes it easier for dyslexic readers to read longer lines of text
• San Serif fonts (although the site above is serif)
• Helps to decrease the letter spacing but increase the word spacing (dyslexic users have some trouble recognising where words begin and end)
• Justified disrupts word spacing making it more difficult (visual distraction for reader = loosing their place).
• Use italics sparingly

Copy considerations

• Abbreviated text makes it harder – always provide the full term initially with the abbreviation immediately after in first instance
• Write in simple short sentences
• Some dyslexics use screen readers to help them read.

Thus far many media sites have simply converted their large demanding search forms on the home page into a refinement toll on the search results page.

However, the question remains: Is this the best way to provide users with functionality on the search results page that helps users find what they are looking for?

How internet dating got me thinking….

When looking for a date users are unlikely to alter their most important criteria on the search results page.For example, users are unlikely to think that another member who is well out of their age range, location range and lifestyle habits would be a suitable date on the search results page.

This is different to users looking for a home, car or job because their preferred criteria could change during a search. For example, you’ve just started looking for a car. Your friend’s Mazda seems to run ok, you’ll start looking there… you enter in your search for a Mazda, then select body type, transmission and price range only to find that there aren’t very many Mazda that you can afford, no problem – you can broaden your search by selecting all makes and models and in doing so you find a nice looking Honda. This is a reasonable scenario – unlike an internet dater changing their gender, sexual preference or smoking preference from a results page. It just doesn’t make sense.

For users who would look for dates in 2 locations for example or bisexual people looking for both gender’s it is reasonable design for the user to conduct two separate and distinct searches based on each preference. Particularly in the example to distinct searches based on gender – where by all the criteria may well be different.

Given this, how useful would populating a refine panel with search criteria be? Could this be an opportunity to look outside of the box and do something other than work out the right way to display the tabulated data within our site?

So it got me thinking… and I took it back to basics.

What tasks can users perform within a search refine panel?

Below is a list of possibilities of the sort of functionality that a refine panel can provide to users. Usually a site would use a combination of these:

a) View feedback on original search
b) Select additional criteria
c) Browse content
d) Exclude content
e) Include more content
f) Preference content

Simple and straight forward. But this list is really useful in determining what is most useful for your refine panel.

Should it be for presenting feedback?
Would it be for tweaking results?
Do you want to offer new criteria
Would it be more useful for users to broaden their results or to narrow them?
Should some content be excluded?
Or do we want to offer users the ability to browse?

Naturally – it could be several of these – depending on the task at hand. Such a list however, has provided me with a handy tool for considering the sort of functionality a refine panel could offer based on the information I’m able to crawl with in the system.

There isn’t alot new. But lets take a look… Which are the features we notice right away…?

• The interface doesn’t say “Profile” anymore… its my name!
• Introduced in page tabbed navigation to deal with the long scrolling page issue
• I have to navigate to status updates… sort of liked the random ones.
• Photo news feed – see more photos than before…
• Interesting stuff like My Flickr, Delicious links, RSS Feeds are hidden

In order:
394826, 677A1B, BAB244, E2D090, CD737F, 98334C, 7F1C24.

As you can see from my scan below the colours exist so beautifully next to each other in nature.

I’d be chuffed if anyone who decided to use this pallete let me know so I could check it it out.