• The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" – There is No Crowd | ReadWriteWeb
  "Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today's web. His research focused on studying the voting patterns across several sites featuring user-generated reviews including Amazon, IMDb, and BookCrossing. The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. In other words, as many have already begun to suspect, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd" really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing extremely positive or extremely negative."
• How Personality Can Improve User Experience | Consequencing
  "[M]ost usability peeople might say the button should explain what it does. [...] It made me wonder if there are other sites which should be slightly less formal but aren’t. But it’s a risky business. There’s a thin line between being friendly and being pretentious."
• How Does User Experience Design Fit into Marketing? | RTCRM Sparkblog
  "With marketers increasingly following their customers online, user-experience designers and marketers find themselves going through some growing pains on their way towards partnering to create great sites. "
• Patterns for the Color Blind
  "About 8% of the male population has some sort of color blindness. The color blind have the inability to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues. Because of this, the color blind have trouble with a lot of websites.
  Are you a working on a website? The patterns and examples on this site help you create websites the color blind can use without problems."
• UX is making me dumb | Doug McCune
  "User Experience Design (or UX for short) has exploded on the software scene carrying a blazing torch of freedom and promising to guide us to the holy land. We are now dedicating time and resources specifically to user experience design. This emphasis on actually designing user interactions and the experience of our applications is a fantastic effort and I applaud all those that wave the UX flag and sing its praises. But I have one problem: UX is making me a worse software developer."

(via delicious.com)

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