Because of a very subtle yet clever feature, Amazon makes the best of both the positive and negative reviews easy to find. And that feature, based on our calculations, is responsible for more than $2,700,000,000 of new revenue for Amazon every year. Not bad for what is essentially a simple question: “Was this review helpful to you?”

When you’re dealing with feedback from hundreds of people you don’t need to address every single issue raised. You’d be mad if you did and have no time for getting the design work done. Rather, what you’re looking for three things:

1. emergent trends
2. unexpected comments
3. obvious pickups

Lack of coherent vision is a common weakness of Agile projects. This stems both from Agile’s modular nature and, to an extent, its inherent power balance. Product owners, for all their strengths, sometimes lack the tactics to appreciate the big picture. Unchecked, this can lead to vague, volatile requirements based on strategic whim, and products faithful to company daydreams, not customer reality. A telltale symptom of this malaise is the ‘horizon effect,’ whereby potential problems are pushed repeatedly from view into future iterations, and the designer is unsure whether the solution works as a holistic whole until it is complete.

• Lesson 1: Use Clear Calls-to-Action
• Lesson 2: Put a Priority on Creative
• Lesson 3: Make Personal Connections

There’s no substitute for good graphic design. All of the Obama materials were consistently beautiful throughout the campaign. From the website, to the signage, to the downloadable desktop wallpapers—it all looked great and portrayed a distinctive brand.

Branding

• The site provides visitors with an engaging and memorable experience.
• Graphics, collaterals and multimedia add value to the experience.

Usability

• The site prevents errors and helps the user recover from them.
• The site helps its visitors accomplish common goals and tasks.

Content

• Link density provides clarity and easy navigation.
• Content is structured in a way that facilitates the achievement of user goals.
• Content is appropriate to customer needs and business goals.

There are many straight corners, but there are only four rounded ones. Rounded corners are not simply eye-candy, they’re a tool you can use to better define content boxes or application windows.

Many of the systems that have passed through HCD design phases and usability reviews are superb at the level of the static, individual display, but fail to support the sequential requirements of the underlying tasks and activities. The HCD methods tend to miss this aspect of behavior: Activity-centered methods focus upon it….

Human-Centered Design does guarantee good products. It can lead to clear improvements of bad ones. Moreover, good Human-Centered Design will avoid failures. It will ensure that products do work, that people can use them. But is good design the goal? Many of us wish for great design. Great design, I contend, comes from breaking the rules, by ignoring the generally accepted practices, by pushing forward with a clear concept of the end result, no matter what. This ego-centric, vision-directed design results in both great successes and great failures. If you want great rather than good, this is what you must do.

Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

Most of the form fields available with HTML are straightforward and easy for people to understand and use. But there is one exception. The select multiple.