UX Booth

What’s New at the UX Booth

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Andrew Maier

Published

December 31st, 2008

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Blog, News & Events

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Christmas time changes! Tis the season to make updates. This holiday season, the UX Panel has taken a brief break to be with loved ones and eat way too much turkey (and ham) (and macaroni and cheese) (and ham). To offset the time away from doing more mundane tasks, we’ve been hard at work polishing off a couple of shiny new pages and tweaking some existing site content.

So, what’s new?

Put down the peppermint and pay attention. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s changed for the better:

1. 

   Created a facebook page/group

   While some members of the UX Panel (cough, David) have already sworn off Facebook as the next myspace, the rest of us are excited to announce our new Facebook page. If you’re a regular reader here (and even if you’re not!) skedaddle on over to Facebook and become a fan! In this way, you will proudly tell your friends: behold! I support a worthy cause, and so should you! We’re not one to aggrandize ourselves, (for example: ye olde Stephen Colbert) but we do think it’s a pretty cool way to get the word out about the ‘Booth.

   In addition, we’ve also created a related UX Enthusiasts Facebook group. We’re hoping that this will be a way to meet other people who are as excited about usability as we are. Feel free to join up and start a discussion!

   The group is completely open, so after you’re done looking around, go ahead and invite your friends! We’d love for the group to get the word out about user experience; design with the user in mind forms brand loyalty and makes for exciting product innovation.

2. Now you can submit your links and favorite resources to the UX Booth.

   Resources receives loving, goes public

   We’d love to get your feedback about this one. We’re working on building one of the best collaborative collection of resources for the UX community, if we do say so ourselves. We’re pretty excited with the results. For example, did you know you can do a five second usability test of a website, right now? – or see how your site is rendered in a text-only browser? These are just two of over 30 resources we’ve collected and added over the past month. We hope to keep it growing, and you can help.

   We’re opening up resources to the public. That’s right. If you come across a cool usability resource that you’d like to share with the UX community, sharing it is as easy as a short form. Simply click on “add a resource,” fill out the form, and off your submission goes, to our editor, Redd. If approved, the resource will be added to our queue and given a shout by @uxbooth on twitter when it’s live. Easy as that.

   One more thing. We want to organize the resources in a way that’s intuitive. We hope to employ the social power of the community to help us do this. So we have a question for you guys: how would you like to have a say in the placement of one resource over another? Would you like to be able to comment on resources? would you like to vote? Let us know what you think is best in the comments!

3. Now the UX Community can weigh in their ratings on Website reviews!

   Community Votes!

   This site is all about the community. We’d love to let everyone have their say when a site gets reviewed. To hammer home the point, we’re letting the community voice their opinion about a site’s usability via a 5-star rating system. Here’s how it works: traditionally, when a site is reviewed, the UX Panel will each weigh in on the site’s usability by giving it a rating: 1 star for poor usability and 5 stars for excellent usability. As of two days ago, the UX community can now do the same.

   After the comprehensive review is a new widget titled “UX Community rating.” By simply clicking a star, you can cast your vote on that site’s usability (but do look the site over first)! In sum, the average of the community and the UX Panel will form that site’s overall usability score. It’s not just for new content, you can cast your vote on our past reviews as well! You can rate a site in the review and then share your thoughts in the comments. In this way we hope to inform site owner’s of as many vantage points as possible.

4. We are now accepting Guest Posts! What can you contribute to the UX community?

   Guest posting is ready!

   We’ve heard your requests. It would be foolish of us to ignore them—after all, usability is all about the users.

   Even before this point, we’ve received dozens of emails about article ideas and guest posting. We’re thrilled that we can now facilitate this process. Starting this week we’re going to be taking guest posts from (hopefully!) our readers. Just head on over to our guest post form, fill in the required fields and we’ll be in touch. This blog helps represent the community and we know that it’s bigger than just four people! So, what have you got to lose? Got an idea for a post? We’ve got some ideas and guidelines on our contribute page as well. Feel free to look them over and let us know what’s on your mind.

More coming soon

These updates are just the beginning. Even though this site is young, we’re certain we’ve got a great community that’s thrilled about crafting great user experiences. So stay put. Even if you don’t check in everyday, simply subscribe to content updates and we’ll let you know when we’ve got things to share. If you’ve got some holiday cash to burn, we’ve even discounted our January ad rates.

In the future, you can expect to see more insightful articles, honest usability reviews, and lively discussions at the UX Booth. We’re glad to have you here.