Getting Real recognizes that good writing is good design.

"My next bit of insight into how to sketch a service comes from the intersection of ethnography and cinema." (Design for Service)

"With the iPad, we finally have a platform for consuming rich-content in digital form. What does that mean? To understand just why the iPad is so exciting we need to think about how we got here." (Craig Mod)

"UX professionals can be an egotistical lot. We like to think that only certain people with certain qualities can do what we do. Not everybody has the right stuff to fly to the moon or storm the beaches at Normandy. And in a similar way (sort of) not everybody has what it takes to create great user experiences." (Colman Walsh - IQBlog)

"The truly worldwide reach of the Web has brought with it a new realisation among computer scientists and industry professionals of the enormous importance of usability and user interface design. In the last ten years, much has become understood about what works in user interfaces from a usability perspective, and what does not." (Simon Whatley)

"Here's my open transparent written exploration of how I am navigating this concept. (...) I think the concept of Agile is fine, its the execution of it that I think is where the story kind of starts to fall a little to the way side, I think from a UX standpoint you really need to outline the features ahead but do so in a way that is suited to a ready, aim, fire model." (Scott Barnes)

"A five minute rant on the importance of letting data be your guide when making tactical design decisions. An introduction for managers of design teams who are driven from a heuristic, or 'genius' perspective." (Ryan Freitas)

"I've been involved in developing what I would say is the craft of interaction design. A craft is a way of working that you develop entirely through experience without thinking about rationalizing it or systematizing it. And I believe that craft is essential to interaction design, and always will be. But I also believe that there could be ways of thinking about interaction design, ways of generalizing principles from experience and existing knowledge, just as in the twenties general principles about composition and graphic design were developed at the Bauhaus, or a new grammar of film was invented by Eisenstein and written about by Arnheim. These ways of thinking about practice make a platform in which people coming after us can build without them needing to invent everything from the start." (Gillian Crampton-Smith 2007)

"Users overlook features if the GUI elements — such as buttons and checkboxes — are too far away from the objects they act on." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

"In short: it's time to think about the Internet instead of just letting it happen." (David Gelernter - EDGE)

"The 1st international congress on Web Studies aims at providing a venue for researchers and professionals from different backgrounds for discussion, study, practical demonstrations, sharing, and exchange on new developments and theories regarding the World Wide Web. The congress therefore invites contributions from a heterogeneous set of fields and domains such as: Web systems, computational intelligence, human-computer interaction, digital theory, Web sociology, and well as interactive and digital arts. We also encourage contributions from businesses and organizations." (1st Int'l Congress on Web Studies) - courtesy of markbernstein

"The iPad may be a larger version of the iPhone in terms of the hardware and operating system, but treating it as the same device would be foolish. It turns out that increasing the display size of touch-screen hardware can transform it into an entirely new class of device. The iPad is a productivity platform in a way that the iPhone rightly never tried to be." (Matt Legend Gemmell)

"Usability testing is one of the least glamorous, but most important aspects of user experience research. Over the years, it has also been one of the forms of user research we have performed most frequently. In doing so, we’ve learned quite a few best practices and encountered some potential pitfalls. We think it's important that we share what we've learned with the many stakeholders, designers, and engineers who might find this information helpful." (Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain - UXmatters)

"Thinking of porting your Web finding experience to iPhone, Android, or Windows Mobile? Just forget about the fact that these devices are basically full-featured computers with tiny screens. Having gone through this design exercise a few times, I have realized that designing a great mobile finding experience requires a way of thinking that is quite different from our typical approach to designing search for Web or desktop applications. To put it simply, designing a mobile finding experience requires thinking in terms of turning limitations into opportunities. In this column, I'll discuss some of the limitations of mobile platforms, as well as the opportunities they afford, and share a few design ideas that might come in handy for your own projects." (Greg Nudelman - UXmatters)

Make your iPhone screenshots look like product beauty shots.

"The art of the narrative is one of the strongest threads running through our society and culture, and is in many respects one of the defining traits of humanity. 'The story' is more than just a recitation of facts or assertions (whether real or otherwise). A good story is experiential. It puts each of us as listeners into the narrator's world and frame of mind, let's us live, vicariously, through the experiences that the narrator had or conceived. In many cases we identify with the protagonist, whether the story is an epic fantasy journey through lost worlds, a sports article talking about the clash between two rival football teams, or the reportage of a major political event. We read meaning into these narratives at many level, from the bald statement of fact to the subtle interplay of analysis, implication, innuendo and metaphor, and it is the richness of these metaphors that give meaning to the work." (Kurt Cagle - DevX)

"Designing is hard enough as it is, taking into account your surprisingly erratic users makes it that much harder. Fortunately, taking unexpected user behaviour into account throughout the design process is a large part of the battle, it's a significant step on the way to a good user experience." (Alistair Gray - Webcredible)

"Back quite a while ago, when there was a Sun Microsystems, the company banned the use of PowerPoint, because its employees were spending two minutes on the content of their presentations and 16 hours on using PowerPoint's features to make their slides look pretty. (I probably exaggerate, but you get the point.) Is the technology really making us more productive, or is it simply providing a pleasant (in some cases) user experience at the expense of real productivity?" (Daryle Gardner-Bonneau - Journal of Usability Studies February 2010)

"When people talk about the imminent death of publishing, they’re usually talking about something narrow, specific, and tied to ways of working that predate the internet: the publication of books, magazines, newspapers, and all kinds of printed legal and business data, along with the economic, logistical, and aesthetic structures that have made that process possible. And that kind of publishing is indeed getting whipped around like a very small cowboy on a very large bull. Why? Because the internet is made of publishing, and its new and often anarchic publishing models are messing with older models in all kinds of ways." (Erin Kissane - Incisive.nu) - courtesy of khalvorson

"As we move into the next decade of web design, it's time for us to reevaluate our understanding of wireframes—a tried and tested user experience staple." (Nishant Kothary - MIX Online) - courtesy of rasmusdegruil