UX Post

Filler text is a great tool for providing quick and easy placeholder copy. It helps to simulate text, though it has no actual meaning. It's extremely helpful when using dummy copy for wireframes or in mockups to test typography and fonts. The go-to resource for generating this copy has been lipsum.com, but recently, a new crop of themed-generators has been popping up, adding a touch of humor to your documents. I've used a few in my wireframes, but it's important to note that due to the nature of some of the generated text, you might want revert back to plain ol' lorem ipsum if you're planning on presenting the copy as part of a deliverable to your client. Here are some great ones to check out:

Bacon Ipsum

Hipster Ipsum

Samuel L. Ipsum

Cupcake Ipsum

Veggie Ipsum

Lorizzle

Bogan Ipsum

Malevole

Tuna Ipsum

Beer Ipsum

A lot of sites now are implementing infinite scroll, allowing users to paginate by scrolling down the page. These are usually sites that present their data as a "feed" or "stream," and the data is usually "skim"-worthy (status updates, images, quick and concise information…). 

Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Svpply and Facebook all employ this method of pagination and they all have their own unique methods of doing so. Twitter has hotkeys ('J' and 'K') that allow users to jump from tweet to tweet and loads an additional batch of tweets once you reach a certain threshold. Tumblr and Pinterest dynamically load content while displaying a static call-to-action on the side, "Scroll to top" or an arrow, allowing the user to quickly jump back to the top of the page at any time. Svpply shows the first set of content statically and the user has to explicitly initiate the infinite scroll by pressing "Show All." Facebook has an interesting and smart interaction. As you scroll down the page, content will continue to populate. However, because the footer is at the bottom of the page, it would be difficult to access if status updates continue to fill the page. If you scroll down the page fast enough, the system assumes you're trying to get to the footer and stops the continuous loading, an extremely clever solution. 

Do you ever find yourself browsing an e-commerce site and clicking on "View All" to see the entire catalogue, rather than clicking through 8 pages of clothes? Google research just published:

User testing has taught us that searchers much prefer the view-all, single-page version of content over a component page containing only a portion of the same information with arbitrary page breaks

This, hopefully, means that Google Search results will soon also implement infinite scroll, although the logo pagination is a classic component to the site.

Localizing your content has always been a task that could greatly affect international usability and accessibility. There are cultural habits that need to be addressed when localizing. For example, users in eastern countries read from right to left (CNN US: http://www.cnn.com/ CNN Arabic: http://arabic.cnn.com/). 

One of the more difficult tasks is ensuring terminology and colloquialisms you use is understandable in other countries. Will German users intuitively understand what will happen if they press "Retweet" or "Like"? Services like Twitter and Facebook take a more social approach. Rather than hiring translators, they let their community decide what native terminology will work best. On Facebook, users can upvote and vet existing translations, or suggest alternatives. Twitter announced today that it only took a month to translate the service in Dutch and Indonesian with the help of 20,000+ users who volunteered to help.

Most social networks offer free vanity URLs to users, for example, twitter.com/jeffsoo. The newest, Google+ hasn't enabled this feature, but I'm assuming they eventually will and tie it to your Google Profile name. If you don't have your own domain and hosting, gplus.to is a good alternative for a Google+ vanity URL. A post by MG Siegler inspired me to create a subdomain on my personal domain (http://jeffsoo.com/+) and redirect it to my G+ profile. Hakim El Hattab shared it on his profile and a few other creative examples came along:

Google+: http://jeffsoo.com/+

Twitter: http://jeffsoo.com/@

LinkedIn: http://jeffsoo.com/in

A few people have asked me how to do this, so I created a quick HTML file you can download, change some paramaters in an HTML editor like notepad or Dreamweaver and upload to your hosting for the same effect. Here's how to do it:

Download and extract this ZIP file

Open the index.html file, change "######YOUR G+ ID######" with the long string of numbers you can grab from the URL of your Google+ profile (or change the entire URL for Twitter/LinkedIn), and Save.

Create a directory in your root folder named "+" or "@" or "in"

The Miss USA pageant this year allowed viewers to actively judge contestants' wardrobes in real-time through multiple platforms. A website optimized for mobile phones and tablets was publicized on the screen and allowed users to rate on a scale from 1-10, the contestant's outfit. As users voted, the average score would be displayed on TV, fluctuating until the voting period had ended.

Bijan Sabet posted a great writeup on iCloud vs Dropbox this morning and it got me thinking about how I use the cloud. There's a good chance that iCloud is going to be the de facto method for managing personal content (most prominently with photos and audio) in the cloud.

I currently use Dropbox as a tool for personal storage and as a means for collaboration. At first I was doing ok with the amount of free space I was given, and the additional free space I received once I got some friends to sign up as well. Once I started working at a startup, it became very clear that I would need to ante up my storage in order to handle all file types that we need to share, with .psds being the largest space hog. 

What's great about Dropbox is the administrative capabilities that allow users to sync specific folders, share syncing abilities with other users, and publicly share files to anyone. What I like the most is the file explorer that can be accessed on any web browser, not to mention that integration into my os makes it look like a normal folder on my hard drive.

One great point that Bijan brought up is the inability to connect iCloud with other existing 3rd party services. Not much is known about how the iCloud API will be able to integrate with services I use all the time like Dropbox, Instagram, Boxee, and turntable.fm. 

Today, Twitter will begin rolling out its new photo sharing service into their product, along with a new and improved search system that displays both related photos and videos to the search keyword/hashtag.