Nielsen: designing commercial messages for Twitter

Capria.TV noted Jakob Nielsen's tips on designing commercial messages for Twitter, Twitter Postings: Iterative Design,

"Leave it to Jakob Nielsen to bring iterative design best practices to tweets. For those of you who use Twitter for commecial ends, as opposed to merely sharing moment by moment minutiae, this Useit article might be of interest. A few pointers on scheduling tweets are also given."

Twitter seems appropriate for Nielsen's style; for designs with graphics, other approaches, by Steve Krug for example, seem to lead to pleasant results.

Update: themediamogul notes "Great article on CEO's using Twitter," CEOs' Take on Twitter.

Usability: Don't Make Me Think

From the Business of Software social network:

"Usability testing is important, but you've got other things to do. In this video, Steve Krug [author of Don't Make Me Think] ... talks about informal usability testing and how the minimum of work can give you extraordinary results."



Update: Ignore the Code has several good articles, like Usability Testing: It's not a Myth, Flatland, and Designing with Data. This was in one post:

The Science of Aesthetics by Keith Lang from Keith Lang on Vimeo.

Information Anxiety

I used to read Search Engine Watch but got bored. That's changed because Read/WriteWeb (a Web 2.0 blog) made search engines interesting with regular Top 100 Alternative Search Engines lists. Sure Google destroyed Altavista and now rules, but they're not that strong on information design and will have to innovate like everyone else to be able to filter the explosion of multimedia, location, and other information now available. It's not just a matter of semantics.

Not incidentally Read/WriteWeb also has a good post on Mozilla and the future of the browser, which looks at recent presos from Mozilla designers, as well as commentators concerned with an open web and stuff in the works from Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, etc. This really is a concern because of neocon Rupert Murdoch's News Corpse statements about further consolidation by the oligarchs: Peter Chernin and the Time Warner CEO weren't talking about Dow Jones/WSJ but Google, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon.