1. Using statistics on small sample sizes: You do not need a sample size in the hundreds or thousands or even above 30 to use statistics. We regularly compute statistics on small sample sizes (less than 15) and find statistical differences.
2. Power: Power is sort of like the confidence level for detecting a difference—you don’t know ahead of time if one design has a higher completion rate than another.
3. The p-value: The p-value stands for probability value. It’s the probability the difference you observed in a study is due to chance.
4. Sample Size: Sample size calculation remains a dark art for many practitioners. There are many counterintuitive concepts, including power, confidence and effect sizes. One complication is that there are different ways to compute sample size. There are basically three ways to find the right sample size for just about any study in user research- problem detection, comparing and precision.
5. Confidence intervals get wider as you increase your confidence level: The “95%” in the 95% confidence interval you see on my site and in publications is called the confidence level. A confidence interval is the most plausible range for the unknown population mean. But you can’t be sure an interval contains the true average. By increasing our confidence level to 99% we make our intervals wider. The price for being more confident is that we have to cast a wider net.

It was born at a 48 hour workshop at MozFest 2011 in London. It subsequently spilled over into an international, collaborative effort involving dozens of data journalism’s leading advocates and best practitioners - including from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, the Chicago Tribune, Deutsche Welle, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Helsingin Sanomat, La Nacion, the New York Times, ProPublica, the Washington Post, the Texas Tribune, Verdens Gang, Wales Online, Zeit Online and many others.

You can buy the book or use the free web version online.

The Data Journalism Handbook.

That’s not all, here’s a list of great high quality content free online UX books I have personally picked and recommend you to go through: Free User Experience books (Interaction design, HCI, web accessibility & Information Architecture)

This study uncovers:

• Primary motivations for six sharing personas
• Essential steps for marketers aiming to get their content shared
• Impact of sharing on Information Management
• Cycle of sharing
• Enduring role of e-mail in the age of social media

The Psychology of Sharing

1. A huge list of Style Guides and UI Guidelines
2. Free User Experience books (Interaction design, HCI, web accessibility & Information Architecture)
3. Download IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit
4. Ergonomics for Interaction Designers
5. Mobile Prototyping Essentials

The toolkit emerged from frog’s collaboration with Nike Foundation/Girl Effect on a project where we explored the nature and value of connections for adolescent girls living in extreme poverty in the developing world. Pairing design research and skills development, frog worked with girls around the world to examine their communities and collectively devise solutions for the problems they faced. Inspired by the Girl Effect project, frog went on to create the Collective Action Toolkit to empower groups of change-makers everywhere.

The CAT isn’t a rigid template for problem solving. It’s designed to be flexible and accessible, with an action map and activities arranged into six categories, from building a group, to imagining new ideas, to planning change. The toolkit challenges groups to move beyond discussion to action, continually clarifying their shared goals based on what they learn through the problem-solving process. The result is a holistic approach to help groups tackle issues in their communities.

Collective Action Toolkit

When we present personas, sitemaps, user flows, wireframes, and other design deliverables to our clients and stakeholders, it is our duty and responsibility to create well-designed deliverables.

Expressing UX Concepts Visually

This article takes the principles of the lean startup and suggests their UX research equivalents. Hopefully, it sheds some light on why the lean startup concept is so very well accepted in the entrepreneurial world and why startups suddenly want to do UX research and design.

Lean Startup Is Great UX Packaging

Webstock ‘12: Jared Spool - The Anatomy of a Design Decision from Webstock on Vimeo.

What are the habits of highly effective design teams? The best designs come from not one, but hundreds of well-made decisions. The worst designs arise out of hundreds of poorly-made decisions. All that stands between you and a great design is the qualify of your decisions. Where do they come from?

For the last five years, UIE has been studying how designers make their decisions. When do they use outside information, such as research about their users? When do they go with their gut instinct? When do the designers look to past decisions and the lessons they’ve learned?

What they found is interesting. In this presentation, Jared does an entertaining deep dive into the gut instinct of the best designers (without looking at all the gooey parts). You’ll learn five styles of decision making, from Self Design to Experience-focused Design, and which style produces quality results.

In our study we investigated how users’ first impressions of websites are influenced by two design factors:

• Visual complexity — how complex the visual design of a website looks
• Prototypicality — how representative a design looks for a certain category of websites

Users Love Simple & Familiar Designs – Why Websites Need to Make a Great First Impression

ESOMAR Guidelines on the Mutual Rights and Responsibilities of Researchers and Clients (PDF, 140 kb)