Pkate1, I could not agree more with you!

Mtidwell- I don't think so, I went to the site to check it out- and didn't even notice it! (and that was the purpose of the visit). It took me lots of looking around- i was so compelled by the great design of the top nav and main marquee area. I wouldn't recommend it- for the reasons mentioned in this post. Good luck!

Good question. It's clear we need more gender specific usability testing and user research to know for sure. What's evident to me is that if women are your main or a strong user group of your site or product (or an area of your social strategy) that you can appeal to them more strongly than they are being catered to today. There's no research to my knowledge to show that what works for women doesn't work for men. It's likely the case that web design needs more balance and inclusiveness of women.

Yes Michael, Task-Centered Design seems to be the same thing as Inductive User Interface Design. Why they are calling it that I don't know? To be trendy? To add a new emphasis? Who knows. It seems they are mixing Progressive Disclosure http://experiencedynamics.blogs.com/site_search_usability/2004/03/progressive_dis.html ...with Task Centered Design in terms of their "new" foundations to this IUI approach. Thanks for sharing- Frank

Very interesting Manoj- thanks for sharing. Challenges outlined in your deck are helpful. I didn't see your case studies. I would also like to know more about the localization factor you see for India. Is it at the infrastructure level or are we talking content and context as well? Frank

yes I think 10 is a good number, at least it's double Nielsen's 5!

Michael, I think you are right to be skeptical of the potential of tablet usage scenarios...If you think about how the mobile user experience has been transformed by touch/gesture interfaces (iPhone being the trailblazer), that's where the potential is unknown at this point. You are describing the state as it is today- and that's fair. This situation might change if touch/gesture and portability are combined- on a tablet form factor- you might have more people actually contributing who don't today share via a tiny iphone or smartphone. We've seen several categories transformed right under our nose in the past five years or so...i think it the user experience is done right- this could be the next one. I don't think Apple will put out a dead end product especially not in the device area...Microsoft also looks like they have a serious productivity (business oriented?) device in the works too.

John, Blog not abandoned, just on "thinking incubation" mode a lot of the time (~1 post per month). This is to provide higher quality content rather than the usually blah, blah. I have made a commitment to try posting more often. This will mean shorter posts (not a bad thing) but will still keep the nutritional density to posts. Thanks, Frank

Hi Ayush, Great question. Diary Studies are semi-effective as a card sorting technique (like card sorting). We have found Diary studies to be effective if: - users are carefully instructed what needs to be done (make input easy). - users are managed with regular contact. - the start of diary study includes contextual interview (to ground the findings and speed up the discovery process). - anything longer than 1.5-2 weeks tends to lower participation (unless you are paying a larger stipend). hope that help! I will blog this with more insights and tips. Thanks! Frank

That's a great suggestion- thanks for the feedback. Look out for some changes soon!

Great job on the redesign. I've just it a bit and I love it already. I'm actually writing a post about redesigns and user adoption- so your redesign will be one of my examples since it works as expected. No figuring things out (so far). BIG Thanks!