According to Joseph C Lawrence’s article “Five reasons why user experience thinking is essential” there are five important “UX mantras” that every designer should keep in mind when designing a user interface (as paraphrased below):

1.    UX design is about the users: Keeping the users at the center of your interface design will allow you to create websites and applications that aren’t just characterized by functionality, but also by individuality based on what users want and need beyond the structure of a site—sometimes a basic, functional structure is too boring.
2.    UX design requires testing: UX testing will help you learn not only how users interact with your site, but also how they want to interact with your site.  Thus, you will be able to analyze the feedback and make the changes necessary to infuse your interface design with individuality.
3.    UX design is psychological in nature: Websites are dynamic and intertwined with almost every interaction in our daily lives whether it is socializing, traveling, or shopping etc. Since the web is now such an integral part of the way people live personally and professionally, interface designs must now be more than a collection of pages and data—they must be designed understanding the psychology of what motivates people to perform the interactions facilitated by websites and applications.  UX design allows designers to gather this vital information.
4.    UX design is a harmonizing force: UX design can tie together all of the diverging goals of web users and designers in order to create a unique and usable interface design.  Understanding how users use an application and what users want gives designers and other stakeholders the information required so they can tailor their business goals and methods to the needs of the user without jeopardizing their own enterprise.
5.    UX design is an interdisciplinary method: The dynamic and integrated nature of today’s websites and apps requires web developers to understand not only computer software and programming but also an assortment of other fields: psychology, business, and marketing to name a few.  UX design transcends into all of these fields because users are human and humans are by nature interdisciplinary.

Using Lawrence’s “UX mantras” can help you keep your focus on the users which will ultimately distinguish your site from others that are similar, increasing your interface design’s popularity and success.  The better you understand your users and their needs, the more seamless the process of using your website or application becomes for them. This makes users happy and they will want to use your site above others because it is designed to understand what they want and respond to their needs.

The toolbar, with big clearly marked buttons, itself is found at the top of the interface design below the Address Field but above the Tab bars. It is itself distinct in the same red and white colors of the Austrian flag. The colors also add to the legibility of the text. The toolbar has its own search bar on the left of the interface design unlike the top right customary search bar of the browser itself. This, I think, is a good touch because it serves to further distinguish it as not being the same as full internet search but rather specific. Clicking on a service in the toolbar automatically launches it in a new tab leaving your hitherto browsing unaffected. The challenge now for the Austrian government is to work on incorporating their services into the interface designs of other browsers that work with different operating systems. Hopefully other governments will be close by behind them.

Usability testing expert users isn’t drastically different from testing novice users (you can still use card sorting and other standard methods), but one thing that is important is pre-usability test preparations.  Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when beginning the usability testing process with expert users:

1.    Make sure that expert testers comprise a demographic most consistent with and important to your interface design.
2.    Make sure the tasks are realistic and relevant based on how your users have previously employed the site.
3.    Try to obtain user information concerning what expert users have liked about the site in its previous form and what they haven’t like.  You can later compare their answers with the way they responded to the changes that you have made to the interface design after conducting the usability test.

Bottom line: Don’t forget about the dedicated experts!

If you have an evolving website that has accumulated a reasonable amount of success in the cut throat world of the internet, then it is worth testing your core users, your expert users when conducting usability tests on new interface design additions or changes.  They are the ones who have used your site in the past and they are the ones who will bolster it into the future.

Expert Users are Longtime Users

So what is the main benefit of obtaining user experience feedback from experts?  The fact is that at one point, everyone was an amateur— even the experts. Amateur users grow into expert users, just as your interface design matures over time.  That is why expert users play such a vital role in usability testing new developments for extant interface designs. Experts are longtime site users, users who have shown commitment to the evolution of your website, users who have buttressed your interface design’s success by sticking with it over the long haul. If you are running an eCommerce site you want to know what makes it most usable to your most loyal customers—the expert users. You want to keep their business as returning customer often make up a considerable portion of business for an e-commerce website. So increasing your interface design’s usability for expert users will make your site sustainable because you will be appeasing a core group of users who keep your website relevant and your business running.

Much like Android, VP8 came to be a Google product by way of acquisition and, likewise, then released as open source code and available royalty-free for a number of uses such as online and mobile video. The VP8 video codec is paired with the open-source Ogg Vorbis audio to form the WebM container format which is directly aimed at providing high quality video compression for use with HTML5 video. Is there an immediate impact on the interface design of websites? Not really, but interface designers and web developers have to think carefully about which users they’re targeting when implementing video into their interface design. These decisions are more pronounced when developing a website that requires natively hosted video (i.e. not using YouTube embedded videos) because one has to decide on which format(s) to use. For now Flash is still the most popular player but, say, you are targeting a significant amount of iPhone users you’d have to use an alternative. And since Apple has embraced H.264, the use of that codec brings with it its own set of baggage as we saw with Nero. So, is open source the right way to create a video codec standard? Quite possibly, but we will have to wait and see what lies ahead.

With HTML5 looming, video codec standards have recently become a hot issue popularized by the oh-so public feud between Apple and Adobe. Up until now Flash has been the preferred video format on the web due to Adobe’s Flash Player being installed in most web browsers. The HTML5 video tag is intended to become the new standard way to show video online. The question is which formats should be supported in the tag. Despite its tremendous popularity Flash remains the property of a single corporation, Adobe. Apple favors the H.264 codec and due to the success of the iPhone, iPod Touch and now the iPad (which don’t support Flash) many popular sites such as YouTube, Vimeo and CNN, to name but a few, now have all or a growing number of their videos available in the H.264 format in addition to Flash. Criticism of H.264 is centered on the patents leading to most users of the format to pay licensing fees leading to the software company Nero to sue the licensing authority of the codec. This is where VP8 comes in.

In what ways does Google have a better interface design?

At first glance I found Google to score higher on usability. Firstly the advanced search option was more clearly labeled on Google as ‘advanced search’. The blue letting immediately made it clear that it was a clickable link. On Bing this option was only labeled ‘Advanced’ and even though underlined it had the same font color as the text next to it. The news items results for my search input (which in case you were wondering was Snoop Dogg) appeared much higher whereas on Bing I had to scroll down all the way to the bottom of the screen. Google adheres to the quasi standard of showing the login option in the top right corner, while Bing puts the ‘Preferences’ option in that spot, requiring users to search for the login.