UX CALENDAR – DECEMBER 23 – UX watch – Methods and sources 2020

Newspapers and coffee

Let's start by asking the question, even if it's obvious to many: Why keep watch? Well…because we live in a world that is changing faster and faster. Because much of what you learned in school is probably no longer valid today. Because it is always good to learn about good practices, whatever the field of knowledge. Because it sharpens curiosity and inspiration. And then because you have to stay open to evolve.

So how do you do monitoring in the field of UX? Often, it is enough to look at what our peers produce, through the latest versions of recognized sites. Simply search “best websites” or “top applications” on Google and you will find what you are looking for. I recommend that you search in English, it's always more meaningful than looking for information in French. For example, Awards often compiles the crème de la crème… (and I saw “French Soon!” indicated in the menu).

Then there are two main methods to do the day before:

  • The quick watch : It will show you a lot of things, a lot of bits of info, a lot of images. It will help you spot trends, emerging uses. You will often not fully understand the topics covered, but you will know it exists and you can come back to it. the quick and dirty often good.
  • In-depth monitoring : It necessarily requires more time. It will be reading relatively long articles, videos of more than 10 minutes. Sometimes it may even mean that you start testing products or services to understand how they work. It's longer, but it's better.

To find information in both types of methods, the best organization is to aggregate all your sources, and refine as you add more:

  • After 6 months a source has not released anything? Delete it.
  • A source broadcasts too much content? Reduce its frequency.
  • Do you want information on a specific subject? Make a habit of labeling by topics.

Content aggregators will help you stack all your sources. I recommend you Feedly, but make up your own mind among different tools. They are still sometimes called “RSS feed readers”, but the URL of a source is always sufficient.

bookmarking sites do almost the same thing as aggregators. They are mainly used to quickly keep track of each piece of information that you have not had time to read. Again I recommend Pocket (mostly the button for quick add) and I give you a list of competitors.

There are the Social Media (especially LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) where you can subscribe to tons of sources just by clicking “Like” or “Follow”.

Much less common, I suggest the Product Hunt Chrome plugin, an extension for the Chrome browser that will display updated content on each new tab.

Finally, Google, among its many services, offers an alert system: Google Alerts. You program an alert on a specific subject and the search engine will regularly send you corresponding news by email.

It's almost Christmas… so here's a long source list carefully harvested one by one, by hand… Good tasting… and happy holidays!

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fast standby

Instagram

Pinterest

Twitter

Behance

Dribbble

Slack

LinkedIn

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Deep intelligence

Youtube

Expert Blogs

Agency Blogs

Brand Blogs

News and curation sites

Case studies

 

As usual, perhaps you will find that other quality topics also deserved to be treated. Do not hesitate to write to me (I.e.

Thanks

Kisses! 🦄

 

Adrian Koss, UX Designer @UX-Republic

 

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