Community magazine on user experience and interaction design, with articles on usability, product design and minimum viable products.
HN commenters link it for design concepts like affordances, progress bar effects, and critiques of the MVP idea and Nielsen's iPad study.
This Quora thread might be an interesting starting point if you're looking for freelancers:
- http://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-best-web-designers-under-25?q=Best+designers
Strolling through Dribble might also give you some inspiration:
- http://dribbble.com/
The UX world gathers on blogs like:
- http://uxbooth.com
- http://konigi.com
- http://usabilitypost.com
- http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com
- http://johnnyholland.org
Some of them might offer job postings as well.
The term for this in the field of human machine interaction is (perceived) affordance, popularized by Norman.
This sounds like less active guidance than nudging or shepherding. Creating affordances is still an active design choice though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
http://johnnyholland.org/2010/04/perceived-affordances-and-designing-for-task-flow/
I don't think this paper is the source I remember. I seem to recall something from Microsoft Research. But, it reaches the same conclusion.
Article with easy summary and link to paper: http://johnnyholland.org/2008/11/the-effect-of-the-progress-bar/
Edit: here's a large collection of articles
https://github.com/Zhouzi/reactivedesign/blob/gh-pages/README.md
Just keep in mind that Your Product is NOT “The Product”[1]
and that MVP is a deceptive concept[2].
[1] http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/06/your-product-is-not-the-product/
[2] http://johnnyholland.org/2012/02/making-sense-of-minimum-viable-products/
http://johnnyholland.org/2010/05/26/usability-ain%E2%80%99t-everything-a-response-to-jakob-nielsen%E2%80%99s-ipad-usability-study/