Our digest this week will be a bit shorter than usual because we’re jet lagged after literally flying half way around the world a few days ago. There’s also been slightly slimmer pickings on the Content Strategy and UX fronts this week, which we are attributing to the post-SXSW hangover many of you are probably still suffering from.

Content Strategy

• Speaking of SXSW, Firehead has put together a great roundup of some of the Content Strategy presentation malarky that went on in Get Your SXSW 2011 Content Strategy Presentations Here!
• Typographer extraordinaire Mark Boulton is publishing a Content Strategy book as part of his Five Simple Steps book series. In A Richer Canvas Boulton talks about how design needs to happen “from the content out, rather than from the canvas in.” Amen my brother! (Full disclosure, Contentini’s Dan has a Five Simple Steps title coming out later in the year called A Practical Guide to Web App Success).
• If You Talked to People – a cute reminder for those of us coming at content strategy from a marketing background.
• 10 European Content Strategists to Watch, begrudgingly because he linked to our post, Content Strategy: When Will it Break Out of Coastal US, while inferring that we’re from the US. It’s okay Janus, we forgive you.

User Experience

• The User Experience and the Psychology of Colour tests common beliefs we hold about what colors mean to users. The results aren’t really surprising – green is associated with success and red with failure – but the post underscores the importance of considering conventions and consistency when making color choices, particularly in an interface environment. It’s important to note that this is a Western-centric post, and that the results don’t necessarily hold true across cultures: check out the graph on Yahoo! Finance China, for example, to see how the roles of red and green are reversed.
• I was kind of reluctant to link to How to Ruin Good User Experience in 20 Simple Steps because I find the design of this site really painful. Google Adverts under your title? So 2009! But once I got past all the stuff competing for my attention, I found this to be a pretty decent read with a load of practical examples of unnecessary functionality that truly can ruin a user’s experience.

Shameless plug: make sure to check out our near real-time Twitter trends tool for more on what people are sharing in the disciplines of Content Strategy, User Experience, Web Strategy and SEO Strategy.