UX
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Feature trading to facilitate change.
Those who have worked with me will know that I can sometimes be as frustrating as hell! I work by a let’s get it done mentality; rules be dammed. Why, I wonder, follow the rules when the bureaucracy actively prevents humans acting reasonably to work together to bring a project to fruition. Trust in enlightened… Continue reading
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Customers, customers, customers.
In the immortal words of the Scottish philosopher Billy Connolly “There is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes” and so it is with clients. Let’s be honest, there are some businesses you should never work with and some who are slightly more work than others. Sadly, it’s this mismatch between agencies… Continue reading
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Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory [and its implication for user experience]
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf via ted.com Pointed out by @sparklypips – A fascinating video on the memory of events. Daniel Kahneman gives an insightful TED talk on the science of happiness and the role “the experiencing self” and the “remembering self” plays in our perception of events. The huge implication for designing the user experience is capture in… Continue reading
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Beginners, Experts and Perpetual Intermediates – User Typology
In Twitter usability: Is it really a problem? I argued that the “usability” issues experienced by novice users aren’t worth worrying about as user is only a beginner for a fleeting period of time. I’d like to expand on that slightly as the concept of designing for Beginners, Expert and Intermediate users. This topic preoccupies most… Continue reading
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Twitter usability – is it really a problem?
An interesting essay entitled “Experiment: Twitter Usability – A new users first experience” has been bubbling up on my twitter timeline today. It raises some interesting usability issues on twitter, particularly regarding new users. On face value, these could be a problem but they aren’t and let me tell you why. Firstly, the “new user”… Continue reading
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SEO and User Experience – The case for a unified strategy
Things seem to happen in three’s – I’m not sure why that is, perhaps it’s a universal truth which underpins the universe. However, In the last week, I’ve been asked three times what’s more important SEO or User Experience. My answer? User Experience and SEO should be a unified strategy. The one thing everyone can… Continue reading
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XHTML – Most common page validation errors and what they mean.
Quite often I’m asked to review a client’s website for accessibility. One of the first things I always do despite the desired conformity level is to validate the (X)HTML (validation is a prerequisite of “aa” conformance). Here are the most common error’s I come across when validating to XHTML. Elements and attributes in upper case.… Continue reading
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The dark side of prototyping
Going high-fidelity early in the design process The term fidelity means how perfect a prototype is made (if you want to read more on this subject, you might want to read my article Balancing fidelity). As with perfection in any other area, perfection in prototyping comes at a cost: It makes the design process rigid.… Continue reading
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What is usability anyway
With 57% of the UK population having access to the Internet now has never been a better time to launch a digital product, but research also shows that users have become more impatient. It now takes only 4 seconds for a customer to make a decision about the companies they encounter on the web, and… Continue reading
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User experience in the software development team
User Experience (UX) design is traditionally seen as the domain of user interface (UI) design, but within a software development team it should mean so much more! UX should permeate through the whole development team. It should influence the way middle tier developers’ craft their components and the way database administrators create their tables, stored… Continue reading