Chances are, you’ve seen a few change blindness videos before. The clip below is slightly different because it demonstrates how the effect works. The grey flicker gives just enough time for your visual short term memory buffer to empty. Take
User research is a funny thing. When you see users rushing through your user interface without stopping to think, or skipping through huge swathes of your lovingly prepared copy, it’s tempting to think of them as lazy sods. It’s true.
Jacob Burghardt has recently published a free interaction design ebook called ‘Working through screens‘. It contains some rather nice diagrams that you can re-use (with certain conditions) as he’s released it on an Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike creative commons licence.
Wow, first sequence shortened, now we also have steps removed in the new UK app store ad. What next? The ad isn’t on youtube yet, but when it does appear it’ll be interesting to find out exactly which steps Apple
Ok, so I’m following up last week’s post on Maxymiser’s MVT research. The findings are revealed below, and a few of you got your predictions wrong! It just goes to show that when you are putting the final stages of
Here’s another Multivariate testing example from our friends at Maxymiser. The performance of each of these shopping basket pages were measured in terms of clickthroughs into the checkout process. Which do you think performed best? Answers in the comments with
A few months ago we had Alasdair Bailey of Maxymiser come and visit us at Madgex to give a talk on Multivariate testing. It’s fascinating to hear a specialist in the field of multivariate research talk openly about their findings.
When you’re designing an experience, it’s easy to look at your competition and get caught up in the normal way of doing things. Rather than being innovative, you end up creating some small incremental improvements. A better approach can be
I’ve just got back from giving a talk at VBUG 2008 in Reading. It was a very friendly crowd of developers who showed a lot of interest in “this user experience thing”, and I ended up doing a solid half
If you’re like me, you may have read about the usability problems with the Diebold touchscreen voting machines in the States. Before I saw this video, I didn’t realise quite how serious the problems are. It’s not a question of
Touchless is an open source demo and SDK from Microsoft. It was released in October – and it looks so much fun!
After messing around with Domai.nr a couple of days ago (a really cute tool for coming up with domain hacks), I found out there are quite a lot of nice .ly domain names still available. It seems the reason is
There’s a persistent myth about guerilla user research that it’s perfectly OK to grab just anyone to act as a proxy for your users. Perhaps it’s something to do with the whole low-cost, lo-fi ethos that makes this myth so
Out of Box Experience (OOBE) design is a discipline that consists of designing the details of the first few moments of owning a product, from the point of peeling off the shrink-wrap to the point of powering it up and
Clicktale seems like it’s matured quite a lot since it launched. They have an interesting take on analytics – instead of going for a pure stats approach like everyone else, they are trying more of a click & keystroke logging
I’ve been chatting to Kevin Arthur of Touch Usability (and Usability Dude at Synaptics in California), who has been filling me in about some of the new developments in tactile feedback. The little rant I was having about “before the
You may have noticed that this blog has gone pretty quiet over the past few months. This is because that’s because I’m working pretty damn hard at the moment, consulting on the user experience design of the Madgex Job Board
Quite a few new handsets are offering tactile feedback on their touchscreens, like the Blackberry Thunder, pictured above. I can’t help thinking that because the manufacturers can’t do multitouch properly, they are opting to enrich their feature lists in other
Tim Mott and Larry Tesler developed the desktop metaphor at Xerox parc back in the 70s. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that it’s probably one of the most significant developments in interaction design in the past 50
If you’re ever involved with field research, or if you just have an interest in human behaviour, you will find this video fascinating. It’s a clip from William H. Whyte’s “Social life of Small Urban Spaces” (1979). Moving on to