These days when you see someone wondering down the street looking lost, chances are they don’t have a shop-bought map in their hands – it’s much more likely they have a scrappy looking print-out from a web-based route planner service.
This post by Christopher Fahey of graphpaper.com got me thinking about the longitudinal nature of usability issues, and what it means for user experience research & design. Now: the teething problem This is a usability issue that you experience at
Having worked at 3 different User-Centred Design (UCD) consultancies in the last few years (Flow Interactive, Amberlight, and Oyster Partners), I can confidently say that the type of project most commonly requested by clients looks like this: Client delivers test
I was in Blockbuster yesterday, and started chatting to the staff. I asked them why Pan’s Labyrinth (good film) only has 2 copies shown, while Shadowboxer (worst film of all time) has 2 entire shelves worth of boxes on display.
Microsoft Surface is a pretty amazing piece of research: tabletop touchscreen computing done really well. But, the “origins” section on the Surface website strongly implies that the whole concept of tabletop computing originated from Microsoft. It didn’t. If you find
Google’s new “website optimiser” is one of the biggest and most exciting user research tools to emerge on the scene in quite some time. It’s a bit surprising, then, that hardly anyone in the User Centred Design field is talking
I’ve been having a lot of fun doing out of box experience design consultancy over the last few weeks (OOBE as it is pretentiously called by those in the know). If you’ve ever opened an Apple product then you’ll know
This is Luis von Ahn giving a Google TechTalk presentation about “human computation”. He talks about Capatchas and the ESP game among other things. He’s particularly qualified to talk about them because he basically invented them. Really interesting stuff. It’s
You’ll see on the right hand side we’ve added a link to our feed. Why not subscribe to it? Our posts can be a bit sporadic so the feed is probably the best way to read this site… You can
Think back to your first ever home inkjet printer. Mine was an Apple stylewriter in 1993. Look at home printers today. They still look pretty much the same – they haven’t moved on much. Why not? We’ve been having the
We’ve all had hardware like this in our home: designed to be an ornament yet attractive to nobody, and a waster of good surface space. You can imagine how the designers pictured it – the user placing the device on
Woah there! You’ve found yourself on an old article. Take note of the date before reading. Do you remember when you stopped paying per minute for your dial-up modem connection? Suddenly using the web became a real part of your
A while back I blogged about how Google was missing a trick with the name “froogle”. In short, its an in-joke that a lot of people just didn’t get (a pun combining “Google” with “frugal”), and didn’t even realise that
Word of mouth happens when customers become really passionate about your product or brand. The thing about passion is that is has two ends: very happy, and very angry. Here’s the story of my last two points of contact with
I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor on my aging laptop the other day and after scanning my machine for a few minutes it gave me this wonderful feedback screen: [Blue speech bubbles added for emphasis] Great stuff. Even though it
I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Web 2.0 darlings 37signals. I used to read their ‘design not found‘ articles fairly avidly and even bought their excellent book ‘Defensive Design for the Web‘. Their sense of aesthetics is
. Another great deal from Three.
After all the beta testing – how did this one slip through the net? When you browse videos in Vista Media Center it only shows you thumbnails with no text label whatsoever. (you do get a filename displayed when you
If you’re in the UK you may have seen this in The Guardian today, but if not – check out this this article by Charlie Brooker. A great takedown of the Samsung E900… As he puts it: “The whole thing
In this BusinessWeek article, Jakob Nielsen calls the OLPC UI design approach “reckless” because they have done no user testing so far. Meanwhile, John Maeda bizzarely praises process as “…the Steve Jobs method. […] You don’t use focus groups. You