Here are the slides (with audio) of the talk I gave at UX Brighton in March 2012. It’s an extended version of the talk I gave at UX London which is written up here. Can’t see the slides above? If
If you’re willing to go black hat, it’s easy enough to boost your app’s reviews in the App Store through astroturfing. The downside, however, is not just that it’s unethical – it’s also forbidden by Apple and will probably get
It may sound old fashioned, but there are still plenty of companies out there that have never done usability testing. They aren’t all dinosaurs, either – there are plenty of new start-ups popping-up who know they need to “do UX”
A paraphrased transcript of my talk at UX London 2012. Do you want to know what interests me about our industry? It’s the fact that we always talk about the importance of making mistakes, and iterating, and learning from our
My talk at UX London this year was about the iPad app that Paul Lloyd and I designed for The Week magazine. It’s been doing rather well in the App Store (The majority of ratings are 4-5 star and it’s
Purchasing an auto-renewing subscription to a Newsstand publication on an iPad is incredibly easy. You basically just tap “buy subscription”, tap confirm and you’re done. So how hard is it to unsubscribe? Well, it involves a 12 step process so
My good friend Nick Bowmast has created Mr Tappy, a rather well engineered kit for mounting cameras onto mobile devices and tablets, for the purpose of filming the screens for usability testing. The rig costs $289.00, which isn’t expensive when
Glenn Jones is a Founder/Director of Madgex. Glenn is currently co-organising a Design-Push event on Web Intents in Brighton (25-Feb-2012). If you work in UX and you don’t know much about Web Intents, you’re missing out on a discussion that
User research. It’s right there in the name. A user is someone who actually uses your service. Equally valid is the idea of a “target user” – someone who doesn’t yet use your service, but has a genuine need that
These days we all know how easy it is to record usability testing sessions on a desktop computer. You can use Silverback on a Mac ($69.95), Morae on PC ($1,495) or you can try one of the many other screen
You may have noticed things have gone really quiet on this blog lately – let me reassure you that it is still very much alive. I’ve been taking a short break to focus on some very cool projects at Clearleft,
A few days ago, a friend of mine told me a story about their first visit to IDEO. At one point in their tour they saw a dozen Design Researchers standing in a makeshift kitchen, each holding a different brand
James Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model of System Accidents is quite a useful way to to think about how failures can happen, even when you have multiple layers of “defence” in place. It’s been applied to things like aviation and medical
We’re hiring a Senior User Experience Designer, which would put you in the same role as James Box, Cennydd Bowles (who is leaving soon) and myself. As a newcomer to the company, I thought it’d be useful for me to
Here’s a brief excerpt of Dave Meslin’s TEDx talk on The antidote to apathy: “You ever see one of these before? This is a newspaper ad. It’s a notice of a zoning application change for a new office building so
This talk by Professor Alan Penn of the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture is quite brilliant. He reveals loads of resonance between physical shop floorplan design and UI design for ecommerce, plus he explains exactly how Ikea employ Dark Patterns.
I’ve noticed a fair few designers muddle up observations with recommendations when analysing user research findings. This can really screw up your design process, but thankfully it’s quite an easy one to avoid. It’s important to always state observations separately
Using a CAPTCHA is a way of announcing to the world that you’ve got a spam problem, that you don’t know how to deal with it, and that you’ve decided to offload the frustration of the problem onto your user-base.
Quite a few people in the UX industry have been moaning – myself included – about the demise of critical thinking, and the fact that people don’t question what they read before accepting it as solid fact, particularly if it
Now, I love Silverback just as much as the next User Experience Professional, but it’s not a Swiss Army Knife – it’s designed to do one thing really well, and that’s recording users’ screens in usability tests. What about situations