Author Archives: Harry Brignull

Change blindness and the role of the grey flicker

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 … Continue reading

User laziness = user smartness, and why this is really important.

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. … Continue reading

‘Working through Screens’ – free interaction design ebook by Jacob Burghardt

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. … Continue reading

Steps removed and sequence shortened: UK iPhone App Store TV ad

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 … Continue reading

And the winner was…

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 … Continue reading

Another Maxymiser example: which of these shopping basket pages perform best?

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 … Continue reading

Maxymiser publishes some great Multivariate testing case studies

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. … Continue reading

Designing end-to-end user experiences.

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 … Continue reading

My VBUG’08 talk – following up on the developer Q & A session

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 … Continue reading

Diebold touchscreen Voting machine – not fit for purpose?

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 … Continue reading