Author Archives: Harry Brignull

Designing route planner services that play well with paper

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. … Continue reading

Two types of usability issue: “now” and “later”

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 … Continue reading

Rapid Iterative User Testing: what a great method

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 … Continue reading

Blockbuster just don’t know what they’ve got.

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. … Continue reading

Microsoft Surface: standing on the shoulders of giants

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 … Continue reading

Google’s website optimizer: fantastic, but not a magic bullet for User-Centred Design

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 … Continue reading

Out of box experience design: the Bento Box metaphor

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 … Continue reading

Luis von Ahn’s presentation about human computation

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 … Continue reading

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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 … Continue reading

Home Printers. Why are they usually rubbish?

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 … Continue reading