Back in the 1970s when Artificial Intelligence was in its infancy, researchers hit upon a performance problem. Their robots were designed to take in every detail of their surroundings and perform complex mathematical calculations to deduce what they could see. … Continue reading
If you are a User Experience (UX) consultant, or a client who often outsources to UX consultancies, then this post is for you. It’s about UX skirmishes. In case you don’t know, a skirmish is a military tactic where the … Continue reading
Can’t see the embedded flash above? [view low res | view high res] I like the way you can see the recurring pattern of a pristine design getting gradually tweaked and cluttered until it hits tipping point, then it gets … Continue reading
If you don’t know the story of how the role and structure of DNA was discovered, you really should read the full article that I quote below, or even better, read The Double Helix by James D Watson (a charmingly … Continue reading
Parag Deshpande asked me to explain about Wicked Problems, so here’s a quick rundown. I’m not going to write a long post since this has been written about extensively elsewhere (including wikipedia). So, what is a Wicked Problem? It means … Continue reading
In a recent post on Boing Boing, Clay Shirky talks about the user research approach used at meetup.com: […] Scott pulled me into a room by the elevators, where a couple of product people were watching a live webcam feed … Continue reading
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the standard form controls offered in the HTML specification are a good thing. They’ve stood the test of time, they’ve evolved and users have grown up with them. It’s always far safer to use … Continue reading
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 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
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