To put it simple…
March 24, 2011
An iPhone app is not a mobile strategy, it’s an iPhone app. Said by Google’s Ian Carrington, tweeted by @chrisjvernon Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/aftab/3602645078/in/photostream
Category: UX matters
Crap. That wasn’t meant to happen
March 21, 2011
Sometimes something leaks or goes live when it’s not meant to. No matter what precautions you take, when the human factor (or technology for that matter) is involved mistakes happen.
UX is 90% about desirability
March 17, 2011
It [Zune] plays music just like an iPod! Why don’t people get this? I don’t know why people want this one chunk of plastic over the chunk of plastic that I make?! Bill Gates character in Charlie and the Apple Factory. Quote taken from the UX booth article UX is 90%
Updated: Learnings from the Twitter quick bar
March 10, 2011
Last week Twitter released version 3.3 of their Twitter iPhone app. Some of the features are lovely and a great example of how to adapt your app according to the device. However, one new features was not great namely the quick bar which overlaps the tweet feed.
The close up vs. the bigger picture
February 22, 2011
One of the things I go on about most is sustainable design, i.e. planning, designing and developing for longer term needs. It hurts my little IA heart when a project is done half-heartedly just to get “something” live.
Why UX matters
February 21, 2011
[youtube id=”O94kYyzqvTc” width=”475″] Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/3383629917
The user experience designer. A very special species indeed
February 21, 2011
[vimeo id=”19131028″ width=”475″ align=”…”] Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/jdhancock/3383629917
Bad service experience Dixons travel
January 27, 2011
With my imminent departure from a permanent job I will no longer have a work laptop which I can take home and use. I didn’t use to have do this but the HP laptop we bought 2 years ago is broken (again) and Currys refuse to fix it because we
“Quora is such a UI/IA mess”
January 18, 2011
The heading quotes a tweet by Flo Heiss, one of our Executive Creative Directors here at Dare. Up until I saw that tweet I hadn’t actually looked at Quora yet. Well, I tried but arrived at their home page which said nothing, or correction, showed nothing of what Quora was
Got to love the detail
December 18, 2010
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about better IA where I listed a few things I’m a big advocate of and which I belive makes for better IA.
Facebook, what are you doing?!
December 8, 2010
Facebook has yet again rolled out changes to their design and today was the first time I got the option to change to the new profile page.
Better, betterer, betterest
December 6, 2010
Yesterday I received a confirmation email for my submission to the IA Summit in Denver next year. I’ve never presented at a conference but it’s been on my wish list for a while. This year they were looking for submissions from new speakers and the subject was “Better”. How we
The boiler analogy of planning for longer term needs
November 26, 2010
At the end of January this year I broke our boiler. By turning on the timer. It was old and would have broken anyway but it came at a really bad time. It was cold in the UK and we had just moved into our flat and were starting making
Boring, boring error pages (or Three principles for error pages)
November 20, 2010
Error pages aren’t the most fun thing in the world. It’s not the pages that one normally looks forward to designing. They tend to be forgotten. A bit like the stuff that’s furthest to the back of your fridge, which starts to smell after a while.
Which page of a website are you?
November 17, 2010
This morning a colleague of mine asked me if I was going to that meeting about “that page” of “that client’s” website. The way he said it it sounded like he asked me: “Are you the [name of page]?”.
Understanding and utilising the lifecycle
November 16, 2010
No matter what industry you are in your customers/users will go through a certain lifecycle with regards to your product or service, starting from being completely unaware of it, to e.g. considering buying/using it, to purchasing it and needing support after the purchase.
When working in a cafe and not presenting in power point is good
November 15, 2010
It’s easy to get pulled into the usual way of doing things. To take for granted that a presentation requires a formalised presentation, or that you have to sit in an office and work. Sometimes, stopping and questioning leads to more satisfactory outcomes.
An information architect vs. a normal architect
November 14, 2010
To blog is a little dream of mine so I’ve decided to blog. About what I do for a living. I guess that means I feel I’ve got something worthwhile to say about the matter. Whether that’s true or not I’ll leave to you.
Why you should write every day
You probably think you have nothing to write about but once you start it gets hard to stop. Honestly.
Writing is an incredibly important skill at all levels. By writing every day you reflect on things in a different and clearer way and you become better at expressing yourself. If you haven’t tried writing every day, give it a try for 30 days to begin with. I did it every day of 2012. Seth Godin has done it for years and swears by it.