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Has Apple cracked the touchscreen usability problem?
Touchscreens. Pockets. Keys. Big Fat Thumbs. These things haven’t managed to go together very well in the past … but have Apple managed to crack it with the iPhone? The great thing about physical...
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Funny story about the origin of the Office ribbon menu
According to Diggnation, Microsoft ran a number of focus groups for Office 2007 and asked people what new features they wanted Office to do. They gave a list of needs and nice-to-haves. Funnily...
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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...
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Facebook vs Flickr image tagging
Has anyone else noticed how great Facebook image tagging is? Granted, it is only for putting names to faces, but it’s incredibly quick to use (say 5 seconds per photo), and it’s really satisfying....
View ArticleThe difference between good and bad writers.
A great quote that sums up the art of User-Centered Writing: “Bad writers worry about whether the reader will understand them. Good ones are more concerned about how well they understand the reader.” -...
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Latest addition to the family
I usually hate it when people blog about their sprogs but suddenly I understand… My daughter Lilly was born on saturday afternoon, 7 pounds 14, a little bundle of joy. I’ll be fairly offline over the...
View ArticleMy Presentation on Out of Box Experience Design
Out of Box Experience (OOBE) design is a discipline that consists of designing the details of the first few moments of owning a product, from the point of peeling off the shrink-wrap to the point of...
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Signup forms must die – here’s how we killed ours!
Here’s a short screencast demo of our new Lazy Registration system on the Madgex Job Board Platform. If you’ve read Luke Wrobleski’s book or ALA article ‘Sign up forms must die‘, this will probably be...
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How tablet design can influence the potency of the Placebo effect
We all know that design influences people emotionally, but have you ever considered the possibility that possibility that design alone can actually influence the health of your users? This article by...
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F**K CAPTCHA
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...
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Dark Patterns Awards at SXSW 2013: Last Call for Submissions!
Image credit: Paul McDonald Which website would you nominate to win an award as the most deceptive, sneaky and manipulative of the last 12 months? I’m very interested in hearing from you, even if you...
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Is User-Centered Design Broken – or is It Just Us?
Cennydd Bowles recently argued on A List Apart that User-Centred Design “may be limiting our field”. I don’t agree, and I didn’t agree with Jared Spool when he said the same thing at IA Summit 2008....
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Moving on.
Yesterday I quit my job at Clearleft to become an independent UX consultant. I’m going to miss this place. What I’ve loved about Clearleft is that it’s just so different to any other agency I’ve worked...
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Assumptive Personas
It seems that assumptive personas are getting fashionable again, thanks to Lean UX’s Proto-Personas and Gamestorming’s Empathy Maps. Getting stakeholders to think about their users is a good thing, but...
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Powwowapp: for scheduling research
This is neat. Powwowapp is free little app to help you schedule research appointments. If you work in a UX agency then you’re probably used to paying about £70-£100 a head finders fee for some...
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The drunkard’s search
“There is the story of a drunkard, searching under a lamp for his house key, which he dropped some distance away. Asked why he didn’t look where he dropped it, he replied ‘It’s lighter here!’. Much...
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Sneaking responsive in under the radar using an mdot site.
Let’s face it, there’s the right way to do design, then there’s the pragmatic way to get things done within your organisation. The two are often not the quite same thing. Let’s say you want to create...
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Are you in a teflon-coated UX role?
Maybe you’re a UX researcher, passing choice insights into the product development machine. If what comes out the other side doesn’t seem right, you feel free to bitch and moan. “Didn’t they listen to...
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The slippery slope
A paraphrased transcript of my talk at SMX Munich 2013 Let’s start with a little game. In iOS, there’s an ad tracking feature that allows advertisers to identify you (albeit anonymously). It’s turned...
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