Category Archives: Usability / IA
UX Bristol 2013
I had a great day at UX Bristol, it was a great mix of workshops and talks with plenty to keep you interested. This is a little roundup from the sessions I took notes in. Not all of them I'm afraid, but hopefully it provides a taster. Peak Appification
The commercial model for software on devices is for Apps. That works great when an app matches the task you have, but falls down when you have to cross one or more apps. Android has made some progress in getting around this (intents); iOS is starting to create corrals of apps (e.g. passbook); and Facebook has created the people-centric 'Home'. Have we passed the peak of importance for apps? Send to my… fridge?
I've noticed a trend in how I use the internet now, where I use different aspects of it in different contexts. In my browser there is a set of bookmarks in a folder called "Send to", which allows me to direct resources to different places. Usability Introduction - Baltics
Thank you to all those people who attended the session today in Tallinn, and I look forward to meeting people from Vilnius and Riga! Thanks also go to the guys at Best Marketing, who have made me very welcome. I promised lots of links to go with the presentation, so here they are...
Is accessibility actually usability?
A couple of days ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the first seminiar on usability in Bulgaria. A great thanks to the people at .net and Lucrat in Bulgaria, it was a great event with great hosts. It was also great to see & meet Peter Merholz, having …
Home links verses logos
Facebook appears to be testing (with a far greater audience than I could), the current state of web conventions. A few years ago, few regular people knew that the logo on a website would link back to the homepage. Anecdotally, I have noticed more people using logos for that purpose in usability testing, but it's very difficult to know what proportion of the general population that is. dConstruct 2008 notes
My journey to d.construct was a long one, I hadn’t even checked which talks were when, so I was very thankful for the schedule built into your name tag! I took quite a few notes for general use, but please to refer to the originals where possible:
Email IA for the overloaded
For those who get a large volume of email, you probably know the pain of trying to balance reading, sorting, and acting on that email. After several years of battle, I've settled on a particular filtering method that will probably work for anyone that receives email from several internal teams, and many project lists. Do you need IA for email? Accessibility findings vs recommendations
This article on newspaper site accessibility dropped into my inbox, from the author hoping to get some coverage from accessibility related sites. Whilst the aim is good (testing sites to increase the awareness of accessibility), I wouldn't be happy with the recommendations.
Usability myths and professionals
A recent post by a local authority web officer was fairly frustrating for me, as it perpetuates several myths in usability, as well as calling into question my motives. The last part is about usability advice (from me) published on the localdirect.gov.uk site.