Recent posts in my Application design Category
December 14, 2011
UXmas at the Guardian
Last night we threw open the Guardian’s door for “UXmas” - a chance to meet people from the UX and design teams, hear a couple of talks, and eat some mince pies before retiring to the pub.
October 17, 2011
How the Guardian’s iPad app changed the way that I consumed news
We’ve had a lot of products launch over the last few weeks at the Guardian, including Android and Windows phone apps and our Facebook app, but none have been as high profile as our iPad launch. With a design team of Mark Porter, Andy Brockie, Barry Ainslie and John-Henry Barac, you wouldn’t expect it to be anything other than beautiful, and using it has changed the way that I consume news.
June 4, 2010
8 tips for making ambush 'guerilla user testing' clip reel videos
Yesterday I posted my 10 tips for ambush 'guerilla user testing'. Once you've got some footage of people using your website, you need to find the best way to present that back to the business. I like to make a summary clip reel of the testing, and here are my 8 tips on putting your clip reel together...
June 3, 2010
10 tips for 'ambush guerilla user testing'
Over the last couple of years I've been practicing 'ambush guerilla user testing', which is basically the art of pouncing on lone people in cafes and public spaces, and quickly filming them whilst they use a website for a couple of minutes. It isn't by any means a formal research technique, but you can soon build up a valuable clip library of initial reactions to you and your competitors' products, and tease out interesting anecdotal evidence about the way that people use and feel about your website. Approaching strangers in a public place and asking to video them using the Internet sounds pretty daunting, so here are my top 10 tips to help you get started....
June 2, 2010
Future of web design: Aarron Walter and Aral Balkan on making fantastic user experiences
In the last of this series of notes from the 'Future of web design' conference, here are two talks about building user interfaces and experiences that are fun, playful and a delight to use.
May 31, 2010
Future of Web Design conference iPhone app review
I recently spent a couple of days at Future of Web Design in London. Beforehand I downloaded the iPhone app, which put the conference programme straight into my pocket, and allowed me to share which sessions I was planning to attend. It was, though, missing one key feature.
April 30, 2010
The mobile digital general election - official party iPhone app review
As part of their election campaign, the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green parties have all launched official iPhone applications. I've reviewed and compared them.
December 15, 2009
Real-time web provides real-time feedback on The Guardian's iPhone application
Real-time web gives real-time feedback on Guardian iPhone app
Twitter is transforming the way that digital products are launched.
December 11, 2009
The curious case of the enterprise software design from the nineties that just would not die
Several presentations of enterprise software I've seen recently have made me wonder why we tolerate interfaces and interactions in this sphere which would never make it into production for web tools.
August 4, 2009
"Graceful Hacks" - UX, IA and interaction design tips for hack days
"Graceful Hacks"
UX, IA and interaction design tips for hack days
September 21, 2008
Will last.fm ever ask for the last time?
I love last.fm. You love last.fm. Everybody loves last.fm. It is a cool poster child for the Web 2.0 generation, and the fact that they built their business model on avoiding paying streaming royalties in the UK as much as possible is neither here nor there to most people. But... ...installing the application on your Windows XP PC can be really sucky. The problem is that the Last.fm application seems to pay no attention to the account settings on the...
September 12, 2008
A painless way to file your tax return
Very often when I'm writing about some online application or web site or the other, I'm making a list of things that could be improved. It is always much nicer to be able to write something completely in praise of a system - in this case the HMRC's online tax self-assessment application. Well, I can't completely praise the system, since it is designed to part me with my hard-earned money. And you know they are only going to waste it...
September 27, 2007
Take-away facts and quotes from the Euro IA Summit in Barcelona - Day 2
At the weekend I was in Barcelona for the Euro IA summit, and so, whilst trying not to blog my every move for a change, I thought I would post my key take-away facts and quotes from the conference. I covered day one yesterday. Stanisław Skórka I started the second day of the conference listening to Stanisław Skórka talking about the bridge between the librarian and information architect professions. I don't envy any of the speakers having to present in...
September 26, 2007
Take-away facts and quotes from the Euro IA Summit in Barcelona - Day 1
Last weekend I was in Barcelona for the Euro IA Summit, and I made a solemn vow to my wife and myself that I was actually going to concentrate on doing stuff rather than spending my time and energy blogging about doing stuff. However, it did seem rather churlish not to at the very least post my favourite take-away facts and quotes from the conference itself. Ricardo Baeza-Yates Ricardo is the director of Yahoo! Research Labs in Spain and Chile,...
August 6, 2007
5 quick usability wins for the BBC iPlayer beta trial installation process
Having spent two of the last three weeks sitting very near to the iPlayer development team in the BBC's Future Media and Technology department in White City, I'm aware that there is no shortage of people telling them what they ought to have done with the product. And that is both outside and inside the BBC. From the Open Source Consortium's 'rip it up and use video codec DIRAC instead' vote, to Guardian journalists patiently explaining to commentators on their...
July 20, 2007
BBCi Toolbar for Internet Explorer - 2002 style
One of the things that has interested me in recently putting together OpenSearch plugins and Google Toolbar custom buttons for BBC and newspaper related searches, is the change in the nature of web development they represent over the last few years. I've been able to make all of these, with no official permission, in just a few hours, by stringing some XML together into a bunch of text files. They all seem to work fine so far. By contrast, one...
July 13, 2007
'Cancel' just doesn't seem to mean 'Cancel' for iTunes 7.2 on Windows
I've mentioned before that I haven't exactly been seeing eye-to-eye with iTunes 7.2 on my PC. It keeps getting upset and sparking Windows error dialogue messages if I run it without my iPod attached first, and won't quit without warning me every single time that iSproggler is using the iTunes scripting interface, am I sure I want to quit? More seriously though, I don't like the way that Apple do not follow the standard Windows OS conventions with some of...
June 19, 2007
Facebook could do with short nickname URLs
Updated 15/6/2009 - A mere two years after I wrote this, Facebook has introduced a usernames feature - you can find out more here. One of my friends in an IM conversation the other day pointed out that in barely three weeks Facebook has gone from being something you didn't want to join as it was full of spotty teensomethings, to something where the serious boss of your boss of your boss of your boss now has a profile. The...
June 14, 2007
The curse of annoying Windows XP speech bubble system alert pop-ups
Whenever I write complaining about some aspect of Microsoft's Windows OS, I usually get a couple of people pointing out that I should use something a bit more Linux-y. I have tried out a couple of flavours of Linux desktop, but so far I haven't found anything that does the trick for me. More importantly, the ubiquity of Windows in the business world means I'm pretty much stuck with it in order to do my work. Which doesn't stop me...
October 19, 2006
Google Talk's latest update doesn't behave gracefully offline
I've griped before about software programs silently updating themselves on my laptop, and then not behaving gracefully when they find I live in an almost always offline world at the moment, and yet again Google Talk is a prime culprit. Last time it updated itself without asking my consent, the Norton software and the Google software on my machine just would not play nicely until one of them got a chance to go online again. That time the honours were...
September 11, 2006
Living in an almost-always-off world
I'd like to think that if I've learned one thing from living in a house without an internet connection, it is that in the future any application designs I work upon will be more graceful about being offline than the set currently installed on my laptop. The thing that most grates is the way that going online alters the state of my laptop, as applications silently phone home and reconfigure themsleves, and then gripe at me when they can't get...
August 2, 2006
Engineering parallels at the Science Museum
I was in London's Science Museum yesterday, and couldn't help noticing that there some parallels and lessons to be learnt for our own times and developments in new media technologies. Throughout the modern debate on computer software patents we have been assured by those in support of them that patents allow companies to innovate and help technological development. That view doesn't seem to be shared by the Science Museum's caption writer for their energy section. Talking about the rise of...
June 16, 2006
Building my rebooted:bbc.co.uk homepage
During April and May 2006 the BBC ran a competition to redesign their web homepage, called reboot:bbc.co.uk. Accompanying the competition was a blog, which I was a guest contributor to. My main series of posts on the reboot:bbc.co.uk blog described the way I developed a theoretical entry into the competition, and compared it with how the BBC's New Media department develops new products and services. Here on currybetdotnet, rather than duplicating the whole thing, I have gathered together links to...
April 19, 2006
The travellers' internet: Designing applications for those on the move - part three
Over recent months I have been travelling through Europe and the Middle East, which has meant me using all kinds of web applications from internet access points that were not my usual domestic internet connection. On Monday I outlined some of the issues I encountered with browser compatibility, JavaScript and cookies. Yesterday I looked at some problems I experienced with one of the web's most talked about photo-sharing applications, Flickr which included the upload interface and the login process. I...
April 18, 2006
The travellers' internet: Designing applications for those on the move - part two
Over recent months I have been travelling through Europe and the Middle East, which has meant me using all kinds of web applications from internet access points that were not my usual domestic internet connection. Yesterday I outlined some of the issues I encountered with browser compatibility, JavaScript and cookies. Today I want to look at issues I had with one of the web's most talked about photo-sharing applications, Flickr. Internet session during travelling tend to have a very tight...
April 17, 2006
The travellers' internet: Designing applications for those on the move
Over recent months I have been travelling through Europe and the Middle East. This has meant me accessing my email, uploading photos, writing my blog, and making all kinds of forwarding travel arrangements over the internet at internet cafes, hotels and other access points that were not my usual domestic internet connection. Over the course of my travels I have made some observations about which types of web application are particularly suited to being used by travellers, and the kind...
March 12, 2005
When Oyster Card fails think "Thanks for the uptime"
In Friday's Evening Standard there was a small article by Local Government Correspondent Ross Lydall about the Oyster card: "Oyster card users have been overcharged about £1 million because of delays in limiting fares, it was claimed today. The revelation came as pressure grew for an inquiry after a computer crash caused the £50 million smartcard system to collapse. Card readers across the 270 Tube stations and on 8,000 buses failed yesterday morning - taking five hours to repair and...
October 3, 2004
Microsoft Research Paper on software re-design
Microsoft Research published a very interesting paper this week - Contextual Method for the Re-design of Existing Software Products. It laid out a framework for user-testing and user centred design methodologies being applied to incremental enhancements to applications. The work they use to illustrate their point was a study of the use of Internet Explorer at Cambridgeshire County Council, with a view to introducing new features that would improve the efficiency of the workflow in the department. Two things stood...
September 10, 2004
BBC Four A-Z-o-tron
The BBC Four web site got a design facelift and spruce up this week - and part of the project was a mini-CPS to allow the team to automatically generate subsets of their A-Z index for genres like music and documentaries. It was a great example of a how a quick idea being well specified can consequently be delivered rapidly - which I was very happy with. However, I learnt a valuable lesson as a manager of these kind of...
March 3, 2004
The Vanity Experiment on "designing task based interaction flow"
Brilliant stuff from Ant explaining the thought and effort behind the BBC's Single Sign-On Registration service - Tips for designing task based interaction flow I particularly value any set of observations that can hammer home this kind of point: "Errors are usually not the fault of the user, but the fault of the system for not understanding the user or allowing them to input how they would naturally" It doesn't matter whether you are building a web application to...
