Recent posts in my User Experience Category

I’ve featured in a couple of interviews published over the last few days about the Guardian’s Facebook app and my ideas on UX recruitment.

I had quite a rude awakening from Twitter on Sunday morning when someone contacted me about John Naughton’s Observer column: “Graphic designers are ruining the web”. The users in the comments have done most of my blogging for me...

I wasn’t able to be at this month’s London IA event, which is possibly the first time I’ve ever missed it. Unavoidable, but a real shame because I had been looking forward to seeing Jeff Gothelf talk about Lean UX, and hear the debate that was sure to follow. But instead of hearing about it, I was putting it into action.

At news:rewired today I was part of a panel discussing optimising news sites for social media. I talked about the Guardian’s Facebook app. Here is an essay version of the talks.

I came across this tweet yesterday, by an IT support company called IGC Technical Solutions: “Windows 8 has a redesigned Blue Screen of Death, It's worrying that Microsoft has taken the time to update something that shouldn't be seen.”

Worrying? What nonsense. Here’s why you should design error pages for users, not for IT consultants.

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.

At UX People Leisa Reichelt issued a rallying cry to the UX troops. She said it is time for us to start being the awkward people in the room who say no - and if it ends up getting you fired, then that is just an opportunity to move to a company that will listen.

At UX People, Mo Syed gave one of those talks that reminds me that I haven’t read as much about psychology as I probably should have, but that I’ve picked an awful lot up by osmosis along the way. Here are my notes from the session.

John-Henry Barac is someone I have worked closely with at the Guardian on projects like our iPhone and other mobile apps, and he has written several thoughtful essays about the app and touchscreen user experience on his blog, so I was really looking forward to hearing him talk at UX People. He was discussing his personal journey from print design to “literally pushing pixels” through the touch-screen interface. Here are my notes from the session.

James O’Brien was talking to the UX People crowd about the perennial problem of the relationship between agile development and UX practice - a relationship defined by the obvious tension between the two created by one of them insisting on “no big design” up front. Here are my notes from the session, where he described the relationship between agile and UX as “an abusive one”.

At the weekend the Guardian became the first major publisher to experiment with Scroll, a new tool from a New York based start-up which promises to allow users to build magazine-style layouts for the web without having to know any code at all. Benji Lanyado put together a version of the weekend’s lead travel section article using it, and we published that in our new Guardian beta section, as well as publishing the more conventional version.

A couple of weeks back we held the latest of our London IA evenings. I’ve already blogged about Ben Bashford’s talk on “connected things”, and today I’m posting my notes from Jonty Sharple’s talk about arrogance in design.

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, and here are my notes from Ben Bashford’s talk about “Interaction design for connected things”.

It is just over twenty days since we released the Guardian Facebook app. I’ve been engaged with a lot of conversations with people about it on Twitter over the last couple of weeks, and I thought I might put down a few thoughts on the app, and some of the reaction to it.

Tom Coombs spoke at least week’s London IA event about his experience of working on the UX for a start-up that had managed to raise a lot of cash before they had really settled on their product vision. Here are my notes from his talk.

At London IA last week, Oli Shaw was reprising his EuroIA talk about serendipity. It is, he said, a lovely word on the tongue, but has been rated as one of the hardest English words to translate into another language. Here are my notes from his talk.

This is my final set of notes from last week’s EuroIA conference in Prague - covering Margaret Hanley’s closing plenary session.

I’ve been gradually working through the remaining notes I made on my trip to Prague to speak at this year’s EuroIA. One of my favourite talks was more heavily focussed on software engineering than anything else on the conference programme, which put a big smile on my face. Here are my thoughts on Bob Royce presenting “The Rise and Fall...and Rise Again of Information Architecture.”

Before starting his EuroIA talk, Jason Mesut suggested that if you kept a count of the number of people he offended, you might win a prize at the end. He also asked for people not to tweet his soundbites out of a context - a tweetable soundbite in itself - and asked for a public critique of the talk at the end. Here is mine...

I’ve been catching up on the notes I made in Prague over the course of the EuroIA Summit. Here is what I made of a couple of talks with a Scandinavian twist - Haakon Halvorsen & Kjetil Hansen from Norway, and the BBC’s Anna Dahlström.

I’m trying to keep up the pace with “live blogging” the sessions from EuroIA as soon as they finish today, but there was so much packed into Wouter Sluis-Thiescheffer & Brian Pagán’s talk that I didn’t quite manage to write it up in the fifteen minute break that followed. It was fantastic though - and really great fun as well as useful. And please excuse an above average number of typos...

I’m trying to “live blog” my notes from EuroIA in Prague as quickly as I can. Here are my takeaway points from Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati’s talk about pervasive IA in our cities, which has just finished. You’ll have to be forgiving of an above average number of typos...

I’m trying to blog my notes form the EuroIA 2011 Summit in Prague as quickly as I can, so you’ll have to be a little bit more forgiving than normal about typos, spelling, and thorough linking. Saturday morning’s sessions have started, and the first one I attended was by Boon Sheridan.

This is the essay version of the talk I gave yesterday at the EuroIA Summit in Prague.

This year’s EuroIA Summit kicked off with a keynote from Luke Wroblewski - whose book on web form design is one of my personal bibles. Here are my notes.

Over the course of the next couple of days, I’ll be blogging my notes from the sessions at EuroIA in Prague. Not necessarily, it must be said, in the right order. I’m starting with my notes from a session that has just finished - LBi’s Terry Ma talking about localising web design to compete in the Middle East and Asian markets.

Welcome once again to my probably futile attempt to gather together all the EuroIA slides, resources, poster sessions, and blog posts into one place. If you know of a resource I’ve missed, then drop me a mail at martin.belam@currybet.net or ping me on Twitter - @currybet.

This is my final set of notes from this week’s Content Strategy Forum. Elizabeth McGuane was presenting “Content is UX is design: crossing disciplines for fun and profit”, talking about topic maps, disambiguation, and multi-disciplinary teams

Over the last couple of days I’ve been blogging my notes from the sessions I saw at the Content Strategy Forum in London, including those by Karen McGrane, Eric Reiss, Lisa Moore and my own. Today I’ve got my notes from a masterclass in micro-copy delivered by Catherine Toole - “Seven micro content strategy projects with high return on investment”

This is the essay version of a talk I gave this morning at the Content Strategy Forum in London - “Taking content strategy to people who already think they have one”. It covers how the Guardian has shifted from traditional to digital publishing, and talks about our CMS, our metadata, our API, and gives my advice for those entering the content strategy field when dealing with traditional publishers.

My notes from 2 sessions at the 2011 Content Strategy Forum, featuring talks by Lisa Welchman and Eric Reiss.

My notes from Karen McGrane’s brilliant talk at Content Strategy Forum 2011.

This is an essay version of a talk given at last week’s Hacks/Hackers meet-up in London. I presented eight things that I believe news organisations need to stop doing, start doing, or do better, in order to cope with the way that digital has transformed the news cycle.

We had our first “UX drop-in” at the Guardian yesterday, and judging by the waiting list to get tickets and the reaction on the day, it won’t be the last. It was quite a simple format - get a ticket, turn up at the Guardian on the day, there will be some short talks, the chance to play with some forthcoming products like our Android app, and some free beer.

There are a couple of opportunities open at the moment to visit the user experience team at the Guardian. We are having a “drop-in” open day, and there are vacancies.

Andy Rutledge published a fascinating blog post last week looking at the design of digital news, and to illustrate his points he did a redux of the New York Times. Whilst appreciating the visual design, I thought there were 4 key areas where I very much disagree with Andy’s analysis, and think it would fail to engage with mainstream news readers.

I suspect that most blog posts about News International this week will be on another topic, but I’ve been reviewing The Times iPhone app. Here are a few of the things I’ve noticed and liked or disliked.

I posted a screengrab to Tumblr last night of the headline from The Times website which unfortunately managed to follow the formula “Live: Someone is dead”. I think it is the perfect example of something that wouldn’t be allowed to happen in print, but which hits a magic Venn diagram intersection of technology, editorial and information architecture allowing it to happen digitally.

Sometimes you can end up just as proud of some small changes to a website as you are of the big projects. We’ve made a couple of tweaks to the Guardian website recently which fall into that category.

I just wanted to briefly post about some of the talks I will be doing, and events I am involved in, between now and the end of the year.

At the UPA conference Susan Weinschenk talked about the paradox of choice, and that how as humans we often say that we want a wide array of choice, but actually find it bewildering when presented with it. I thought it might be worthwhile doing a quick survey of the level of choice that news homepages present to users. This table shows the number of headlines displayed to readers on the front pages of some major international news sites:

Recently I was in Atlanta for the UPA conference. Here is part three of my notes from the week, featuring Amy Buckner & Pamela Walshe talking about contextual mobile research, Susan Dray talking about barriers to adopting usability techniques, and a big helping of my own technology failure.

Last week I was in Atlanta for the UPA conference. Here is part two of my notes from the week, featuring Kuldeep Kelkar, Rolf Molich and Danielle Cooley.

Last week I was in Atlanta for the UPA conference. Here is part one of my notes from the week featuring Brooke Baldwin, Kathi Kaiser and Susan Weinschenk.

Paul Adams opened the UPA conference in Atlanta with a keynote talk that looked about how the web is being rebuilt around people. With a liberal dose of Facebook’s “Social by design” mantra, he explored the nature of our offline social networks as humans, and the differences between strong, weak and temporary ties between friends and people. Here are my notes from the session.

One of the sessions I enjoyed most at the UPA conference was the debate featuring Michael Hawley, Steve Krug, Rich Buttiglieri, Jen McGinn and Bob Thomas. Titled “Dangerous in the Wrong Hands, or Power to the People?”, it tackled the issue of “amateurs” running usability testing sessions.

Today at the UPA Conference in Atlanta I gave a presentation entitled “Changing the Guardian through guerilla usability testing”. Here is an essay version of the talk.

Here is my almost certainly doomed attempt to gather together a running linklog in one place the slides, resources, posters and blog posts from the speakers and attendees at the UPA 2011 conference in Atlanta as they appear on the web. If I’ve missed one, let me know in the comments or tweet me the link to @currybet.

This is part four of a five part essay based on my Polish IA Summit keynote talk “Come as you are”, looking at how I do my work at The Guardian.

Part three of “Come as you are” looks at some of the things that I learned about about being an IA/UX practitioner whilst working for Sony in Austria - including treating internal systems with as much care as you focus on end users, and why sometimes UX cannot rescue a flawed product.

This is the second part of my essay version of “Come as you are”, a talk I gave at the Polish IA Summit which looks back at my digital career and draws out what I think are the key lessons for information architects and user experience practitioners. This post looks at my time working at the BBC between 2000 and 2005.

Over the next few days I’ll be publishing an essay version of “Come as you are”, my Polish IA Summit keynote talk, which looked back over how I came to be an Information Architect, and what I’ve learned in the process.

Alexis Madrigal asked in The Atlantic if it was “the magazine app of the future”, and I’ve been playing around with Biblion, the app produced by the New York Public Library. Although it has generated some rave reviews, I thought there were some flaws and missed opportunities in the app.

This week I’ve been publishing the notes I made in Warsaw as I attended the Polish IA Summit. In the last of my notes, here is my take on Peter Boersma’s closing session.

One of the things I was pleased to hear get a mention in Denver at the IA Summit was the value of community management. Johanna Kollmann gave a great talk entitled “We love change. Change is scary”, that explored why humans are initially uncomfortable with change, and recommended good community management as a way to deal with it

In Jared Spool’s presentation at the IA Summit, he talked about the “Holy Grail” being a UXer who can code. He didn’t mean someone who could just do both, but someone who could do both really well. Jared posited that in the near future, al UXers will need to know code.

I’ve just come back from Poland, where I was giving the opening keynote session at the Polish IA Summit. This is the first of a series of posts about the sessions I saw there, looking at two presentations that featured designing for or with children.

Today I delivered the opening keynote address at the Polish IA Summit in Warsaw, entitled “Come as you are”. It is the story of how I’ve come to spend 13 years building digital products, and how I’ve observed and been part of the changes and development in the UX and IA disciplines over that time. It finishes with what I consider to be the five key lessons about computers and people from my career as an IA practitioner. Here they are...

A (probably futile) attempt to gather all the 2011 IA Summit slides into one handy reference point.