There’s too much going on there. A classic case of using every crayon in the pack:

While usability tests and focus groups are useful for specific phases of application development, they aren’t as useful for understanding cultural frameworks and practices because by the time an app is being tested. It has already accumulated so many cultural assumptions along the way in the design process that users are often asked to test something that functions in the programmer’s world, not the user’s world.

Sometimes, one size does not fit all.


Wang, Tricia. 2010. “GOOGLIST REALISM: The Google-China saga and the free-information regimes as a new site of cultural imperialism and moral tensions.” The Eigth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities. UCLA. Los Angeles, California, June 29.

Not quite sure how I stumbled upon this deck, but it’s given me quite a lot to think about. As some people do or don’t know I’ve moved to pastures new and I’m having to take many of the things above into account.

Who cares? Is it worth cheapening your clean homepage with the kind of advertising that you’re likely to find on Pirate Bay or some kind of underground file-sharing service.

By the way, did you spot the missing question mark? A copywriter out there must be getting a serious lambasting.

Do. Me. A. Favour.

The web is rapidly becoming a more semantic, dynamic and real-time environment. Applications now sit on the cloud and people are spending more time on social networks.

As we spend more time “leaning in”, the ergonomics of the equipment we use starts to become vital. Seamless lifestyle integration and usability will be critical to making web applications successful.

Whilst the iPad does a good job at delivering the web in more ambient format, I don’t think it’s no where near what’s around the corner. True gestural control and augmented reality will be the technologies that start to replace our keyboards and mice, in order to make software and the web more integrated into our lives.

The Gesture Cube appears to be start of commerce gaining traction around what I’ve been thinking about, but we’ve got all of this to look forward to!

Recently I read Steve Krug’s book: Don’t make think. It’s a very basic UE/IA primer, but a must read for anybody who is involved in anything to do with content, SEO, design and development.

One of the things that I learned about was concise and clear UI’s across websites; they shouldn’t overly repeat things where they’re not needed. Krug give’s an simple example of this when he talks about search functionality: the word “search” should only be used once. Search functions are now ubiquitous, people are familiar with them and they know what they mean.

Taking this simple rule into account, I still keep seeing so many blogs and websites getting it wrong. Some of these blogs are owned by you Cannes Lions design agency dudes!

I guess I’m being petty, but it annoys me like a fly on the telly; you don’t know it’s there until someone points it out, and then you can’t ignore it.

Whilst I was watching the box last night I noticed that the T.V. commercial for Go Compare was promoting the fact that their website had really good usability.

I think it’s a clever move from an advertiser that is now operating in quite a saturated market. There are so many insurance comparison sites and aggregators on the web; none of them seem to have any real distinguishing USPs.

We’ve seen Meerkats and all kinds of other brand awareness campaigns over the last few months, but what I like about GoCompare is that they have concentrated on creating a really positive user experience—that is now proudly being promoted.

No gimmicks, just a really good website that is easy to use.

Oh and by the way…

Cardboard cars and tins of beans? What were they thinking :S

Everything from UE, SEO and good design have been addressed very well. I had my music downloaded to my desktop and uploaded to iTunes in next to no time.

Purchasing aside, I seriously recommend all offerings from Nasha Records.

Also those of you who are into eastern electro are probably no strangers to Chase and Status and their track Eastern Jam. Did you know the original hindi sample was taken from a song on the soundtrack of Devdas, a very popular Bollywood movie? Found that out this weekend, pointless trivia I know.

The recent launch of Google Website Optimiser probably got a lot of web-masters thinking “Great! a free, off the shelf solution to usability”, just like Google Analytics was a free, off the shelf equivalent to all the big names such as Omniture, Nedstad and Hitbox.

Multivariate testing can provide insight into effective landing page rotations and web analytics can provide insight into navigation paths, dwell times and user journeys. Whilst these snippets of information are useful, I believe they cannot replace the expertise delivered by UE creatives and IA’s.

Working with UE creatives has made me realise that their day-to-day work involves:

- Detailed qualitative and quantitive research
- Defining typical user personas and user journeys
- Accessibility auditing and consulting
- Information architecture design
- User interface design and optimisation
- Content consulting and landing page design
- User testing

In addition to their practices and output, they have an understanding of web technologies, web design, consumer psychology and many of them come from backgrounds in design, web-design or product design.

User centered design has never been so important and even when I speak to clients about the design of basic things such as blogs, I always reiterate the importance of taking UI design and overall usability into consideration.

Good usability increases dwell times, lowers bounce rates, increases repeat visitors and most importantly helps the end user achieve their goal or purpose for using your website.

Whilst the mentioned benefits seem fairly straight forward, people often overlook the benefits that user centered design has on Natural Search Optimisation. Approaches adopted to improve usability and accessibility often simultaneously facilitate more efficient search engine crawling and indexing too.

In an economic and digital climate where the customer really has become King and every penny really does count, ensuring your website is user friendly is essential for maximising efficiencies and gaining the most value from website traffic.