An introduction to card sorting

Card sorting. It’s really as simple as it sounds, but one of the most effective tools in user centred design to understand how your customers navigate to structure your content and name your sections.

I’m going to use this blog post to try and give you an overview of card sorting – what it is, how we use it and why you should make it a part of your next design project. Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of June, we packed up an eyetracker, a ton of leaflets and our stand and headed to the Online Marketing Show, part of Marketing Week Live.

I wasn’t just there to sell our service. Yes, I wanted people to know we exist and end the sleepless nights I used to have over design, but mostly I was  interested in the challenges marketers face these days. When we were asked “what is usability” our first reaction was to ask “well, what do you do and I will tell you how we can help”. This is what we learned: Read the rest of this entry »

Personas. You’ve probably heard of them and maybe you understand them, or maybe you don’t. That’s OK – these little chaps seem to receive a lot of attention and yet we are frequently asked by our clients what they actually are.

They are a key part of ensuring you stick to your user centred design principles. This post will hopefully give you a bit of an overview of what a persona is and isn’t, how we’ve used them and why you should too. There are also some suggestions for further reading at the end if you’d like to get your teeth sunk a little deeper into this topic.

Read the rest of this entry »

11th November 2010 saw World Usability Day being celebrated around the world. We took part by hosting a design competition on World Usability Day’s theme of “Communication”. We had an amazing morning with the kids from Royal Mile and Niddrie Mill primary schools. In the last month they have built their prototypes following user centred design principles, and after a round of testing at the Bunnyfoot offices they have made all their changes and were ready to put their ideas to a panel of judges.

Prizes up for grabs were:
Best Presentation, Most Usable Device, Most Innovative Device and Most Realistic Prototype.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week, we’ve been overrun with 10-11 year olds from Royal Mile and Long Niddrie Mill primary schools, showing us up with their amazing ideas for how to improve communication in their schools for World Usability Day.

We’re hoping to teach them that usability is a key element when designing tools for communication by helping them to test their products in a professional environment. Each team appointed a moderator, then watched from the viewing room as a group tested their prototypes. Read the rest of this entry »

We developed ‘mass user testing’ in response to the real world needs of commercial clients and to combat the deficiencies inherent in the most widely used traditional usability testing methods (we have actually been doing this for about 4 years but formalised it last year).

The key to mass user testing is using large numbers of people rapidly and cost effectively – this is achieved through recruiting people ‘off street’ with the lure of some cash (or other incentive – we are quite creative in this regard) for about 15 minutes of their time. Read the rest of this entry »