User Experience (UX), UX design, and design thinking are popular buzzwords and often used interchangeably. But are they interchangeable? What do they mean, exactly, and how should we use them? User experience continues beyond a single touchpoint Let’s unravel the meaning of each one, starting with user experience. Per the Nielsen Norman Group, “‘User experience’Read more
Posts with the category: Brain Feasts: Longer Reads
It’s 9:00am and you’ve just touched down in sunny Barcelona and arrived at your Airbnb. You open the door and your eyes dart around the room — lots of light, modern furnishing and most importantly, it’s clean! First impressions are good.Read more
Giving myself enough time to reflect on the Service Design Fringe Festival as one of the 2018 organisers I can firmly say that the Festival was a success and worth of my time and energy investment putting aside/greying out countless meetings and myriads of emails, hungry late night catch-ups and playing “hardcore Tetris” with theRead more
If you were asked to characterise a ‘gamer’, chances are, you’d describe a socially awkward teenage male. That’s the general perception of a gamer – and something that has been perpetuated by films and TV for decades – but it’s a far cry from the truth. In fact, the average gamer is 35 years old,Read more
This is a short(ish) blog that aims to respond to the increased use of Sketch (a software design/prototyping tool) by our clients. I’ll look at some of the more significant differences between Sketch and Axure (a similar prototyping tool), how they fit into our user-centred design (UCD) practice and what we recommend our clients useRead more
“Dear Diary, How can I ensure I get the best results when conducting a diary study as part of a UX research project?” Let’s start with a quick overview: diary studies are a research method used to gain qualitative insight into participants’ behaviour (and the context) over a period of time. During the study period,Read more
Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ is still one of the most respected books about web usability, nearly 20 years(!) after its original publication. Some might even argue it’s more relevant today than ever, especially given the number of sites and apps there are in the world.Read more
Registering for a site or service is often, to put it frankly, a tedious and boring task. But although it’s not the ‘sexiest’ part of an interface, the registration process is a crucial element of any digital product, and can even be a determining factor in whether the user will actually continue to use the service…Read more
Persuasive design has received a lot of media attention recently. At the end of 2017, before Facebook’s more recent data leak difficulties, a number of high profile Silicon Valley technologists spoke out against the platforms that they helped build. Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker criticised the development of functionality that “exploit[s] a vulnerability in humanRead more
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a meet-up in London run by the Service Design Network, where we discussed how we can improve the way we design for those who are vulnerable, as well as how to build trust through design. Building trust is not an easy task – but if businesses aren’t ableRead more
