I worked for the UX department at Sainsbury’s between 2020-2024, and was peripherally involved in the evolution of their design system over that time. While I was there, I wrote the following document (which I have abridged here).
Category: Tools
Why is it that so far no web application platform, framework or content management “solution” seems to care about the UX of the applications they are responsible for creating? Systems such as React, node.js, Zend, Drupal, Rails, etc. allow for the debugging of code, the optimisation of resources, ease of configuration and deployment. But they…
A few months ago, the New York Times wrote about “Scoop”, their new publishing system. Scoop, they point out, is more than just a means of facilitating their editorial processes. They see it as “…central to our ambitions to innovate on all platforms”. They also point out that the capabilities, ease of use, and competitive edge of content management systems is an increasingly important part of media publishing in the digital age. The fact that Goo…
When multiple designers work on multiple assets or across multiple projects, it gets very difficult to manage files over time. Which files are the latest versions? Which files are even relevant any more? Which files contain things that may be affected by the contents of other files? Yet with a few short-term exceptions, I have yet to see any reliable method of version control and general asset management in use in either agency or in-house digita…
There’s some debate about the utility of “high-fidelity wireframes” at work at the moment. It’s a reasonably common topic in the UX chattersphere too, so I thought I’d expand on it here. Firstly, to avoid some potential misunderstandings – let’s make some assumptions about the domain we’re in: 1. There are two main roles on the UX team: visual designer and non-visual designer (the latter is my currently preferred internal term for what is often e…
Data visualisation (“dataviz” or more broadly, “infoviz”) appears to serve two main purposes. The first is to show data to people who are not analysts or experts. This is so that they can understand some or all of something that has already been identified in that data. The assumption here is that raw tables, or perhaps bunches of charts or diagrams, don’t easily reveal what’s going on. An example of this would be Tufte’s favourite graphic, which…
… Jonathan Since I wrote this, the Folding Plug has done a pivot! They couldn’t get it past the 240V regulations, so they’ve turned it into a USB charger. Very nice. I take it all back (well, part from the fact that it still illustrates my point). https://www.themu.co.uk/ (and in tin-foil-hat HTTPS too!)…
At Hotels.com we’ve been doing multi-variate testing (“MVT”, or sometimes “A/B testing” if you’re variant challenged) for a while. This means we typically build a number of different designs, then let them duke it out on the live site to see which one performs the best. Recently, however, I’ve been increasingly aware that while we have a very powerful tool in MVT, power is nothing without control. When you can test anything you want, things can s…
With my Kindle’s free worldwide 3G connection (which I’m hoping to make some use of when I’m travelling to the Americas next month), I thought I’d investigate options for reading RSS feeds. Being the geek I am, I liked the sound of Daniel Choi’s kindle-feeds, a neat little Ruby script that gets RSS feeds from the sites you want, then formats them as single file for the Kindle. The Kindle 3 also comes with the ability to email files to your Kindle…
While I’m obviously rather late on the uptake here, I recently (and rather reluctantly) upgraded to Office 2007 on my work laptop. The “ribbon” UI is now sapping my will to live – I had to resort of Googling to work out where the “Links” dialogue had gone in Word, and many functions in Excel seem to have just disappeared. But one thing suddenly jumped out and grabbed me the other day as I was using Outlook. Finally, after about 15 years of total …
It’s that time again, when my fragile designs need to be encased in a sturdy barrel of documentation and set off down the rapids of implementation. All I can do is hope that they end up at the bottom in one piece. If there’s one thing that’s constant about documentation, it’s the maddening inconstancy of its form. This seems to be due to the inconstancy of the development process itself, which is something now gradually being accepted via things …
… Matt Awesome idea….
With the advent of Thermo “some time next year” things are at last hotting up in the RIA design space. Regular readers of this blog (if there are any such people) will know that I have been wondering for a long time in a somewhat Pooh-bearish way about the future of “The Designer” in the “The Development Process.” While this is hardly a topic unique to this blog, my particular angle on it can be summed up by the following idea. Designers (by whic…
I’m a bit late with this, but last weekend’s Slashdot discussion of this article on the ZDnet blog was interesting, if somewhat awe-inspiring in so far as some of the opinions expressed about designers (and the software development process in general) were breathtaking stupid. Ever since I got preview of Expression and the wonders of XAML last year, I’ve been wondering about the effect of elevating UI design to the same (at least practical) level…
One of Microsoft Word’s biggest time-wasting functions is auto-numbering. This feature is actually an option which (of course!) is turned on by default. Hardly anyone knows this though, so most people struggle needlessly as auto-numbering rudely kicks in when they start a paragraph with “1.” It then usually refuses to actually number the other lines properly according to what the user wants, or to stop numbering when they want it to; or re-starts…
I was in Dallas last week. It’s a big place – it has the second largest airport in the world in terms of square mileage. Even the city is so big it gives you a feeling that hardly anyone’s there. We went there to observe some user testing of a prototype I’d created, and to conduct some marathon meetings with the client. We discussed, amongst other things, the juicy subject of how we’re to engage with the build team, etc. It struck me once again t…
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to find a better way of documenting designs. I’ve posted about this before, and I still think that Axure looks promising, but most of my IA life’s been based around Visio, some occasional PowerPoint – and on joining Oyster/Framfab – FreehandMX. None of these tools has really baked my cake when it comes to combining text with annotated graphics though. This is a shame because that’s what I’ve been do…
I went to the Microsoft Campus yesterday to have an informal preview of some of the new Windows UI things to be announced next week (technically under NDA – so sue me). In the lead-up to Longhorn (now “Vista” – the next version of Windows), one of Microsoft’s aims is to make the role of UI/UX design as important as that of coding in the overall development process. This will be done by the introduction of the “Windows Presentation Foundation” und…
… Seen on “overheardintheoffice.com”… http://www.overheardintheoffice.com/archives/000360.html Hmm… The washing machine The “the washing machine of communication” was something that I thought was rather descriptive at the time. It seems to have taken on a life of its own now, I see. However, “the janitorial chocolate delivery system” (also from my time at Warple Way) has not stood the test of time….
I find myself doing what I think might be an unhealthy amount of thinking about the tools I use to do stuff, and regular readers of this blog will know that one of my ambitions is to discover – or better still help to make – an Information Architecture IDE. So one of the things I’ve been meaning to blog about is the latest release of what was called Ubiquity RP, now Axure RP, by a company called Axure. Peter van Dijck published an interview on hi…
As part of some recently expansive thinking, I’ve been jamming on the following theme recently as follows. So far, I’ve got some thoughts, but no good solutions, on streamlining the experience and graphic design process overall. I was thinking about one of our projects (referred to here as “Project X”) in which we delivered HTML and flat graphic “prototypes” for the purposes of user testing, client approval, etc. during the design phase. Ideally,…
It’s been nose-to-the-grindstone this last week working towards an insane deadline to write up the findings (and think up some suggestions going forward) from a large card-sort being done while I was in Milan the week before. Planning and analysing the results of a 30-user card sort is actually rather fun. It’s rare you get the chance to do one – I only regret not having the time to facilitate more than a couple of sessions. And of course it’s mo…