A recent conversation I had about UX research centred on whether such research is to help designers predict eventual outcomes of design interventions, or whether its role is to “de-risk” UX or business ideas. They were keen to frame research as a way of lowering risk to the business. This applied both to design validation…
Tag: design
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…
At hotels.com we’re pretty test-driven. We’re testing stuff all the time on the site with multi-variate or A/B tests of various kinds. But as I always point out, doing tests (or indeed any kind of quantitative or qualitative research) is easy. It’s what you do with the results that count. So when I see a test proposal, I always ask myself “what if?” What if the result is X, what would that tell us? And if it is Y or Z? Could we use that informati…
It has become a shibboleth of the UX and Agile communities that “collaborative design” is the best way of designing things. Or if not the best way, it is at least better than leaving people to come up with solutions on their own. Regular readers of Webtorque will know that if there’s one thing I like to do, it’s to question things that appear to be received wisdom. The usually unchallenged assertion that collaboration in design is always good is …
I’ve been wondering whether using Chernoff faces might be a good variation of the “advanced search” pattern in the context of finding a hotel to stay in. Choosing the right hotel requires a number of quite complicated things to be considered. But which things you place the most emphasis on depends very much on the context of why you are booking a hotel in a given location or time. If price is the only consideration you have, then you’re lucky. Th…
Here’s a fascinating incident. In a nutshell: net news site readwriteweb.com posts a news article about some Facebook business development with AOL. Nothing remarkable about that. But then something strange starts to happen. Hundreds of people start posting comments complaining about how their beloved Facebook has changed and they can’t log in … to readwriteweb.com. The article has since been updated to point out to people that they’re not on Fac…
With the Kindle DX — Amazon’s new large-screen e-reader – the debate about the delivery of information via printed paper compared to that of digital is starting to pick up even more. Earlier, I’d wondered about reasons to prefer dead tree media that weren’t based on just aesthetics. I see that in reviewing the new Kindle, and much to their credit, Slate has avoided misty-eyed discussions of ink-stained fingers or the timeless aroma of newsprint. …
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 …
… mdja i guess they haven’t looked out of the window… it says ‘maybe’ when clearly the answer is ‘no’ Jonathan Well, in their defence it is about *future* weather, so maybe it’s about “maybe” at some (unspecified) future point? A bit like a stopped watch is always exactly right twice a day……
… Jonathan Hm. Looks like Don Norman wrote something similar on this subject a while back….
… Eikoku Downloaded big buck bunny but real player, wmp etc won’t play it in synch. You had any luck? Jonathan Video formats are, as I have sometimes mentioned, one of the bigger SNAFUs of the 21st century – have you tried playing it with VLC?…
… Jonathan Vuk Milicic of Faviki.com has replied to me and says they want to implement OpenID and will do so… later. When they do, I’m in. It looks like an interesting site they have….