by Jonathan Baker-Bates on April 13, 2023
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 […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on May 15, 2013
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:
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on April 15, 2012
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 […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on March 5, 2011
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 […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on February 20, 2011
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 […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on February 11, 2010
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. […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on June 21, 2009
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 […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on April 16, 2009
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 […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on November 29, 2008
Several years ago, I was looking at the then newly-redesigned BBC weather page. I marvelled at how bad I thought it was because it failed to answer the one question that I always want to know right off the bat when I ask for a weather forecast: will it rain? I don’t care about wind […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 6, 2008
When Apple launched the Mac, one of its supposed great advantages was that it was graphical. “Just point and click” – what could be easier? Certainly better than the awful DOS (or even UNIX) command line! The command line was thus condemned to be seen as symbolic of the old school. Arcane commands typed in […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on June 18, 2008
In many cases, the design and content of a “home page” – the first page you see when you view a web site from its document root – owes its existence more to tradition than sense. Perhaps a home page speaks to the idea of a “cover” in the same way as a cover for […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on May 29, 2008
While I yield to no man in my admiration of Tim Rowe, I cannot accept his latest invitation to join him on faviki.com. This is because I have resolved to boycott any new service unless it supports OpenID. I have written to Faviki about this. Let’s see what happens (nothing probably), but in my opinion, […]