by Jonathan Baker-Bates on May 5, 2022
On my LinkedIn profile, I say the following: I predict the future. Not flying cars or robot pets, but whether any given design intervention will raise, lower or have no effect on your KPI. I do this through researched hypotheses and experimentation to become progressively less wrong. By understanding people’s behaviour and what motivates them […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on November 24, 2019
What is design? How do we make the most of research? These are two questions that seem at first unrelated, but are in fact strongly connected. The following thoughts came from trying to make sure research activity is used, appreciated, and understood. Along the way, it revealed an approach to design that may help solve […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on February 25, 2012
It seems like not too long ago, many IA/UX designers fought endless battles on mailing lists and Usenet about whether Visio was better than Freehand which was better than Omnigraffle which was better than Excel (no, really, I’ve seen people use Excel to express UI ideas). There was always some software or other that totally […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on October 26, 2011
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 […]