I was planning on writing a blog post about testing search interfaces when I realised I’d already written one for my friend Lorraine Paterson. She had hired me to help her with her workload in a research post at Edinburgh University. So I’ll save myself the trouble of writing it again and just link to [...]
I received a nice little email from the makers of IntuitionHQ the other day asking if I’d be interested in trying out their new usability testing software. I’ve had a play with it and written this post to share my impressions of it with you. What does it do? IntuitionHQ allows you to upload images [...]
Imagine you’re a starry-eyed teenager having just been inspired by the recent Olympic games. Your country has one a bag full of medals and you’re inspired to get involved. It should be easy to find out how to do this shouldn’t it? In this post I’m going to have a look at the websites of [...]
This is an opinion piece I wrote that appeared in Net magazine in February 2009. I was always quite fond of it so have decided to to pop it on my blog. I’m not responsible for the title I should add. I’ve altered some punctuation and added sub-headings to make it a little easier to [...]
Usability testing is too often used innapropriately in my opinion. Compared to other research techniques, it’s fairly cheap and easy to organise. But this leads to it being used to answer research questions it often can’t answer. In this post I’ll discuss how I think the UX community is losing touch with some of the [...]
I haven’t written anything about intranets on my blog yet. I worked for several years on intranet usability, and after years of counselling feel I’m about ready to talk about my experiences. In this post I’ll tell a story that explains how organisations sometimes think they’re being more efficient when the opposite is true. A [...]
In this post I’m going to talk about road signs, traffic and their similarities with the user experience of websites. Frontloading important information There’s an advertising sign I often see when driving down the M74 in Scotland. I’ve noticed it dozens of times but I can’t tell you what company it’s promoting because I didn’t [...]
In this post I’m going to discuss luxury brands. I’ll mention some mistakes that luxury brands often make and then go on to compare two similar web pages from different luxury brands. Fine wine and screw-top bottles Picture this. You’re having friends for dinner and want to make it a little special. You want to [...]
You probably speak a different language to that of your customers. It might be a subtle difference but it probably does exist. Your website will have a better chance of serving your customers if you’re aware of it. In this post I’ll discuss how the use of the word complications caused a lot of confusion. [...]
When you look through your own website, you do so with complete knowledge of how it works. So it’s often difficult to spot problems with it. Through usability testing you can uncover issues with your designs that you may never have realised on your own. In this post I’m going to point out an issue [...]
This post is a follow-up to to my previous post on validating web forms. In that post I gave you tips on helping users recover from validation problems. In this post I give you tips on avoiding the problems in the first place. You can write a whole book on this subject (and many have) [...]
When designing web forms, you should always consider the flow. By flow I mean the sequence of thoughts and interactions that takes place when your user is completing the form. In this post I’m going to tell you about a time when I got it wrong because I didn’t consider the flow properly. Once upon [...]
It’s a question that many organisations ask on contact forms, registration forms and checkout processes – How did you hear about us?. But asking this will cost you in lost conversions and the data you gather is probably inaccurate. In this post I explain why you should avoid asking people how they heard about you [...]
“It’s in the 16th century building on The High Street” she said. This was my mum trying to explain where the local copy and print shop was. I couldn’t tell a 16th century building from an 18th century one. The High Street in my home town is full of old buildings, so I couldn’t even [...]
Many organisations limit the success of their websites, purely because their branding guidelines do not provide enough colours for designers to utilise. In this post I’ll show you how a limited colour palette can affect the success of a website. Good calls-to-action I recently wrote an article for UX Booth about Good call-to-action buttons. In [...]
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I'm an independent usability specialist based in the UK.
I help people make their websites easier to use.
