Category Archives: User Experience

Because it makes you money.

No seriously, I know hiring people costs money, and potentially increasing development time costs money. But nothing is more expensive than bad design. And I’m not just talking about something that doesn’t look great, I’m talking about things which don’t work.

Attention is a finite resource, if you need to pay more attention to the tiny parking space you’re squeezing your car into, you need to take some away from the radio.

Let’s face it, Amazon is amazing. It’s delivering everything from groceries to office supplies, to clothing, to electronics directly to our door with no fuss. Worst we have to do is pop to the post office if our parcel didn’t fit through the letterbox. Amazon Prime even allows us to get our precious items the […]

If you’re a business, you need social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (it might not be as popular as the others but it’s good to set up the page just so you can control what information Google shows about your business), and maybe an Instagram account. These accounts are the gateway to potential customers, gathering reviews […]

Is that nobody seems to be able to decide what to refer to it as in forms. Are we using UK (United Kingdom) or GB (Great Britain)? Or are we going for the home countries with SCO (Scotland), ENG (England), WAL (Wales), and NI (Northern Ireland) plus the channel islands etc? Or are we actively […]

Deep Interaction is a design pattern (for lack of a better term) which encourages users to spend time with an app or website. Services which use deep interaction will more than likely be content heavy, online only, and where the end goal is a distraction from the real world. Conversely, Shallow Interaction is a pattern which encourages the user to interact, not with a device or application, but with people. The application/device is purely there to add to the experience.

Recently I posted an article rant about how user onboarding shouldn’t be seen as ‘handholding’, and how it’s an important factor in ensuring that your users know how to use your system and aren’t left feeling lost at sea. However, it can sometimes be better to let your users dive in at the deep end. Anyone who has had […]

First impressions count. You’ve managed to convince a user to give you their personal details, now you want them to keep coming back. It’s been proven many times that users don’t come back to services which are hard to use. Frustration isn’t just the name of a board game, it’s a killer for apps and […]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Hence why it is important when creating web forms to let your users know if something isn’t quite right. Whether it’s requiring a space between postcode sections, not allowing certain characters in an address, or a required field is left blank, […]