user experience
Agile and the horizon effect
The 1960s saw the first ideological skirmish in computer chess programming (and by extension much of the nascent field of AI) between two schools of thought: ‘brute force’ and ‘selective search’. Brute force methods involved looking at every possible position on the board, whereas selective search advocated pruning the game tree by ignoring moves that [...]
SXSW 2009 - vote for me!
The South By Southwest session picker has just gone online and I’m not too proud to shamelessly solicit votes for my session:
Divorce / Retry / Fail: Keeping Users Infatuated
We know all about lust. Our websites pose, preen and seduce, and it works – those users just can’t keep their hands off our bits. But, as [...]
The illusion of control
“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” - Mario Andretti
Control is a slippery thing. It’s important to our lives; we need it to rationalise and justify our decisions, but sometimes it’s simply beyond our influence. The well-known fundamental attribution error is a clear example of how we overstate human involvement in [...]
dConstruct buttons
I’m very fond of what Paul’s done with the dConstruct 2008 buttons: in addition to the usual branded colours, you can also supply your own background image (from Flickr, or elsewhere on the web) to create some a sort of social mashup button. Here are a couple of my attempts:
I’m also rather starstruck at the [...]
BarCampLondon4
Despite some early WiFi problems (which prompted me to finally go out and buy the broadband dongle I’ve been considering for a while), I’d say BCL4 was a big success. I was particularly pleased to find many people bucking the geek trend and choosing not to watch Dr Who, instead joining in the beery Werewolf [...]
Pragmatism, not idealism
I’m currently taking a short break before starting my new job (more to follow on this).
Obviously I’m relaxing and enjoying the weather, but I’m also brushing up on XHTML and CSS so I can ditch Visio wireframing and start creating live prototypes. I had planned to use this blog as my sandbox, but to do [...]
The Fox goes shopping: cognitive dissonance in e-commerce
One of the most widely used metrics in e-commerce is conversion: simply a measure of the proportion of people who go from x to Sale, where x might be simply visiting the site, or perhaps adding something to the basket.
Of course, increasing conversion is generally a Good Thing because it makes big red lines point [...]
The death of page views, and why we should care
Ask any web geek and they’ll tell you that the page, as we know it, is terminally ill. For many years, it was the proud atom of the web: an unbreakable, fundamental unit. However, much like the atom, it has now been broken down further, and in modern times is being bypassed by Ajax, Flash, [...]
Metaphors
Having one of those jobs that defies snappy explanation, I spend a while explaining it to others. I came up with this one a few months ago, and so far it seems to be holding up.
Formula 1 teams spend millions on tyres. The tyre companies themselves spend millions more. Their extensive R&D programmes pour money [...]
Full coverage
As I’m struggling with my WiFi yet again (I’m on the point of conceding that my MacBook has dodgy wiring - off to Regents Street I go…), I was interested by this article on the pointlessness of mobile signal strength bars.
We, the public, have no understanding of communication technology. We simply trust the designer to [...]