February 2013
1 post
Nothing's Your Fault*
I’ve been working as a user experience consultant for large clients for about eighteen months. One thing bugs me more than anything else.
So much of the time, nothing gets done.
You start user experience consulting with lofty ideas about matching business goals against user needs to uncover a holy grail for your clients. And it feels like that at the start - doing research, interviewing...
December 2012
1 post
The Year of ThisIsMyJam
My love affair with music died sometime after I gave up trying to be a musician, left Manchester and stopped living with DJs. Without a constant supply of personal recommendations I just got bored.
ThisIsMyJam totally changed that this year. Overnight I had a constant stream of amazing back music in my life.
In a world where too much is thrown at you to pay attention to, the focus on a single...
November 2012
3 posts
A Pattern Library for Writing
I don’t know about you, but no one taught me grammar at school.
It’s a massive shame, because grammar is really useful. These days I use it as a pattern library for writing. Like a stencil set, it gives you a collection of predetermined shapes to use when you’re floundering.
Which is helpful, because writing is hard.
Three of my favourite grammar patterns - statements,...
The 'Can' versus 'Will' Hack
There are a million ways you can hack your brain into better habits using language. Changing your words, grammar or how you write sentences will have a huge impact on your behaviour.
This post is about just one - the difference between ‘can’ and ‘will’.
There are two areas of user experience design where this can make a big difference - avoiding edge cases and getting...
A Symbolic Victory
America elected Barack Obama again today. It’s some achievement, considering how bad their economy is. But then Mitt Romney never looked like he could win. I was surprised he was the Republican candidate after losing the race to John McCain last time around.
There are plenty of people who are going to talk about the problems with Obama. The fact that he’s not really liberal. His...
April 2012
1 post
Designers Don’t Like UCD
I read an article recently that blew my mind. It lamented that three principles of user-centred design – focusing on users, measuring the effect of your designs and using an iterative approach – were being ignored by most designers.
What blew my mind was it was written in 1985. 1985! I thought, from the way everyone talks about them, that these were modern ideas. Yet here were two academics...
March 2012
2 posts
3D Dot Voting
I love dot voting. Although telling people to stick dots on their favourite concepts may sound more like playschool than work, it’s a great way to reach group consensus at the end of a workshop. I use it all the time.
But sometimes dot voting just doesn’t work.
Say you’re dealing with senior business people used to making complex decisions after considering lots of data. The...
We Made Mistakes
In 2007, my DJ brother Gabriel asked me to build him a website. I didn’t know at the time, but it would turn out to be the best thing I ever did.
It took ages to build. I had to learn HTML, CSS and Expression Engine. Five years later Gabriel’s a full time DJ and I’m a user experience designer.
But the best thing about building your own site is the mistakes. Our biggest ones...
December 2011
1 post
Escaping The Vacuum
Before 2007, I lived in a vacuum. The internet was overwhelming me.
I bookmarked interesting websites and completely forget to check them again. I read life-changing articles that disappeared into the ether. I constantly felt like something important was evaporating behind the currently-open tab.
Google Reader changed everything for me in 2007. It remade the internet at a human scale by...
November 2011
1 post
Radiolab and Other Podcasts
Podcasts have the power to transform mundane tasks into enjoyable activities. Why? Because unlike books, tv, videos or websites, you can do other things at the same time as listening to them.
Exercising, cooking, cleaning, shopping, commuting or just lying awake with jet lag are all a million times better with a good podcast between your ears. But like most things online, sorting the great from...
August 2011
5 posts
1 tag
The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
For years I’ve been hostile to branding. It felt like smoke-and-mirrors, a relic from the golden age of advertising with no place in our brave new online world.
The Brand Gap changed my mind overnight. It bridges the gap between strategy (logic) and creativity (magic) and is structured around five activities – differentiate, collaborate, innovate, validate, cultivate.
But the twist comes...
The Hidden Business of UX Design
User research often throws up problems beyond the scope of designing websites and applications. Awkward things like corporate focus, content freshness, customer service relationships and database quality problems.
All affect the user’s experience, yet addressing the business processes responsible is rarely seen as part of user experience design. Which is a shame because failing to address...
Concatenate Rules
Normal people don’t usually thank you for teaching them Excel tricks. Unless that trick is the Concatenate function. Then they love you forever.
Concatenate joins together text from multiple cells. Let’s say you have two cells containing “Hidden” (A1) and “Gems” (B1). Here’s how to combine them:
=CONCATENATE(A1,B1) results in...
Why Can't I Shop By Meal?
Online grocery shopping in the UK is underwhelming. It’s the same old process (write a list and locate the items) with a few tweaks (favourites and search).
It doesn’t take much to imagine big improvements:
Find a recipe online and click a link to get the ingredients
Jump from wine review to buying a bottle (or case) in one click
Buy a chef’s cookbook with QR codes throughout...
Coasthopper Service Design
The Coasthopper bus in North Norfolk is a fantastic service. It proves you don’t have to be a huge corporation to do great service design.
If you’re tired of hearing the same old service design case studies, here’s an example of a simple public service delighting its users by meeting their needs.
Frequent, Cheap, On Time
In Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith advises that...
July 2011
1 post
The Hidden Powers of SurveyMonkey
Twice I’ve joined companies to find professional researchers laughing at my use of SurveyMonkey for user research. They assumed it was inadequate compared to their costly enterprise software.
But most surveys don’t need advanced features. When they saw how easy it was to do surveys with SurveyMonkey, the researchers never looked back.
In their honour, here’s my guide to the lesser-known...
June 2011
1 post
My Name Is A Geolocation
My name is Will Myddelton, but you won’t find any other Myddeltons in my family except my brother. Why? Because my mum and dad made a stand against centuries of tradition when they named us.
They felt that, women and men being equal, it wasn’t right to name me after a distant ancestor on my dad’s side. So they decided not to call me Haynes after my dad. They could have named me Welch...
May 2011
1 post
1 tag
Becoming A UX Designer
This time last year I was a web editor. Today I’m a user experience designer. If you’re thinking about making a similar transition then this post is for you.
A word of warning. This isn’t about shortcuts or changing your job title to make more money. This is for people who already love improving things for users, who lap up design theory wherever they can find it and who use user-centred...
April 2011
2 posts
UX By Numbers
User experience designers are fond of saying that although web analytics can show you what users are doing, it can’t show you why they are doing it.
True enough.
Yet some designers use this idea to avoid engaging with analytics data completely. It’s understandable – many bright people are uncomfortable with numbers – but it’s a shame, as analytics offers many insights to UX design.
Analytics...
1 tag
Tactics For Government Websites
You hear bad things about government websites. The £585 icon at the Information Commissioner’s Office. BusinessLink’s £2.15 cost per visit. The website for Birmingham City Council that cost three million pounds.
Easy targets. And never the whole story…
I ran the websites for a government agency called CABE and the truth is that it’s a difficult job to do well. The main problem...
March 2011
1 post
3 tags
Open UX University
You don’t have to pay tuition fees to get a UX education in London in 2011. Everything that you need to educate yourself is already out there.
I’m not downplaying the value of an academic education. The Human Computer Interaction courses at UCL and City University are amazing experiences and their students will graduate with skills that are impossible to get elsewhere.
But there are...
February 2011
4 posts
1 tag
My First Design Jam
Design Jam London 2 challenged 10 teams to create a mobile service that helped visitors to London feel more like locals. This is the story of Madeleine, our team’s idea for a mobile service to meet the brief.
In case you’re wondering, a Design Jam is where designers gather together, form teams and work on a design challenge. Like a hackday with no code.
This was a challenge where it...
1 tag
The Alternative Vote System Explained
Few people outside politics, myself included, understand the Alternative Vote system. Yet on 5 May we, the people of the UK, will decide whether to adopt it in our first national referendum since 1975.
I researched how it works. It took me ages. To save you the same pain, here is the simplest explanation that I could come up with.
The Simplest Example Possible
The Most Familiar Real...
Improve Your Web Writing
The quickest way to improve your web writing is to focus on structure – not style, language or grammar. Clear structure is a sign of clear thinking.
People think that if you can’t “write”, you can’t write. But writing’s real value is in channelling your ideas into a single, coherent message. Good writing is mostly about structuring your thoughts, and it’s easier than you think.
This is a...
Solve Any Problem
The most useful thing I learned last month was “a technique to solve any problem”. Seriously.
It’s called the KJ Method and it came to me via Leisa Reichelt, but it dates to the late 1960s and a man named Jiro Kawakita. It’s also called an “affinity diagram”, but I used this term at work and was told off for using technical terminology when plain English would do. Fair enough.
The KJ...
January 2011
8 posts
2 tags
Technical Drawbacks in the CABE Archive
The National Archives’ archive of the CABE website reproduces all our pages, images, CSS and Javascript. But it fails in two areas that are critical to the user experience – internal search doesn’t work and links to external sites break.
This post details the workarounds for these (and other) issues.
This is a follow-up to my earlier post about archiving the CABE website.
Internal Search
...
Content Challenges in the CABE Archive
The biggest challenge in archiving the CABE website was reviewing 5,000 pages in 6 weeks. This included removing out of date information, deleting calls to action and making it read like an archive rather than a going concern.
The biggest decision turned out to be the simplest. Grammar. We decided not to rewrite the whole site in the past tense as the whole thing is framed by a banner...
2 tags
Archiving the CABE Website
On 20 October 2010, the government announced that funding for CABE had been withdrawn as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review. Put simply, CABE would cease to exist from from 1 April 2011.
So the CABE website faced an interesting challenge. What happens to the digital assets of a quango when it shuts? There were very few precedents.
The CABE site is a large, popular site that is cherished...
2 tags
Design Tenets (And Their Opposites)
One way to keep everyone focused throughout a design process is to create a set of design tenets upfront. Great examples include “every millisecond counts” (Google) or “the more it’s used, the better it gets” (Adaptive Path).
But design tenets are often elusive and difficult to write. So I’m loving Stephen P Anderson’s presentation on Principles To Build By which contains 9 specific guidelines on...
3 tags
Triple Clicking
Triple clicking is a workflow improvement that will save you hours, days or maybe even weeks in the long run. But what does it do?
Triple clicking on any text block selects that whole block.
It doesn’t sound impressive. But it will turn you into a speed freak when copying and pasting because it gives you an enormous clickable area. You just don’t have to be precise with your text selection any...
3 tags
My Huffduffer UX Tag Bundle
Update 18/01/11: Would you believe it? Within a week of this post Jeremy Keith explained how this functionality is built into Huffduffer. So you don’t have to use my over-complicated Yahoo Pipes nonsense - instead you can just use a single Huffduffer URL. This is next-level URL design in action…
I love Huffduffer for one reason. It lets me find podcast episodes that suit my precise...
Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible
These ideas may all sound familiar - devices are location aware, apps can access social contexts, users are happy to pay small amounts - but it’s great to see them wrapped up into such a useful article with references and examples to follow up on.
Stop building what was possible yesterday, and start building what wasn’t possible yesterday. Jason L Baptiste
Interesting idea. Definitely...
1 tag
None of us knows anything
Peter Adamson from Kings College London has a great podcast - The History of Philosophy With No Gaps - which throws up some amazing quotes:
None of us knows anything, and instead we make do with belief. Democritus
I like the humbleness of it. Learn - but don’t get complacent about what you think you know.
And apparently Democritus was known as the laughing philosopher because he...
January 2010
1 post
PureText
My favourite tool is PureText. If you work with text, you’ll love it too.
PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a Paste, followed by a Select-All, and then a Copy. PureText website
PureText lets you paste unformatted text using your own keyboard shortcut. (I use Ctrl-Space).
How it saves time
Imagine that you’ve just messed up the fonts in a Word document by...
