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...