Find, Understand, Share, Extend By Nic Price on 11 November 2010 — 1 min read Today is World Usability Day. The theme this year is communication. I’ve chosen to write about something which I find helps teams I work with communicate and explore what we design and put on the web. Back in 2005, Yahoo! Search announced a “vision statement”. Enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge. Somewhat ambitious, sure. A little... More
Don’t let distance get in the way of your user research By Nic Price on 1 July 2010 — 1 min read There’s an advertising campaign at the moment for Blackberry, the smartphone company, using the tag line “Closeness has nothing to do with distance.” These days we can all carry our loved ones around in our pocket or handbag using the various social networking features of the Blackberry – including using it as a phone, presumably.... More
Social networking on intranets – have a problem to solve, and expect it to take time, says Jakob Nielsen By Nic Price on 4 August 2009 — 1 min read Here are the findings from usability “guru” Jakob Nielsen’s report on Social Networking on Intranets… Underground efforts yield big results. Companies are turning a blind eye to underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, and then sanctioning them within the enterprise. Frontline workers are driving the vision. Often, senior managers aren’t open... More
Quick user research tip: Open All in Tabs By Nic Price on 30 April 2008 — 1 min read We’ve been running some design research sessions which involve several scenarios, each of which uses a slightly different design version for a website. Each scenario has its own starting page, each of which we put in a different tab in Firefox. This means setting up all the tabs and start pages for each research session.... More
Bonus-centred design By Nic Price on 23 November 2007 — 1 min read We’ve all seen it. The dreaded “Skip Intro”. The picture of the boss on the homepage obscuring any useful content or functionality. I was just discussing this with a friend and came up with a new name for an old problem “Bonus-centred design” Here’s how it works: Take direct orders from the boss. Do not... More
Britain’s online newspapers accessibility scores – should do better By Nic Price on 20 November 2007 — 1 min read Today Martin Belam publishes the scores from his excellent series of articles looking at the accessibility of the UK’s main national newspaper websites. The Times came out on top, even though it makes no use of an on-screen text-resizing widget, nor of accesskeys as shortcuts for keyboard users. Overall my conclusion has to be that... More