Thinking outside the box and other bad advice
Earlier this month I opened CREATE 2009, a forum for academics and practitioners to share creative and innovative ideas for human computer interaction (HCI).
The conference's theme was ‘Creative inventions and innovations for everyday HCI’ so to start things off I outlined my four step approach to help designers find more creative solutions to their problems.
Six 'I's' to help you create ingenious digital marketing campaigns
To loosely follow on from a previous post, it’s not necessarily advisable to ignore innovation and creativity under the current global economic conditions. However, when faced with this kind of negative environment, thinking up imaginative ways to engage with users through existing channels can sometimes become a bit stale.
Here, I’ve compiled a few different examples of relatively recent online campaigns that caught my attention through their resourcefulness and that follow six identifiable 'I's'.
Six rousing user experience presentations
User experience is a complex subject as it crosses various digital disciplines. Here, to accompany the release of Econsultancy’s User Experience Buyer’s Guide, we’ve rooted out six thought-provoking and inspirational slideshare presentations that approach this wide subject from different perspectives.
The inside-out guide to designing a website
When starting out on a new web project it is tempting to begin the wireframing process at the homepage, which is surely the most important page on your website.
But I’ve found that this approach doesn’t work for me. And for that matter I don’t believe that the homepage is the single most important page either!
Starting with the homepage is a little bit like drawing the cover of your novel, before you start writing the first chapter. It’s the story that counts, and until you know more about the story – the content – then how can you decide what to draw? You know what they say about judging books by their covers, perhaps because illustrators don’t read them before they get to work.
It’s the same with websites… isn’t it better to consider what’s contained within before working out how the homepage might look?
26 inspiring resources for typography junkies
As a boy I used to love two types of shops: toy stores, especially those with vast stocks of Lego, and stationery retailers, in which I could lose myself for hours. The latter remains a weird affliction that I don’t yet know the name for.
While I’m not a designer by trade I’ve always loved a good font and appreciate great typography. In an online environment it is often the difference between a good site and a great site, since it is a major part of a website’s visual appeal.
Some say that web design is 95% typography. I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but I do believe that it can help improve the user experience, that it can help persuade visitors to interact and take action, and that as such you should ask yourself whether your site needs a makeover in this department?
I’ve been working on a new website and have done a lot of research in this area. It is so hard to get wrong, and I’m not yet sure that I’ll get it right, but I’ve collated this list from a bunch of my recent bookmarks and thought it would be a good idea to aggregate and share them.
The joy of FAIL: 20 horrific and amusing error messages
It can be incredibly frustrating when things do not go to plan. In an online environment there are always going to be mishaps due to human error or some kind of technology or design failure.
Nobody likes to encounter resistance in their daily activities, but the PC generation is used to things going wrong, as well as the ridiculous error messages that are sometimes displayed when problems occur.
How you communicate issues is highly important, and there are any number of ways of getting it right, or wrong, as we shall see...
All I want for Christmas ... is a new mobile phone
One of the first lessons in usability is that people vary and that designing for ‘average’ doesn’t work. Nowhere is this more true than in the highly competitive world of mobile phone design.
Actually I don’t want a new mobile because I have an iPhone and I love it. Of course, it’s not perfect but once again Apple has demonstrated that it understands the importance of the ‘user experience’. Even its cardboard box is beautiful.
Best practice tips for mobile websites
As Patrick talked about on Monday, 2009 may turn out to be the year for mobile internet, and companies need to be thinking about their mobile strategies.
Some websites have already adapted well to the use of mobile internet, but others seemingly have a long way to go. A new ebook (pdf) from dotMobi takes a look at the best and worst on the mobile web.
Here are a few best practice tips for mobile websites...
Site review: electricshop.com
Electricshop.com is the online arm of independent electrical retailer Strangewood Group.
The site has been updated recently and I've been taking a look to see how it measures up against the bigger electrical retailers' sites...
What should 'continue shopping' mean?
When customers have added items to their basket and want to continue shopping, where should they end up on your website?
Not the homepage; as Brendan Regan points out on GrokDotCom, the 'homepage dump' is a user experience mistake to avoid, so where should they be sent instead?
I've been looking through a few retailers' sites for examples of good and bad practice in this area...
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
