Browsing the "usability" category...
Interview with TED's UX Lead, Aaron Weyenberg
While I was at the Web Directions South conference in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Aaron Weyenberg for desktop magazine.
He’s a lovely bloke and a talented designer, and gave a talk on the topic of skeuomorphs (derivative objects that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original —Wikipedia).
There are some nuggets in there, especially if you are thinking of following Apple’s lead and skinning your next web app or mobile app with photorealistic textures and surfaces. Read the full interview with Aaron on the desktop website.
Tags: design, usability, webdirectionsI'm Big In Bangkok
Laura Eck over at Web Courses Bangkok interviewed me recently to talk about user experience design, user research, user testing and all that stuff I do during my day job. It was fun, and a fairly comprehensive discussion.
She asked some great questions; hopefully the answers I gave did them justice!
Which methods do you use to make UX design decisions?There are lots of activities that influence and inform my design of a web site or application. They can generally be divided into two camps: quantitative methods, and qualitative methods.
Quantitative methods include things like anonymous web analytics or data from multiple-choice surveys.
Qualitative methods refer to feedback that has come through customer support, comments made by a subject during a user testing session, or notes from a contextual inquiry session.
Read the full interview: Interview with Matthew Magain at Web Courses Bangkok
P.S. Try saying “I’m big in Bangkok” three times fast without going red in the face.
Tags: interview, usability, ux+designGiving SmartyHost a Real Advantage
I haven’t been able to share much of the design work that I’ve been working on since leaving SitePoint to found Useractive, a User Experience Design consultancy.
That’s why I’m excited that some of the pages that I designed for SmartyHost, one of Australia’s leading web hosting companies, went live today — the SmartyHost Advantage campaign.
The SmartyHost team were looking for a new, distinct style with which to launch their Advantage campaign. The request was for a design that could potentially pave the way forward for the rest of the site, while still building on colours and utilising imagery from the existing brand.
The precedent for using previous metals to describe different tiers of achievement is nothing new (the Olympic Games pretty much own that space), but it becomes more difficult when you’ve got more than three tiers. We opted to mix the metaphor a little, adding Copper on the low end and Diamond — not a metal, but still a material that has the perception of being even more valuable than gold — at the high end.
Another challenging aspect of the campaign was in communicating the different tiers and how customers can attain them. I hit upon the concept of using a strength tester to communicate the number of points required to reach each tier, and the team liked the idea.
Imagery like this may not work so well with a more corporate brand, but the SmartyHost logo, with his smiling cartoony face and super-cool sunglasses, sets the tone of an organisation that is fun and approachable, and the strength tester reinforces this sentiment.
The idea of offering customers who bring large amounts of repeat business a substantial discount is a great one, and is bound to encourage web entrepreneurs who are addicted to collecting domains or starting new sites (I know a few of them!) to check out SmartyHost as a place to save some cash.
Tags: design, usability, useractive
