UXBri blogs

1. Cennydd Bowles on user experience

   Map design in Modern Warfare 2

   Deconstructing MW2’s multiplayer maps to understand the principles of design and gameplay that lie beneath.

   Cennydd Bowles on 29th January

2. Yandleblog

   Human/machine readable format for titling links in Tweets

   Summary
   Give your Tweeted links titles by using the following format:
   “This is my link title”: http://example.org/
   Raison d’être
   
   
   Link titles enable us to add meaning to links. This is especially beneficial for shortened URLs which are even harder for people to decode than verbose ones.
   
   
   This format degrades gracefully ie. it is human readable even in Twitter clients that don’t support the format.
   
   

   Enriching links in this way improves the Twitter experience.

   License

   This Twitterformat Proposal is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

   I wrote this to appear on: http://twitterformats.org/2009/12/proposal-ping/
   

   Danny on 22nd January

3. 90 Percent of Everything - by Harry Brignull

   Xbox controllers used in the millitary – life mimicking art?

   If you’ve played either of the recent Call of Duty “Modern Warfare” games, you’ll be aware of the disturbingly realistic air attacks you can carry out on other players.
   Call of Duty 4 (Computer game):

   It seems that the grainy monochrome footage is easy to mimic on an Xbox 360 or PS3. The first time I saw [...]

   Harry Brignull on 21st January

4. 90 Percent of Everything - by Harry Brignull

   “User experience is everything” – Evan Williams, Twitter CEO

   → From Evan’s article Ten Rules for Web Startups (2005).
   → Found via InspireUX.com

   Harry Brignull on 20th January

5. SandBox

   Deliverables: usability findings / heuristics

   As a part of the detailed analysis of an academic publishing portal site, this hueristic based RAG (red, amber, green) finding matrix was produced.

   I built it that way, because RAG was a system familiar to the stakeholders (and our own project managers who would have to discuss the findings), and because the colour provided a quick visual indicator of the severity of problems (or not). This meant that we didn’t avoid detailing insignificant issues in favour of significant ones.

   Finding Matrix

   View more documents from LouiseHewitt.

   These are all raw files, not the polished versions that would have gone to the client.

   

   LouiseHewitt on 18th January

6. SandBox

   Deliverables: User states

   This doc was produced to support a low-budget revamp of an academic ebook platform.

   It describes the different states and tasks for the user as they move through the product, and intends to bring together the client and the developer’s understanding of what’s happening.

   The F1 etc. formed the basis for functional requirements that were in line with the existing development team processes. (I worked with them later to revise these process and integrate IA / UX deliverables into the stream more – there was a disconnect between the IA work and the specification).

   Brille Books User Pathways

   View more documents from LouiseHewitt.
   

   LouiseHewitt on 18th January

7. SandBox

   User testing: CABI repository redesign 2008

   This is the final report back slideshow from the CABI usertesting

   CABI are a major academic publishing house and this work was undertaken to review the redesign of their portal. I designed the tests, the scripts, recruited participants (stakeholders, students, librarians) and analysed the findings (with Morae).

   The summary video in the presentation doesn’t work, but there’s a snippet here (it had live voice over, so ignore the long intro):

   CAB Usability Testing with Morae – highlights from Louise Hewitt on Vimeo.

   In the room were 10 stakeholders, including content producers, marketing, senior management and IT representative – so the discussion was pretty interesting!

   Cd2 Usability Final Presentation V1.0

   View more documents from LouiseHewitt.
   

   LouiseHewitt on 18th January

8. SandBox

   Presentation: eBook, online libraries & usability

   These are edited slides from a presentation I gave on behalf of Semantico (as a consultant). The audience included representative from Oxford University Press, Brill, Cambridge University Press, CABI, Wiley-Blackwell and Random House.

   Digital Publishing And The User Experience (No Chart)

   View more presentations from LouiseHewitt.

   Not too pretty, and I’ve had to remove the core example of persona’s that I created by mining stats to reveal user types, using random profiles from those categories in the product database and researching with Google, then creating personas based on the findings. They couldn’t be included for privacy reasons.

   I’ll try and edit those down and put them up separately. The audience here was high level strategist in print and online publishing houses (mostly academic) and the presentation was supposed to be an intro into the value of user experience in digital publishing.

   

   LouiseHewitt on 18th January

9. Cennydd Bowles on user experience

   The best gig of my life

   I’ve never felt so in touch with a machine in my life, and I doubt I will again.

   Cennydd Bowles on 12th January

10. Mark Kirby - Mobile Developer

    Flash on Devices book review

    Here’s a quick review of the book “AdvancED Flash on Devices” by Elad Elrom, Scott Janousek and Thomas Joos, published at Friends of ED. In a nutshell, if you work with Flash and mobile, you must buy it.

    For the past few months I’ve been working on a Flash Lite project, and 3 months ago I [...]

    kirby.mark on 12th January