UXBri blogs

1. SandBox

   Cutting out the middle-man(agement)

   Following on from the IBF member meeting and the New Directions in Usability report (not just yet, out in March), here are some more examples from this month’s Wired (UK) mag about how work is changing.

   HubSpot – ditch staff holidays
   Treating employees like contractors, leaving them to manage their own workflows and productivity with monitoring processess in place. Allowing out-of-office, flexible hours work patterns.

   BestBuy – Global Brand, local responsiveness
   Uses twitter sales support and customer feedback to provide local service tweaks (including and all-night NY store and a ‘Coffee&Donught’ session in Tampa). Local teams respond locally to demand.

   LiveOps – enable networks of freelancers
   Telephone support operators employed as home-based freelancers make up the staff for this “call centre in the sky”.

   Mosaic – “not an employer, but the hub of an entrepreneuerial community”
   Investment banking consultancy that ‘cloud sources’ its staff – creating an enabling framework (including skype meetings, yammer channels). Consultants run concurrent careers and projects, Mosaic keeps overheads low.

   Cancer Research UK – transparent, relevant, responsive
   Scientists directly communicate with and monitor contributions from donors – keeping them motivated and focused on the goal, and keeping donors (customers) in touch with developments and progress.

   All nice examples, and a flavour of the way in which the world of work, business and employment are heading.

   Wired Magazine UK – Work Smarter
   Intranet Benchmarking Forum Member Meeting roundup (eek! with a vid of me!)
   forthcoming report New Directions in Usability

   

   LouiseHewitt on 9th March

2. Cennydd Bowles on user experience

   Happiness in numbers

   There’s more to life than happiness. Look, the numbers prove it.

   Cennydd Bowles on 4th March

3. 90 Percent of Everything - by Harry Brignull

   ‘A Brief Guide to Service Design’ by Paul Thurston & Nick Marsh

   Back in January, Paul Thurston (@paulthurston) and Nick Marsh (@choosenick) gave a great talk on Service Design at UX Brighton. They make some really interesting points about the differences between UX & SD, and strategic (“thinking”) vs tactical (“doing”) work. Here are the slides:

   Using a feed reader and can’t see the slides?
   Huge thanks to Nick [...]

   Harry Brignull on 3rd March

4. Cennydd Bowles on user experience

   Undercover User Experience

   Announcing Undercover User Experience, a book about doing great UX work with tiny budgets, no time, and even without official clearance.

   Cennydd Bowles on 1st March

5. 90 Percent of Everything - by Harry Brignull

   uxurls.com: a user experience aggregator

   I’ve just finished setting up uxurls.com – a user experience aggregator. It’s a really simple popurls clone, intended for people who are too busy to set themselves up with their own RSS reader, or just fancy a quick glance at the sites I’m reading.
   There’s about 130 sites on there right now and I’ll be adding [...]

   Harry Brignull on 28th February

6. 90 Percent of Everything - by Harry Brignull

   The email confirmation / paste disabling antipattern

   Here’s a nice antipattern from the Odeon (UK), who show us how to annoy 99.9% of users in an effort to help the 0.1% who enter their email addresses incorrectly.
   So, here I am registering on odeon.co.uk…

   Oh look, I need to enter my email address twice. Never mind, I’ll simply copy and paste it…

   Job done. No, [...]

   Harry Brignull on 25th February

7. Cennydd Bowles on user experience

   Making SXSW beautiful

   Spring’s finally poking its head round the corner: I fly off for my first South By Southwest in less than three weeks and I’m hoping that winter will have finally given up by the time I return. From the outside, SXSW gives off a Glastonbury-like vibe: an enormous cauldron of distraction, where carefully-planned itineraries are [...]

   Cennydd Bowles on 22nd February

8. SandBox

   Chaos and the art of poor presentation

   Last week I presented a key note to the February gathering of the UK’s leading Intranet Managers at the IBF’s Member Meeting.

   And I was about as effective as a Llama on the London Underground.

   Here’s some of the feedback comments:
   

   “too much was fit into one day and not enough exploration”

   “slightly chaotic”

   “maybe not forward thinking enough”

   Why? It certainly wasn’t the fault of the event organiser, the IBF (www.ibforum.com) who put on meetings like these year round and across the globe, sharing best practice and insights in a confidential, cooperative environment.

   Nor was it the gathered crowd, who represented the cream of intranet professionals and practitioners and all arrived enthusiastic to engage and share with their peers in what, to me, was a uniquely collaborative environment.

   For my part, public speaking is not an issue and I’ve delivered many well received sessions on usability etc. and facilitated enough meetings.

   So how did it all go so wrong?

   Well, beside the over exposure of being thrust into the attendees faces all day long I committed the first mortal sin of usability design. Oh the irony.

   Whilst preaching about the importance of envisioning the context of content, users, and goals, I completely failed to apply the practise myself.

   -The content was about sharing knowledge – not broadcasting information.
   -The users were expecting to contribute – not to recieve.
   -The goal was to support members – not to provide for them.

   Doh!

   So apologies to all of the attendees – but also thanks, I could have sat there for four more days happily soaking up the knowledge and experience in that room. My failure is a credit to you all – never have I seen a room so full of cooperation between effectively competing organisations.

   The IBF meeting is one example of the real best way to improve user experience for all – not through monothetic blabbering by conference-circuit professionals, but by enabling the sharing of ideas and experiences between active practioners like yourselves.

   Bravo!

   

   LouiseHewitt on 22nd February

9. FeraLabs

   One day workshop at the UX Lisbon conference 12th to the 13th of May

   FeraLabs and UX Lisbon are organising a one day workshop, spread over two days on Remote Usability between the 12th to the 13th of May. The workshop is being held in conjunction with the conference.
   The purpose of both workshops is to enable you to turn data and observations from Remote Testing into valuable insights which [...]

   jamespage on 19th February

10. 90 Percent of Everything - by Harry Brignull

    Spare a thought for the ‘experimenter effect’ in user research

    Do you ever think about the impact of the experimenter effect (or Hawthorne effect) when you’re running face to face user research?
    Here’s a quick test.
    First, go and check your Analytics package to see how many users check your site’s Terms and Conditions before accepting them. My guess is that the number will be [...]

    Harry Brignull on 18th February