The theme of this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) was The Web in Turbulent Times. IWMW ”provides an opportunity for those involved in the provision of institutional Web services to hear about institutional case studies, national initiatives and emerging technologies and to actively participate in a number of parallel sessions”. The event is organised by UKOLN. [...]
There’s been a lot of discussion and comment about the BBC News redesign, but I’m mostly interested in the information architecture. First thing I noticed was the change of URL from some weird news.bbc.co.uk address to the simple www.bbc.co.uk/news. I’m sure there’s good reasons for this, and it makes SEO sense. But let’s look at [...]
BBC News is soon, amongst other things, to abandon left-hand navigation. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2010/07/bbc_news_website_redesign.html I’m really interested in the demise of left-hand navigation. When it was originally introduced, it was pretty difficult for people to get around websites. We didn’t have JavaScript and page includes and content management systems. This meant that to do anything sophisticated, each [...]
Last night, Northern User Experience met in Manchester. About 20 people showed up, so it was great to see so much interest. There were two talks: Does Technology Make any Difference in our Social Life This talk by Alistair Sutcliffe was about research being carried out at Manchester University about Dunbar’s number and it’s relation [...]
Here’s a proposition for you: there is no such thing as ‘basic’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘advanced’ users when it comes to user journeys. For user journeys, there are four types of journey which users may take. These journeys mirror anciently-recognised personality types – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keirsey_Temperament_Sorter Broadly speaking, the user journeys are: Give me the top answer [...]
Or ‘Jungian Psychology and Usability Heuristics’. Proposition In the same way as the human mind is split into the ‘conscious’, ‘personal subconscious’, and ‘collective unconscious’, user experience can be split into ‘user interface’, ‘user journeys’, and ‘heuristics’. This has a couple of implications: That heuristics are universal and therefore should not include site-specific elements, i.e. heuristics should [...]
I attended the last UXCampLondon, which was hosted at LBi in London and also sponsored by whatusersdo (who I was hoping to meet). I presented on “A Jung Person’s Guide to User Experience: Archetypes and Personality Types”. I’m not sure the title gave the session justice, so I’ll change it for next time. Reports on [...]
