Entries in the Usability category:
Teaching User Experience at Highlands University
Monday, August 27, 2007
As the new academic year begins, I’m happy to say I’m now an Adjunct Instructor in the Media Arts department at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas.
I’ll be teaching a course on Designing for User Experience to upper-level undergraduates and to postgrads, covering the basics of user experience, usability and user-centered design.
It’s a nice to be back teaching (in Dublin, I devised a delivered a series of one-day training workshops as part of the iQ Content Boot Camp series), and the students are a good group.
I’ll be posting PDF versions of my presentations when I get the chance, for those who are interested, and while they might not mean much without my explanations, you’re all more than welcome to follow along.
Behind the scenes at the CNN.com relaunch
Monday, July 02, 2007
My latest article for my friends at iQ Content is an interview with the development teams at CNN.com, who’ve just launched their redesigned site:
CNN.com unveiled its redesign over the weekend, incorporating a cleaner look, a better way of linking different media on the same story, and some slick Web 2.0 goodness (including in-page video and user commenting).
It’s a radical do-over for one of the most highly-trafficked sites on the Web. We asked the production teams (in London, Atlanta and Hong Kong) how they approached the project.
Get the full story over on the iQ Content site.
Blinksale and Tick - Web 2.0 and the small business
Friday, August 04, 2006
There’s been lots of talk about Web 2.0 - an amorphous collection of ideas and functionality that is supposed to change the way the world works (and make VC firms lots of money again). It’s mash-ups, ruby on rails, AJAX, 37 Signals’ quick and dirty approach to development, and sites like Flickr and YouTube.
That’s all great, but I want to look at some practical examples of sites that do real things that work. Close to my heart (and my bank balance, as a small business owner), is anything that helps me do the admin stuff I can’t pay anyone to do.
Blinksale - because getting paid is good
Basecamp handles the project management side of things admirably - and the added Chat feature could be useful (but I’ve not tried it yet, because I’m too busy Skyping everyone - particularly the folks in Dublin I work with regularly).
But two more recent additions to my armoury (bearing more than a few similarities with Basecamp) are also helping out. They each do one thing, and do it well at a reasonable price (nothing, in my case). Blinksale handles my invoicing elegantly and flexibly - making it quick to create, send and manage the happy documents. It handles Euros and Sterling effortlessly (for my Euro clients), and sends nice thankyou notes when the money comes in.
iPod usability problem
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
One side-effect of my plans to rip all my CDs (and vinyl, too, when I get round to it) has been the discovery of an annoying usability glitch when using 2 Macs and one iPod.
My basic setup is like this:
- Mac mini (at work) with all my tunes on it (and backed up to an external drive)
- old Titanium Powerbook (at home) without enough hard drive space to hold all my tunes
- 20Gig 3G iPod
Sounds simple enough right? I want to auto-sync the mini with the iPod, and then just plug the iPod into the powerbook at home (i.e. not sync at all), so I can stream the songs from the iPod through iTunes to the hi-fi across the room. Straightforward. Or so you’d think.
Time shifting
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
So we got Tivo’d, and it’s greatly improved the quality of our TV-watching lives.
To be precise, we got the Comcast DVR offering, which shows two things: firstly, like ‘sellotape’ and ‘hoover’ (both of which only work in the UK, interestingly) ‘tivo’ has become the generic noun and verb to describe digital recording from the telly, and secondly, Tivo themselves must be worried, losing customers to the big cable companies who offer a simpler but cheaper service (and rental, not purchase, of the box itself).
Internet Explorer 7 - fingers uncrossed
Friday, February 03, 2006
So I just took the new beta of IE7 for spin, to see if it would break any of my sites (trying out on the Dell PC I use for testing).
It didn’t - which is what I’d expect, as it’s more standards-compliant than IE6, but you never know.
Not just a cosmetic redesign
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
While writing an article about a site redesign that changed the look of the old site but actually made the usability worse, I was struck by two recent redesigns that actually made things a lot better without actually changing the surface.
First comes the Porsche Boxster. While there’s definitely something to the argument that says the only statement a Boxster makes about its driver is that they couldn’t afford a 911, it’s a pretty slick car in its own right, and the 2005 version made some real improvements over the previous years.
Moore Consulting’s review of 2005
Monday, January 09, 2006
While it’s still early 2006, I thought it was time for a review of Moore Consulting’s first full year in business.
It’s been a great success, and a lot of fun - here are the basic facts:
We built (or contributed to the construction of) ten sites, with most of our clients being public sector bodies (including the NM State Economic Development Department, the NM Office of Science and Technology, NM Tourism and Santa Fe Economic development). Among these site was the main NM Economic Development Department site, and the very well-received travel and tourism project, Off The Road.
I (that’s me, David Moore) did the lion’s share of planning, construction and project management on all these jobs - I think it’s important that the person working on the overall strategy and information architecture of a site (the higher level decision-making) is also well-versed in the minutiae of construction issues. However, I was ably assisted by a talented group of designers and programmers who were responsible for making many of the sites look and work the way they were supposed to.
Basecamp and Backpack
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
You know that Dyson vacuum cleaner ad, when James Dyson says in his plummy accent, ‘I just think things should work properly,’?
The folks at 37 signals agree. Usability consultants who took the plunge into making things (rather as I’ve done, being a ‘content guy’ or consultant on sites, who now finds himself responsible for the whole thing), they make things that work. Brilliantly.
Unimpress Office
Friday, September 09, 2005
So I’m trying to rustle up some good interview candidates for this month’s iCubed newsletter. We’ll partly have an e-government focus to coincide with the launch of iQ Content’s E-Government Benchmarking report (that I helped write).
An interview with someone in the UK E-Government Unit would be good, so I went to the Cabinet Office website to get an email address for a press contact. And there aren’t any.