I’ve engaged in conversations with numerous retail customers to understand what they want, need and expect from the online retail experience, and what the barriers to purchase are.

So, I set myself the challenge of writing my top five functions a retail website needs to perform to satisfy users.

I have recently been involved in a piece of research for MasterCard® PayPass™ to trial contactless wristbands at the Isle of Wight Festival 2011.

We collected 150 responses to our post-usage questionnaire using Polldaddy, a survey application loaded onto iPads. This tool made setup and data gathering more efficient than pen and paper and it’s more fun too, so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

The media has been telling the tale of two airports for sometime now about how one is getting it right and one wrong. As a prospective traveller trying to find out whether I will be able to travel, I thought I’d take a look at the online user experience of these airports and how they are keeping travellers updated and confident that they will not be spending Christmas Eve at the check-in counter.

A few days ago Amazon launched their Italian website, making lots of Italian consumers (like me) happier.

Last week, Elsa and I presented to UCL (opens in new window) Master’s students in Human-Computer Interaction with Ergonomics.

How do you communicate with users when you cannot provide them with your usual service because something has gone wrong with your website?

How do you tell them in a simple, clear and non-frustrating way that they need to come back later to do what they wanted to do?

As the number of users accessing the internet from their mobile phones continues to rise, companies are looking to their own online mobile presence. Before sketching ideas or discussing functionalities, one of the fundamental questions you should ask is…

Are we building a mobile phone website or application?

An advert I saw for Volkswagen got me thinking about web copy and how it can be optimised to cater for different types of users.

I recently completed research in which I asked 50 users to evaluate their experience with new payment technology. Each session was recorded from two angles, so that both the users’ facial expressions and interaction with the device could be captured.

By the end I had 100 clips from which to compile a video that would help project stakeholders understand what happened during research. Quite a challenging task!