Foolproof blog

Last July we launched the ‘UX500’ – a list of user experience opinion leaders from around the world, ranked by their social influence on the subject.

It seems to be a useful resource: the list has already received more than 20,000 visits, making it one of the most viewed Peer Index groups across all industries and disciplines.

It’s been fun to curate the group on behalf of the wider UX community. And we welcome all the comments and input we’ve had from around the world over the past six months.

The UK Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) recently held its elections and we are pleased to announce that our very own Caleb Tang was elected as the Accessibility Head.  Caleb joins the committee along with his colleague Tim Loo who holds the Vice President position.

Accessibility was a hot topic in the world of the web back in 2004 when the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) required service providers to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to remove any barriers that may prevent someone from using their services. To avoid doubt the act specified that this included websites (now the Equality Act 2010).

The buzz around accessibility has since quietened down, although Econsultancy’s recent report about the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) suing BMI Baby suggests it’s still very much on the agenda.

Long recognised as a stalwart of user-centred design, the value of understanding the “context of use” has an even greater pay-off when designing mobile applications.

And this week I had two reminders of how important that is, as I discovered a new app that illustrates this brilliantly, and reached the end of my patience with one that doesn’t.
 

Congratulations to Caleb Tang who has been voted onto the committee for the UK Chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association as Accessibility Representative.

Marketers, digital designers and developers are all struggling to keep pace with the rapidly changing digital landscape and the evolving expectations and behaviours of consumers. New devices bring new challenges in designing experiences which span many devices and platforms.

In a world where the variety of internet connected devices is rapidly increasing a design technique called ‘responsive design’ offers designers and developers a forward-looking approach that, done well, provides a great user experience for users across devices.
 

In recent months we’ve been working with several corporations to develop compliant solutions to the new EU Privacy Directive ahead of its enforcement in May next year. Our research suggests that the Directive and associated advice is a blunt instrument, which could make the web less accessible for all, unless the ICO introduce more flexibility.

In short, the Directive requires online services – which make use of cookies or similar technologies – to gain informed consent from consumers before they can use them on their website (visit ICO guidance for more information and my previous blog EU Cookie Directive and your users). This poses a huge challenge for many businesses, especially those with hundreds of cookies across multiple domains.
 

The increase in multi-screen television viewing poses a challenge for content providers designing future viewing experiences.

Consumers now face multiple viewing options for TV and are searching for a device agnostic experience that is delivered anytime, anywhere. There are two factors that content providers must consider if they are to create truly engaging experiences:

1. Control
2. Choice

Michael Gove’s comments at the BETT show for educational technology in London yesterday that both teachers and students are ‘turned off’ by ICT lessons really struck a chord with me. However, I hope the changes go further than simply ‘computing’, which suggests a narrow focus on websites and apps and not on the wider digital world.  

If you want to predict positive business outcomes like loyalty, word-of-mouth advocacy and satisfaction then customer experience measures may be more effective than monitoring the outcome of service events or using a net promoter score.

That’s the view of Stan Maklan and Phil Klaus in their article ‘Customer Experience: are we measuring the right things?’ in the International Journal of Market Research (IJMR) this month.

They don’t offer a generalised model of how to measure customer experience (i.e. a framework we can all take away and apply immediately into our customer experience strategy work) but they do share a detailed case study measuring the customer experience of a UK mortgage company. This gives some strong clues about how experience measurement will evolve.

With the online retail world offering a wide variety of products, consumers need to be able to cut through the masses of products available in order to find the single product that they actually need.

The technological world can be hugely complex, with an ongoing game of adding small specifications to the product you want and then removing them to get the ideal product within budget. This is where filtering products becomes more of an art form. If this is not done well then users can become frustrated and bored very quickly.

Here’re my top tips for product filtering design.