Foolproof

Consumers spend very little time weighing up a website. You have just 30-40 seconds to leave a lasting impression and to guide them through to product-specific pages. Time is of the essence.

Getting the content right first for users and secondly for SEO is crucial. Knowing your customer’s wants and needs is the first step to defining content and harnessing it successfully. Here are my top tips for turning page views into purchases through content planning.

Is Planet Earth ready for Windows 8? It appears not, according to some news reports.

There’s no doubt that Windows 8 was a bold move for Microsoft, but, as we predicted back at its launch last year, the big question was always going to be how long it would take for users to learn the new system.

It seems the answer was “too long”. Microsoft has confirmed that it is working on a Windows 8.1 release, codenamed Blue, to address “customer feedback” that they have collected. 

I regularly have the opportunity to observe user research across web, mobile, enterprise and embedded applications.

Over the past few months I have observed two key trends that have practical implications for experience design and digital product development.

1. Expectations of digital experiences are increasingly shared by people across social and age demographics, as well as people at varying stages along the technology adoption curve.
2. The digital landscape has matured to the point where we can identify a broad set of product attributes that are generally perceived as hygiene factors.

Can you really be more creative when plied with alcohol? Apparently so, according to the results from the Newt/Judge experiment.

You can view the full results, as judged by the Chip Shop Jury, plus how we conducted the experiment in the Foolproof office over on The Drum’s website. But here’s a sneaky peak.

Google Creative Lab recently released Super Sync Sports, their latest Chrome Experiment. We were delighted to have the opportunity to once again support this global company with some user research.

The second week in June is going to be a corker. Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference and the videogames industry’s E3 Expo are scheduled for the same days and more than ever, will be focused on the same thing: the battle for the living room.

If speculation is to be believed, Apple will open up app development on the Apple TV, while Sony and Microsoft will show off their next-generation consoles. For Nintendo, it will be a make-or-break year after poor sales of the Wii U.

All are trying to become the dominant player in the living room, to be the first choice for entertainment when people have downtime at home or are socialising with friends. What will be the key to success? Paying attention to the following will be essential.

Jeff Gothelf, Managing Director of neo New York and author (with Josh Seiden) of ‘Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience‘, visited Foolproof last week to meet the team and to talk lean UX. I met Jeff at UX Hong Kong this year where we were both speaking and running workshops.

It was great to meet and get to know Jeff at our speaker’s dinner and when he told me he would be in the UK for UX London, I jumped at the chance to get Jeff to visit us at Foolproof HQ.

Too often, organisations create products without understanding their customers’ underlying motivations or goals. Many focus on their immediate competitors and not on the products and services which customers actually see as alternatives.

One idea of why this happens, and how to avoid doing the same, is the ‘jobs-to-be-done’ theory. This school of thought was developed by Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School and Bob Moesta of the ReWired Group. The theory is popular amongst those working in business strategy and product innovation, but I think it applies equally well in the field of experience design.

Mid-week you’ll usually find me leaning against the bar in the Book Club, sipping on a delicious rum and ginger beer (appropriately named ‘hipster’ cocktail), but Future Human recently took over the venue. Their welcome return provided a night of hands-on entertainment and interesting discussion around wearable technology and the future of the self-improvement industry.

Does alcohol really make you more creative, or just make you think that you are? Well, the wait is almost over. Next month we will be revealing the results from our Newt Judge Experiment.

In case you missed it our friends at The Drum posted this video: The Newt Judge Experiment Trailer.