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.
 

This month, we opened the doors of our London office to students from UCL and City University for World Usability Day.

The event was designed to give students a good idea of how we work here at Foolproof and how the skills that they’re developing during their courses can be applied to commercial projects.

I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new section of our website called User Experience Strategy.

It is a business requirement which our global clients are finding themselves increasingly exposed to as they look to move beyond optimisation to creating unified digital customer experiences, which protect and build financial performance and brand value.

Tuesday night we ran a round-table session to unpack experience design and how it’s viewed within our client’s organisations.  We had perspectives from diverse sectors like financial services, gaming, and energy.  Despite this sector mix, as well as a B2B and B2C split, a common issue emerged:

How do you convince C-suites (CEO, CTO, CFO etc) that putting customers at the heart of your brand experience will improve shareholder value?

Friday’s Great Outdoors of Design (GOOD) conference in London had a number of thought-provoking presentations and group discussions around design research. We covered topics on organisations, social change, product and service innovation. What caught my interest was seeing researchers taking a business perspective to design.

I recently saw Mike Lynch, CEO of the UK software giant Autonomy, speak about his experiences of building his company from four people and a broom cupboard (which had its own part to play in their early successes) to the company that today HP values at $10billion.

He spoke about three ‘catch phrases’ that have become cornerstones to the success of Autonomy, all of which I felt had messages for anyone in business today.

We’re delighted to see that UX Hong Kong is lining up its second conference in February 2012.

It’s been a fascinating week for us looking at the response to our Peer Index list: UX500. The list has so far attracted over 9,000 visits – and plenty of lively comment out in the Twittersphere.

Today we launch the ‘UX Power 500 Index’, a list of user experience opinion leaders from around the world, ranked by their social influence.

We hope it will be a useful resource. It should give you a view about who’s who in the field. It might also give you ideas about people to follow, befriend and spark up a conversation with.

I’ve just spent a couple of happy days in Atlanta with user experience folk from around the world. UPA conferences always create a variety of emotions.