Are all those mundane, admin tasks sucking your time and getting you down? User-centred design might be that elusive but effective answer.
Have you ever drifted into a kind of zen-like state when you were mowing the lawns? All of a sudden the lawns are freshly mown; what were you thinking about? Or when your Nonna is making that penne arrabbiata for the umpteenth time, it’s like she’s doing it without thinking.
The deeper we get into the service design world the more methods we are finding that improve our ability to empathise with (and then create for) our target audiences. Service design, in a nutshell, is intentionally designing a customer’s experience to be wonderful no matter how they interact with your organisation. It is as much about designing great customer facing interactions as it is about the internal processes that enable that experience to be replicable and adaptable. Read more »
The 25th anniversary of South by South West (SXSW) was an awe-inspiring spectacle. Officially, 19,364 people attended the interactive week, the first time the interactive portion has outsold the music. Over the 5-day conference I went to 20-odd talks and heard from speakers like Steve Krug, Jared Spool, Dan Ariely, Robert Hockman Jr, Seth Priebatsch and TOMS shoe creator Blake Mycoskie.
The main themes were centred around location awareness, twitter, gamification, social networking, metrics and beer. Underlining it all was the mega theme of user experience. Read more »
We are getting more and more requests to help clients make sense of their Google Analytics data. Google Analytics is a powerful tool but in our experience there are some common misunderstandings about what it can and can’t do. Read more »
In June, I had a 3-month sabbatical from Optimal Usability and went to work for a US-based user experience consultancy called User Centric. As well as interacting with the smart people from User Centric I also spoke with IDEO, Adaptive Path, Chicago Institute of Design, Paypal, McDonalds, Salesforce.com and SAP. Read more »
I read this week that the Web is now 18 years old. It has gone through the awkwardness of adolescence and reached adulthood. However, there is a lot more maturing still to be done.
Following on from Dan’s article last month, this month we’ve invited Steven Bruce from Public Trust to share his thoughts on what it takes to deliver world-class customer experience. Steven is Head of Customer Strategy at Public Trust, which is transforming its business to become more customer centric. Steven has previously held roles in strategy, marketing and customer experience at organisations such as ANZ National Bank and Westpac. His work has also been show cased in case studies as world best practice by the Washington DC-based Corporate Executive Board.
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Last week I was responding to a Request for Information from an organisation that wanted to create a "world-class, high quality website". It got me thinking – what does it mean to be world-class? The phrase is in danger of being used so often that it becomes meaningless. So this month we’ve invited Dan Szuc to share some of his thoughts on what it takes to be "world-class".
In May I was lucky enough to attend UX London. I thought I’d share some of the notes I took from four of the sessions I attended. (More speaker slides are available.)
By Trent Mankelow
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This time last year we ran a series of talks on How to Create Government Websites That Don’t Suck. We hit a nerve, and the slides have subsequently been viewed over 6,000 times.
This year we have decided to take a different angle. We want to talk about government websites that inspire and delight us, in other words, government websites that rock. The breakfast briefing is happening on the 23rd of June in Wellington, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share a half-dozen of the websites that we’ve researched.
Pay Car Tax (online service, UK) Read more »